Pandora (novel)
Encyclopedia
Pandora is a novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 and a vampire
Vampire
Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person...

 in Anne Rice
Anne Rice
Anne Rice is a best-selling Southern American author of metaphysical gothic fiction, Christian literature and erotica from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history...

's Vampire Chronicles
The Vampire Chronicles
The Vampire Chronicles is a series of novels by Anne Rice that revolves around the fictional character Lestat de Lioncourt, a French nobleman turned into a vampire in the 18th century....

. Her story is told in the book Pandora, one of two novels in the New Tales of the Vampires
New Tales of the Vampires
New Tales of the Vampires is a book series by Anne Rice. It is a departure from The Vampire Chronicles, also written by Rice. The books include Pandora and Vittorio the Vampire....

series.

Plot summary

Pandora was born with the name Lydia in the Roman Republic in the year 15 BC to a Senatorial family. She is tall, with rippling brown hair and gold-brown eyes. Like many Patrician Roman females of the time Pandora was taught how to read and write and is well versed in epic poems, especially Ovid's works. She meets Marius
Marius de Romanus
Marius de Romanus is a fictional character in The Vampire Chronicles novels written by Anne Rice. He is the primary character in the novel Blood and Gold.- Fictional biography :...

 for the first time when he is twenty-five and she is ten. Marius asks for Lydia's hand in marriage, but her father
Pater familias
The pater familias, also written as paterfamilias was the head of a Roman family. The term is Latin for "father of the family" or the "owner of the family estate". The form is irregular and archaic in Latin, preserving the old genitive ending in -as...

 rejects Marius' offer. Five years later, Lydia sees Marius at a festival and begs her father to allow her to marry Marius. Her father again refuses.

Pandora's father holds a high rank as a Senator. But when a new emperor takes power, her family is betrayed by her own brother and killed. Only Pandora and her traitorous brother survive the massacre, and she is taken to Antioch (after changing her name) by a man who was very close to her father. There she meets Marius again, twenty years after their last encounter. Unbeknownst to her, Marius is now a vampire.

She eventually finds out what Marius has become, and also that he protects and hides the Queen and King of all Vampires
Those Who Must Be Kept
Those Who Must Be Kept are fictional characters in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles. They are portrayed as the progenitors of all vampires, and are thus regarded as the "King and Queen of the Vampires"....

. The vampire, Akabar, wants to steal the Queen's powerful and ancient blood. Marius and Pandora try to prevent him from carrying out his plan. To gain access to the Queen, Akabar uses Marius's love for Pandora against him and drains Pandora to the point of death. In order to save her, Marius is forced to make Pandora into a vampire and forced to let Akabar see the Queen, who then destroys Akabar. The pair stay together for the next two hundred years, taking care of the King and Queen of all vampires, before arguing and separating. Marius later characterized the breakup (of which he left her and she spent six months or more waiting for him to return) as being entirely his fault: He considers himself a teacher who longs to impart what he knows upon his pupils, but Pandora -being as free-spirited and highly educated as she was -had no patience to be his student. During their time together, against his objection, she did turn one of her beloved slaves into a vampire. As soon as he was turned he left the pair and was not seen again.

The next time they meet again is in a Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....

 ballroom in the early to late-17th century. Marius tries in vain to make Pandora leave her companion and fledgling, Arjun, and come back to him. Pandora's relationship with Arjun is of great concern to Marius, who fears Pandora is being held against her will. While she outwardly denies this, Pandora overcomes her embarrassment and admits to David in her writing that she could not bring herself to leave Arjun, citing that his stronger will propelled them both through time.

The next and last time that they meet is in 1985, when she is among thirteen vampires who survived Akasha's killing spree and gathered at Maharet's house in the Sonoma compound to battle against Akasha. Pandora remains quiet and withdrawn throughout the whole ordeal, staring out the windows and saying little, rousing herself only once to say that Akasha is trying to justify deplorable "reasons" for a holocaust.

Like many vampires, Pandora is a morose, despairing immortal who initially wanted immortality but soon regretted her choice and turns into a dark, indifferent cynic. Lestat
Lestat de Lioncourt
Lestat de Lioncourt is a fictional character appearing in several novels by Anne Rice, including The Vampire Lestat. He is a vampire and the main character in the majority of The Vampire Chronicles, narrated in first person.-Publication history:...

 thinks that Pandora was troubled in some deep, fundamental way even before she became a vampire, because she's the only vampire who doesn't receive visions of Maharet and Mekare in her dreams. During the confrontation in Sonoma, when Akasha directly asks Pandora to join with her or die, Pandora merely responds in a quiet, indifferent voice that she can't do what Akasha is asking of her, and stoically accepts the idea of being killed.

Even after Akasha herself is destroyed and the thirteen vampires regroup in Armand's Night Island in Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

, Pandora still acts withdrawn from her fellow vampire kin, watching music videos all day long and completely ignoring Marius, who dotes on her lovingly. There is no sense of recovery or security in her as there is with the other vampires, and she departs from Night Island alone, still just as morose as ever.

David Talbot encounters her in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 shortly after the events of Memnoch the Devil
Memnoch the Devil
Memnoch the Devil is the fifth novel in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles series, following The Tale of the Body Thief. Some of the themes of this novel and in large part the title are re-borrowed from the old Irish gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer.In this story, Lestat is approached by the Devil...

and before the story of The Vampire Armand
The Vampire Armand
The Vampire Armand is the sixth novel in Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles series.-Plot summary:With Lestat still in slumber after his adventures in Memnoch the Devil, the vampire coven is united around the "brat prince" , and the vampire David Talbot takes the opportunity to request that Armand...

. He asks her to write the story of her life, which she does in a cafe by writing in some notebooks he gave her. She recalls the details of her life before becoming a vampire and briefly discusses the period when she was with Marius. After she has finished, she writes that she plans to go to New Orleans to look for Marius and to look into the eyes of Lestat, and try to understand what it is he saw. She is last seen at the end of Blood and Gold
Blood and Gold
Blood and Gold is the eighth book in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles series.-Plot summary:The book begins with an ancient vampire of Nordic descent awaking after being frozen in a block of ice for hundreds of years. The vampire, Thorne, meets Marius de Romanus and inquires about Marius' past...

, alongside Marius.
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