the scrolls

The scrolls are a body of ancient writings that Marius removes from the Elder’s library and later reads at Antioch. Their importance lies in the history they preserve: they describe Akasha and Enkil as human beings who entered prehistoric Egypt from an older land, and trace how their unusual powers and blood-drinking became the foundation of religious rites and myths. For Marius, the writings turn an inherited sacred narrative into evidence about the origins of his kind, while also showing how that history was fragmented, adapted, and repeatedly endangered.

Recovery and Preservation

Marius takes the scrolls during his flight from Egypt with Akasha and Enkil. He has placed the pair’s mummy cases side by side in sarcophagi, secured them with chains and locks, and loaded them onto a wagon. At the door to the underground temple, he leaves his slaves on watch, then descends into the temple and the Elder’s library with a leather sack. He gathers every piece of portable writing he can find, wishing he could remove the writing on the walls as well. The theft is deliberate and practical: Marius is leaving Egypt with the source of his people’s power, and the texts are the record he can carry with it.

The writings are not presented as a complete, easily consulted archive. Marius says that the scrolls reveal what happened, but qualifies the claim by noting that deciphering them is necessary; he also refers to papyri that he later reads. At Antioch on the Orontes, a great city he compares in population and wealth to Rome, he studies the old papyri and finds that they recount matters Akasha had already disclosed to him. The written record therefore corroborates her account rather than replacing it, and its survival depends on Marius having taken it from a threatened sanctuary.

Akasha, Enkil, and the Human Past

As Marius explains the scrolls, they identify Akasha and Enkil as human beings who came into Egypt from another, older land, in an era before writing and before the first pyramids. The Egyptians of that period, he says, still hunted enemies’ bodies for food. Akasha and Enkil led people away from cannibalism and taught them to sow crops and herd animals for meat, milk, and skins. The writings suggest that the pair may have led a larger group arriving from older cities, whose names and monuments had since been lost beneath the sands of Lebanon.

This account makes the Mother and Father’s later divinity an outcome of history rather than its starting point. The scrolls describe them as already old by the time the first pharaoh built a pyramid, and say that the earliest texts preserve their presence only in broken and strange forms. They do not identify the first fledglings who followed them. Instead, they trace the spread of the religion to islands in the great sea, the lands of the two rivers, and the northern woods, where shrines honored a moon god and blood sacrifice.

The scrolls also describe what the cult attributed to the god during the intervals between sacrifices. In starvation, his mind could leave his body, travel through the heavens, and gather knowledge; mortals considered pure of heart could come to the shrine, hear the god’s voice, and be heard by him. Marius sets this tradition in a long chronology: by a thousand years before his own time, he says, it had become old and incoherent, after the moon gods had ruled in Egypt for perhaps three thousand years and the religion had suffered repeated attacks.

Ritual, Myth, and Power

The scrolls explain how Akasha and Enkil made an overwhelming change intelligible and containable. They sought a purpose in their heightened senses, reasoning that the Good Mother had allowed what happened to them and that their powers must serve some good. They also feared that, without ritual and restraint, Egypt might become a society divided between those who drank blood and those bred to provide it—a tyranny mortal people could not overturn alone.

The Mother and Father therefore fashioned a religious order around their condition. They associated themselves with the waxing and waning moon and represented their blood-drinking as a god accepting a sacrifice that would otherwise spill on an altar. Through mystery and symbolism, they kept the practice from becoming ordinary; they withdrew from mortal sight into temples and received blood from worshipers. The account says that the sacrifices were selected as offerings for the good of the land, naming innocents, outsiders, and evildoers among those whose blood they drank. The myth of Osiris was adapted to incorporate their suffering, recovery, existence in a realm of darkness, and inability to walk in sunlight, then joined to older stories of gods whose fortunes rose and fell through their relationship with the Good Mother.

This ritual explanation does not erase the violence or danger at the heart of the history. Rather, as Marius reads it, the scrolls show the founders turning an extraordinary condition into a system of worship and social control. The sacred narrative is both an account of their suffering and a means of limiting the consequences of blood-drinking, while the institution it creates remains vulnerable to political and religious change.

Transmission, Destruction, and Significance

The scrolls describe the religion’s reach but also its repeated collapse. When Egyptian priests turned to the sun god Amon Ra, they opened the moon god’s crypts and exposed him to the sun; many vampires were destroyed. Marius compares this with warriors who later broke open sanctuaries in Greece and killed beings they did not understand. The record thus connects the spread of the cult to a persistent danger: the same temples and rites that preserve its authority can expose its adherents to destruction.

Marius’s seizure of the writings gives their history a personal afterlife. At Antioch, he finds in the papyri confirmation of what Akasha has told him, and establishes chapels for her and Enkil across Asia and Europe. He believes they will allow no harm to come to him. Centuries later, when the Children of Darkness set him on fire in Venice, he is too far from Akasha to be rescued; after reaching the sanctuary, he drinks her blood until he is healed. The scrolls consequently belong not only to an ancient account of origins but to Marius’s continuing effort to preserve and understand the beings whose power shapes his own existence.