Marius—Akasha

Marius’s bond with Akasha is founded on a command that becomes a lifelong charge: she asks him to remove her and Enkil from Egypt and guard them from the Elder. He accepts, hides the ancient pair, and carries them toward safety, becoming their protector while also drawing upon Akasha as the source of his supernatural power. Their relationship combines duty, dependence, and an intimacy that cannot settle into ordinary reciprocity, because Akasha remains almost continuously silent and still.

The Call and the Charge

Akasha first appears to Marius in Egypt as a bronze-skinned woman dressed in pleated linen and jewels, with braided black hair threaded with gold. Her presence fills the small room; when Marius moves the curtains, the lamps go out, and smoke rises from them. She silently tells him, “Marius, take us out of Egypt.” Then she vanishes. Marius searches the garden and leaps over its wall, left alone in the street with his heart beating uncontrollably.

The appeal returns in a more urgent form when Marius approaches Akasha and Enkil. He weeps at their isolation and at the sight of them in a place where Egypt is dying above them. Akasha’s eyes remain fixed on him, and her message reaches him as thought rather than spoken language: “Take us out of Egypt, Marius. The Elder means to destroy us. Guard us, Marius. Or we perish here.” Her words define the relationship before it can become personal: she entrusts him with both their survival and their removal from the Elder’s reach.

Marius’s response is not detached obedience. He describes his curiosity about the Mother and Father deepening toward devotion, while admitting that he would have taken them simply to survive. As he approaches them, he knows Akasha will permit him to act, though Enkil could crush him with one blow. His fascination and practical fear therefore coexist from the outset: the pair are objects of wonder, but also the vulnerable beings whose protection may preserve Marius himself.

Concealment and Escape

Akasha and Enkil yield to Marius’s plan. He wraps them in linen and places them in wooden mummy cases painted with other faces and covered in hieroglyphic instructions for the dead. He takes the coffins to Alexandria, first dragging one under each arm, then hiring men to carry them properly to his house. There he buries them deep beneath the garden and tells Akasha and Enkil aloud that their stay underground will not be long.

The concealment turns guardianship into a sustained risk. Marius is afraid to leave them the following night, hunts and kills within yards of his garden gate, and arranges horses and a wagon for a journey along the coast toward Antioch, a city he knows and loves. When the Elder appears, Marius waits in his shadowy bedroom and tries to mislead him by imagining that he has hidden the pair inside the Great Pyramid. His care is not merely a promise: it requires concealment, calculated deception, and the preparation of an escape route.

Marius also understands that distance and physical strength are not enough to make the journey safe. His injured shoulder and arm would heal much faster if he drank from Akasha, perhaps instantaneously, and that healing would allow them to leave Alexandria that night. The prospect joins her role as the person he must protect to her power as the possible means of his recovery. He imagines taking her far away to safe places, but recognizes that some of the intimate dialogue and tenderness he experiences may be his own invention. The uncertainty does not stop him from approaching her: he believes he is her guardian and that she will not let anyone hurt him, even as he knows she could do to him what she did to the Elder.

Blood, Intimacy, and Protection

The relationship changes when Marius drinks Akasha’s blood. His account presents the moment as ecstatic and overwhelming, linking it to other defining experiences of blood: taking it from Magnus, receiving it in Cairo, and killing. The exchange makes his connection to Akasha more than a protective arrangement. She is bound to his supernatural strength and healing, and drinking from her allows him to survive and continue carrying out the charge she placed upon him.

Marius’s sense of closeness remains inseparable from danger and uncertainty. He approaches Akasha’s bronze throat, feeling that knowledge of her is inside him, but fears that she might harm him as she harmed the Elder. He reassures himself that he is now her guardian and that she would never allow anyone to hurt him. The scene’s intimacy thus rests on a reversal: the protector depends on the being he protects, while the seemingly helpless ancient figure possesses immense power.

Marius later explains that he had the source of their power with him as he left Egypt. At Antioch, he and Akasha’s long association takes on a settled form: he builds chapels for Akasha and Enkil across Asia and Europe, confident that they will let no harm come to him and that he will always care for them. Their mutual protection is stated as a lasting compact, even though their different capacities make it unequal in practice. Akasha gives him access to power and, in moments of crisis, the prospect of rescue; Marius supplies the care and safeguarding that their stillness requires.

Distance, Stillness, and Enduring Bond

The pair do not become active companions after their removal from Egypt. Marius says that by the end of his first century of keeping them in Antioch, he had despaired that they would ever come to life. Their silence and stillness remain almost continuous. Time changes Akasha’s skin, which gradually loses the damage of the sun until it is like alabaster again, but this visible restoration does not resolve the essential condition of their relationship.

Their bond nonetheless continues across great distances and centuries. Marius recalls that when the Children of Darkness set him afire in Venice, he was too far from Akasha for her to rescue him. After he reached the sanctuary, he drank her blood until he was healed. The episode makes the limits of their compact concrete: Akasha’s power cannot protect him when distance separates them, but her blood can restore him when he reaches her. Care and dependence recur not as a sequence of ordinary exchanges, but through separation, peril, return, and renewed access to the same source of power.

The relationship’s defining tension is that its emotional intensity exceeds what Akasha’s near-total stillness can answer. Marius experiences devotion, tenderness, fear, and the conviction that she will protect him, while acknowledging that he may be supplying the words and feelings of their dialogue himself. His guardianship endures for centuries, but the ancient beings’ silence remains. Akasha is at once the person who entrusts Marius with a mission, the power on which his survival depends, and an irreducibly distant presence whose stillness keeps their bond from becoming a reciprocal human intimacy.