Pandora is Marius’s first and most beloved fledgling. Similar to Gabrielle, Pandora is one of the most independent female characters in the Vampire Chronicles. She is also among the band of rebellious vampires who fight and defeat Akasha. Pandora appears in The Queen of the Damned (1988), Pandora (1998), Prince Lestat (2014), Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis (2016), and Blood Communion (2018).
Born around 15 B.C. in the Roman Empire under the rule of Augustus Caesar, Pandora is given the birth name Lydia. Her house is run by her father, Maximus, a wealthy senator who claims to be a pure-blood Roman, descended directly from the time of Romulus and Remus. Lydia’s mother, the daughter of another wealthy Roman senator, makes the same claim, but when Lydia is two years old, her mother dies, having given birth to six children, while six more perished in the womb. Lydia’s five older brothers, ranging from Antony, the eldest, to Lucius, the youngest, practice fighting with short broad swords and receive lessons from their tutors, and Lydia is always observing and learning. When she reaches the age at which she can receive tutelage on her own from Greek masters, she discovers that she loves words and adores reading.
Lydia first encounters her future maker, Marius, while he is still mortal, at the age of twenty-five. He is immediately smitten with Lydia’s intelligence and character, and he begs her father, Maximus, for her hand in marriage. Maximus refuses, since she is too young. Lydia does not see Marius for the next five years, but she often thinks of him. By the time she is the common age for Roman marriage (fifteen years old), she is overjoyed to see Marius once more at the Lupercalia festival. Lydia now begs her father to allow Marius to marry her, but once more Maximus denies the request. Lydia does not see Marius again for the next two decades, not until she is thirty-five years old, a few years after the death of Augustus Caesar, when Julius Caesar was emperor of the Roman Republic. Her maturity into womanhood is plagued by blood dreams about powerful people who drink blood.
Tiberius becomes the new Roman Emperor and sets Sejanus to run the empire for him as his Roman consul, the highest office. Sejanus consolidates the Praetorian Guard and begins persecuting numerous citizens, most of whom are Sejanus’s personal rivals. Lucius is jealous of his eldest brother, Antony, and promises the delatores (the Praetorian Guard’s secret spies) that they will receive one-third of the family estate if they accuse Maximus, his father, along with his family, of treason. The Praetorian Guard sends speculatores (scouts) to Lydia’s home, where they kill her brothers. Maximus, her father, slits his wrists, desiring to die a Roman death. When the speculatores try to kill him, he slays them, yet they also mortally stab him. Before Lydia’s father dies, he reveals that he has arranged for two Hebrew merchants named David and Jacob to sneak her out of the city.
The two merchants set sail with her aboard a vessel heading from the Roman republic to Antioch. Upon arrival, David and Jacob give her all the money that her father bequeathed to her, they help her procure a fine house, they falsify documents to say that she is a Greek widow from Rome, and they change Lydia’s name to Pandora. Once on her own, she pretends to be a Greek courtesan and buys a slave named Flavius, who lost his left leg below the knee in a hunting accident but has in its place a false leg finely sculpted out of ivory, with a perfectly cut foot, toes, and a sandal. Well educated in Greek and Roman writings, Flavius becomes her most devoted slave, trustworthy of managing not only Pandora’s house but also her housemaids, since he is not attracted to women.
During this time, Pandora’s blood dreams intensify: one is about a beautiful queen weeping on her throne, and another is about a man so badly burned that he looks like a monster with bones poking through his charred skin. Deeply concerned, she speaks to temple priests about her blood dreams. They confirm for her that the burned being is a reality, for they have been more fully informed of the burned blood drinker by a man who happens to be with the priest, a tall man wearing a toga that completely covers his body, except for his lips. Occasionally he speaks to Pandora aloud, but he is also able to speak with her telepathically. He reveals to her that he knows much more than she realizes, specifically about the circumstances surrounding her brother Lucius’s betrayal. He also assures her that he will protect her from the burned being. After more blood dreams and more reports of a burned blood drinker killing people throughout the city, the tall man reveals himself to be her beloved Marius.
He is leaving Antioch, and he urges her to come with him. She speaks more fully of her dreams with Marius, revealing that the Queen is considered to be a primal and healing fount of blood for blood drinkers, and that numerous burned blood drinkers are desperately seeking a way to drink her pure blood for greater power and healing. Marius then describes to her how he was turned into a vampire and how he became the caretaker of Akasha and Enkil, the progenitors of all vampires, also called Those Who Must Be Kept. He also explains that the caretaker before him, a vampire called the Elder, attempted to burn Akasha and Enkil but caused the Great Burning of 4 C.E. An ancient vampire named Akbar is now badly burned because of it and seeks the blood of Akasha to heal himself.
Marius protects Pandora, but Akbar finds her, drains her blood to the point of death, and threatens to let her die unless Marius takes him to Those Who Must Be Kept. Reluctantly acquiescing, Marius takes Akbar to them, but the Queen crushes Akbar’s head, forcefully dismembers him, and burns the rest, destroying him completely. To save her life, Marius turns Pandora into a vampire, and they remain together, joint protectors of Akasha and Enkil, for many years.
Pandora invites into their home her slave Flavius. Marius is deeply impressed with him and treats Flavius as a very beloved mortal. When Flavius becomes mortally ill, Marius cannot bear the sight of him dying. Against Marius’s wishes, Pandora turns Flavius into a blood drinker. Marius is furious, and he banishes Flavius from his house, and even from the empire. Marius wants to teach Pandora everything he knows, but she does not want to listen to him. A wedge grows between them. Finally, after two hundred years of arguing and heartache, Marius leaves Pandora and takes with him the Mother and the Father.
Around the sixth century, as Pandora is roaming through a Roman forest near the monastery Vivarium, Cassiodorus’s monastic school that published volumes of classical literature, she encounters a spirit rising out of the energy in a beehive. The spirit possesses a scarecrow and begins to weep and mourn the recent death of Cassiodorus. Pandora is completely aware that she is observing a spirit. Utterly unafraid of it, she encourages the spirit to do whatever it can to become greater than what it is, to learn and evolve, to not be limited by what it sees but to see how far existence can go. Then she leaves, unaware that she will encounter the spirit again in the twenty-first century.
In the interim, sometime during the fourteenth century, Pandora falls in love with an Indian prince named Arjun. She turns him into a vampire, and they remain together for many years, during which time their relationship corrupts. Arjun is with her the next time she encounters Marius, in Dresden, where he is with his own fledgling and lover Bianca. Marius hears reports that she is being held captive against her will by Arjun, but she denies it. Marius begs her forgiveness and vows that he will stay with her forever, he will even leave Bianca for her, but she denies him. Before she and Arjun leave Dresden, she writes a note to Marius in his chamber, confessing that he is right: she is Arjun’s captive, and she wants Marius to find her in Moscow and take her away. But the note is lost for the next fifty years. When Marius finds it and goes to search for her, she and Arjun have already gone.
While in Saint Petersburg, Pandora hires the librarian Dmitri Fontayne, nicknamed Mitka, but soon falls in love with him. She turns him into her fledgling, but Arjun is furious. He banishes Mitka from Russia. Pandora gives her fledgling a small fortune before he leaves, but she remains separated from him until the early twenty-first century.
The next time Pandora meets Marius is in the late twentieth century, at Maharet’s Sonoma compound, where they fight and defeat Akasha, who awakens at the summoning of the music of the Vampire Lestat. Marius and Pandora reconcile and remain in contact.
They meet once more in the early twenty-first century to help Lestat take the spirit of Amel into himself and become Prince Lestat, ruler of all vampires. She also reunites with the spirit that she encountered at the beehive and in the scarecrow. The spirit calls himself Gremt Stryker Knollys, and he reveals to her that, through her encouragement, he has learned how to evolve and become incarnate. Furthermore, it is also because of her encouragement that he—along with another spirit, who once was the vampire Hesketh, and Teskhamen, Hesketh’s former maker and Marius’s maker—is responsible for beginning the Talamasca.
Marius and Pandora remain together through Lestat’s coronation ceremony, to witness and encourage the making of Lestat’s son and clone, Viktor, and Lestat’s adopted daughter, Rose, both of whom are united as Blood Spouses. Afterward, Pandora joins Rose and Viktor, along with Gabrielle, and even Arjun and Bianca, back at Lestat’s newly renovated castle in France, where as a mortal he once killed eight wolves. They live together under the same roof as the Court of the Prince, but Arjun grows restless and tries to take Pandora away. Marius prevents him from doing so, and Arjun attacks him, but Marius obliterates him completely. Pandora is finally free of Ajun and is reunited with Mitka when Lestat brings her fledgling back to Château de Lioncourt.
For more perspectives on Pandora in the Vampire Chronicles, read the Alphabettery entries Akasha, Akbar, Antony, Arjun, The Elder, Enkil, Flavius, God of the Grove, Gremt Stryker Knollys, Hesketh, Lestat de Lioncourt, Lucius, Lydia, Marius, Mitka, Rose, Teskhamen, Those Who Must Be Kept, and Viktor.