No one in the courts of the old Queen would have dared to give the Blood to one marked with deformity. Not even to the ugly or the badly proportioned was the Blood given. Indeed every human offered to the remorseless appetite of the spirit of Amel had been a lamb without blemish and indeed with beauty and gifts of strength and talent that his maker must witness and approve.

Yet here was Flavius crippled in his mortal years but burning brightly with the Blood, a meditative and well-spoken Athenian reciting the tales of Homer by memory as he played his lute, a poet and a philosopher who’d understood law courts and judgments, and who had memorized whole histories of peoples of the Earth he’d never known or seen. Gregory had imbibed so much from Flavius, sitting at his feet by the hour, prodding him with questions, committing to memory the stories and songs that came from his lips. And how grateful had been this honorable scholar. “You have my loyalty for all time,” he’d said to Gregory and Chrysanthe, “as you have loved me for what I am.”

And to think, this gracious blood drinker knew the very location of the Mother and the Father. He had seen them in the eyes of Pandora who made him; he had lived beneath the very roof of Marius and Pandora where the Divine Pair were kept.

How amazed Gregory—Nebamun of old—had been by Flavius’s stories of King Enkil and Akasha, now mute and blind living statues who never showed the slightest sign of sentience as they sat on a throne above banks of flowers and fragrant lamps in a gilded shrine. And it was Marius, the Roman, who had stolen the unresisting King and Queen out of Egypt, from the old blood drinker priesthood that had thrived there for four thousand years. The elders of the priesthood had sought to destroy the Mother and the Father, as they had come to be called, by placing them in the killing rays of the sun. And indeed—as the King and Queen had suffered this blasphemous indignity—countless blood drinkers around the world had perished in flames. But the oldest had been doomed to continue, though their skin was darkened, even blackened, and their every breath was taken in pain. Akasha and Enkil had only been bronzed by this foolish attempt at immolation and indeed the elder himself had survived to share the torture of those he had hoped would all be burnt to death.

But priceless as this history was to Gregory—that his old sovereign endured without power—it was not the Blood history that mattered to him, but the new Roman world.