Marius tells how he was born a mortal, a member of the Senatorial Class in the time of Caesar Augustus, and how he was made a vampire, or "dark god, " by Druids who clung to an old religion in the forests of Gaul. He tells how he, in turn, made the Vampire Armand (in "The Vampire Lestat"), how he became the guardian of Akasha and Enkil, the Queen and the King of Vampires who hold within themselves, the secret core of the life of the undead (destroy them and you destroy all vampires); how he became the voice of reason among the vampires, how he created Pandora, the vampire he longs for and still grieves over...

We see Marius, as a mortal in boyhood, in the teeming streets of second century Rome, when he believed in the Empire as preserver of civilization...in his young manhood in the time of Constantine and his battle to save Rome, as he witnesses the horror of the sacking of the city by the Visigoths...We follow him through The Dark ages and the Black Death, and a thousand years later to Venice and to Florence -- where he seeks out the great Botticelli, and becomes a painter living and working in a glorious palazzo -- a Blood Drinker in the thick of a rich and brilliant mortal life.

Worlds within worlds unfold -- historic, fantastic, cultural, vampiric, from the London of Henry VIII to 17th century Paris and Weimar -- as the novel moves through a series of climactic episodes to its splendid finale, in an Aegean Kingdom ruled by the great vampire-magician, Marius.