Those Who Must Be Kept is the collective name used for Akasha and Enkil, the first two vampires in existence, as they sit in silent in a silent, statue-like state for several millennia.
History[]
At some point during skirmishes between different sects of vampires, about three thousand years into their lifetimes, Akasha and Enkil were captured and contained in diorite prison-cages, leaving only their heads and necks exposed. This way they could both take victims and be easily raped of their own ancient and most-powerful blood. They neither killed nor fed during this time, and those who came to take blood from them did so without difficulty or struggle, as they slipped into silence.
After centuries had passed, one night they were discovered to have broken free of their diorite prisons. Their clothing having long ago wasted away, they lay naked, embracing one another on the floor. By this time, the wars that plagued the vampire world were long over. What little information about Those Who Must Be Kept and their origins remained was cryptic, vague or unreadable by then-modern vampires. Although they were described as being the core of the race, it was unclear whether the core itself rested in either one, the other, or both. For this reason, they continued to be cared for by their dark children for several thousand years while they stared, open-eyed, in silence.
Eventually, a vampire named "the Elder", who had inherited care of the couple from another, became frustrated with their refusal to move. Not believing what he called "the old superstitions", the Elder placed Akasha and Enkil next to the Nile river before dawn and fled. The next night, he was horrified to find that "the old superstitions" were true and that his actions had dire consequences. Younger vampires the world over had burst into flames or were incinerated while they slept. Those who were older or more powerful were severely burned, blackened within their own skins and weakened terribly. When the Elder went to retrieve the pair from the riverside, he found them both merely bronzed, and otherwise wholly intact. Afterwards, when other vampires traveled to Egypt to be healed, the two would lash out, refusing to allow other vampires to drink from them.
Following The Great Burning, an ancient "God of the Grove" made the Roman Marius into a vampire and sent him down into Egypt to investigate what had happened. After the Elder revealed he was the one who put Those Who Must Be Kept into the sun, and that he would probably do it again, Akasha temporarily became animate to stir Marius into taking them out of Egypt. The fledgling Marius collected them into sarcophagi and planned to take them with him to Antioch where he would protect them himself. When the Elder arrived to take the pair back, Akasha erupted from her hiding place and annihilated him in a bloody shower of violence. After allowing him to drink from her, both to heal him and pass on blood-memories of their ancient, war-tattered past, Marius became the keeper of Those Who Must Be Kept.
They would spend the next 2,000 years under his care and protection, and they would be moved from one sanctuary to another over the centuries. Just as Marius protected them, so would Akasha protect him when occasions proved capable for her to do so. She would also remove threats that were beyond Marius's reckoning, such as the vampire Akbar, and would also allow Marius to drink from her to be healed or to give him further strength to protect them. She also served to "sanctify" Pandora's transformation into a vampire by allowing her to drink from her without recourse.
Soon after Pandora's transformation, and unbeknownst to either him or her, the ancient vampire Maharet had sought him out to conduct an experiment of her own. The Great Burning was scarce past by this point, and Maharet, who had been made a vampire at the dawn of the species, came to discover whether or not she could destroy Akasha. Maharet repeatedly struck Akasha and Enkil, but felt nothing herself. She then drove a dagger into the Queen's heart and felt her own heart stop along with it, confirming that Akasha's destruction would be her own. Though still feeling venomous toward the silent Queen, she accepted that her own will to live outshone her lust for vengeance, and she left the two in peace, albeit grudgingly.
Marius's care over Those Who Must Be Kept proved no more eventful for him than did the Elder's, and by the time Marius met with the vampire Lestat (some 1,800 years after inheriting them), he had grown weary of his duty, yet continued out of loyalty and responsibility. When a small stunt by the vampire Lestat led Akasha to both drink and be drunk from him, Enkil arose in a mindless, jealous rage, and attempted to destroy him. After threats from Marius and a physical resistance from Akasha herself, Enkil did not destroy the young one, and returned to his pedestal to sit in agitated silence.
This display led Lestat to hypothesize that the core of the race rested within Akasha, and Marius, who had suspected similarly, agreed that this was probably so. Over the years it had most often been Akasha who stirred, but only when one would attempt to take Akasha from him would Enkil ever take any sort of action. Following this escapade, Lestat was sent of to live a "mortal" life and Marius relocated Those Who Must Be Kept to a new location.
Some two centuries later, after the Industrial Revolution had led fully into the modern era, Marius felt a resurgence of hope that he would be able to awaken his charges. The birth of moving pictures and film (which had a profound effect on all vampires in that era, because they were able to see the sun for the first time since their mortal lives) did not stir them, however, much to his disappointment. By 1985 Marius had relocated his sanctuary into a technologically extravagant underground bunker in the frozen northlands of Canada. Following the invention of satellite-feed cable, Those Who Must Be Kept regularly spent their nights in front of a television, where the world could both reach and not reach them in their continuously inanimate existence.
When the vampire Lestat reawakened in 1985, he published an autobiography and promptly started a rock band called (fittingly) The Vampire Lestat. All of his songs were smash hits and his music videos were played around the clock on several stations. The themes of his music were centered around revealing the many secrets of the world of vampires to a public that would never believe or accept them (thus the novelty). This was done also out of his desire to do good by showing the world true evil, even if they didn't recognize it when they saw it.
His voice reached out and stirred Akasha, who, also a dreamer with a desire to do good, found a purpose strong enough to pull herself from her pseudo-imprisonment within her own mind. Upon realizing that her own purpose would require more strength than even she possessed, and also realizing that the creature by her side was far from capable of defending itself, she drained her immortal consort of every last drop of blood, effectively destroying him and bringing their silent reign to an abrupt end.