Lydia, who later adopted the name of Pandora, is a powerful vampire as well as a Child of the Millennia, being over 2,000 years old.
Of all the vampires, Pandora is known as the most lonely and melancholic, surrounded by an air of mystery and sadness, only showing other emotions when she is with her creator and former lover Marius.
Physical Appearance[]
"Pandora, child of two millennia, consort to my own beloved Marius a thousand years before I was ever born. A goddess, made of bleeding marble, a powerful beauty out of the deepest and most ancient soul of Roman Italy, fierce with the moral fiber of the old Senatorial class of the greatest Empire the Western world has ever known. ...Her oval face shimmers beneath a mantle of rippling brown hair. She seems too beautiful to hurt anyone. She is tender-voiced, with innocent, imploring eyes, her flawless face instantly vulnerable and warm with empathy, a mystery. ...she is too ravishing for mortal males and the envy of females."
- Armand describes Pandora in The Vampire Armand.
Personality[]
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. In The Queen of the Damned, Lestat de Lioncourt suggests 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 Maharet's house, 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Akasha herself is destroyed and the thirteen vampires regroup in Armand's Night Island in Florida, Pandora still acts withdrawn from her fellow vampire kin, watching music videos all day long and completely ignoring Marius, who dotes on her lovingly.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.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Pandora was born with the name Lydia a few years before the birth of Christ in the Roman Republic, the daughter of a wealthy Roman Senator. Like many senators' daughters at the time, Lydia is taught to read and write. She comes to love poetry, especially works by Ovid.
She meets Marius, another wealthy patrician, when she is ten and he is twenty-five. Marius asks her father for permission to marry her, but is refused. Five years later, Lydia and Marius meet again at a religious festival. She begs her father to let her marry Marius, but her father refuses again.
The Roman Republic comes to an end when Augustus Caesar takes power. Lydia's family, loyal to the Republic, are killed by Primus, Lydia's treacherous brother. Lydia, the sole survivor, is taken to Antioch by a man close to her father and changes her name to Pandora. She meets Marius, who is now a vampire, twenty years after their last encounter, when she was 35.
Life As a Vampire[]
Eventually Pandora discovers that Marius is a vampire and also that he is the protector of Those Who Must Be Kept. At 4,000 years old (at that point in time), Those Who Must Be Kept are the King and Queen of all vampires. If they should perish, it would mean the end of all vampire-kind. Trouble arises when the vampire Akbar will stop at nothing to drink Akasha's blood, which would make him the most powerful of all the vampires. Marius and Pandora try to stop him, but Akabar uses Marius's love for the mortal Pandora and drains her to the point of death, forcing Marius to make her into a vampire to save her. (Akabar gains access to Those Who Must Be Kept, but is killed by Akasha before he can drink her blood.)
Marius and Pandora stay together for the next two hundred years, guarding Those Who Must Be Kept, but then argue and separate. Pandora waits for six months for Marius's return before realizing that he will never come back, and settles in Moscow. Looking back, Marius regrets arguing and characterizes the breakup as being his fault entirely. Later, Pandora turns an Indian man named Arjun into a vampire to be her companion.
She runs into Marius sometime in the eighteenth century in Dresden, Germany. He tries in vain to win her back, promising to abandon his love, Bianca Solderini, if she abandons Arjun to be with him. She refuses, feeling Arjun's strong will will keep her sane with the passing ages.
The next time they meet is in 1985, during the events of The Queen of the Damned. She and the vampire Santino come to his rescue after he is buried in ice by the newly-awakened Akasha. Together, they travel to Maharet's Sonoma Compound. She is one of the 13 vampires to survive Akasha's massacre. She is mostly quiet at this time, speaking only to tell Akasha that she cannot serve as one of eldest's "angels" because she already deplores bringing death, and that bringing death for Akasha's purposes cannot redeem her.
David Talbot encounters her in a cafe in Paris and asks her to write down the story of her life in some notebooks. This story is Pandora, the first book in The New Tales of the Vampires series. The novel ends with Pandora planning to go New Orleans to look for Marius.
In The Vampire Armand, Pandora is staying/living with Marius in his dwelling. Her behavior is as vacant as ever, however, and she is little more than an emotionless entity who sits around doing nothing, occasionally taking to playing the piano.
In Prince Lestat, Pandora is asked by Lestat to turn his ward Rose into a vampire.
