His Blood Wife of all these centuries was named Chrysanthe, and it was she who’d educated him in the ways of the Christian era and the waning Roman Empire when he’d brought her from the great Arab Christian city of Hira—a shining capital on the Euphrates—to Carthage in North Africa, where they’d lived for many years. There she’d taught him Greek and Latin, offering the poetry, the histories, and the philosophies of cultures unknown to him when he’d gone into the earth.

There she explained to him the marvels he’d embraced the moment he’d risen, and how the world had actually changed, changed when he had thought the world unchanging, as did all those with whom he had once shared humanity and the Blood.

He came to love Chrysanthe as he had once loved his first Blood Wife of long ago, the lost pale-eyed and yellow-haired Sevraine.

Ah, such wonders he’d discovered in those early years as the great Roman Empire came tumbling down around him—a world of metals, monuments, and art that had been inconceivable to his Egyptian mind.

And ever since the world had been changing, each new miracle and invention, each new attitude, ever more astonishing than those which had come before.

He had been on an upwards trajectory ever since those early centuries. And he held close to him the very same companions he’d acquired in those first few hundred years.

Very soon after he and Chrysanthe had taken up residence in their palace by the sea in Carthage, they’d been joined by a comely and dignified one-legged Greek named Flavius who told of being made by a powerful and wise female blood drinker named Pandora, consort of a Roman blood drinker, Marius, the keeper of the King and Queen.

Flavius had fled the household of Marius because Marius had never consented to his making, and when he’d come upon the household of Chrysanthe and Gregory in Carthage, he’d thrown himself on their mercy, and they had gladly taken him in—worthy to be Blood Kin. He’d lived in Athens as well as Antioch, in Ephesus and in Alexandria, and had visited Rome. He knew the mathematics of Euclid and the Hebrew scriptures in their Greek translation, and spoke of Socrates and Plato and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the natural history of Pliny and the satire of Juvenal and Petronius, and the writings of Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo who had only lately died.

What a marvel Flavius had been.