Pandora (1998) is the first book in The New Tales of The Vampires, a short lived spin off of The Vampire Chronicles. The book is the autobiography of the character Pandora written at the request of David Talbot, and tells the story of her mortal life, her family's murder and betrayal, her relationship with Marius de Romanus, and her transformation into a vampire in the early decades of the first century.
Plot summary[]
Pandora was born with the name Lydia in the Roman Republic to a Senatorial family. Like many Patrician Roman females of the time Pandora was taught how to read and write and is well versed in epic poems, especially Ovid's works. She meets Marius for the first time when he is twenty-five and she is ten. Marius asks for Lydia's hand in marriage, but her father rejects Marius' offer. Five years later, Lydia sees Marius at a festival and begs her father to allow her to marry Marius. Her father again refuses.
Pandora's father holds a high rank as a Senator. But when a new emperor takes power, her family is betrayed by her own brother and killed. Only Pandora and her traitorous brother survive the massacre, and she is taken to Antioch (after changing her name) by a man who was very close to her father. There she meets Marius again, twenty years after their last encounter. Unbeknownst to her, Marius is now a vampire.
She eventually finds out what Marius has become, and also that he protects and hides Those Who Must Be Kept. The vampire, Akbar, wants to steal the Queen's powerful and ancient blood. Marius and Pandora try to prevent him from carrying out his plan. To gain access to the Queen, Akbar uses Marius's love for Pandora against him and drains Pandora to the point of death. In order to save her, Marius is forced to make Pandora into a vampire and forced to let Akbar see the Queen, who then destroys Akbar. The pair stay together for the next two hundred years, taking care of Those Who Must Be Kept, before arguing and separating. Marius later characterized the breakup (of which he left her and she spent six months or more waiting for him to return) as being entirely his fault: He considers himself a teacher who longs to impart what he knows upon his pupils, but Pandora -being as free-spirited and highly educated as she was -had no patience to be his student.
The next time they meet again is in a Dresden ballroom in the early to late-17th century. Marius tries in vain to make Pandora leave her companion and fledgling, Arjun, and come back to him. Pandora's relationship with Arjun is of great concern to Marius, who fears Pandora is being held against her will. While she outwardly denies this, Pandora overcomes her embarrassment and admits to David in her writing that she could not bring herself to leave Arjun, citing that his stronger will propelled them both through time.
David Talbot encounters her in Paris shortly after the events of Memnoch the Devil and before the story of The Vampire Armand. He asks her to write the story of her life, which she does in a cafe by writing in some notebooks he gave her. She recalls the details of her life before becoming a vampire and briefly discusses the period when she was with Marius. After she has finished, she writes that she plans to go to New Orleans to look for Marius and to look into the eyes of Lestat, and try to understand what it is he saw.