Blood and Gold

Blood and Gold is a vampire novel by the American writer Anne Rice and the eighth book in her Vampire Chronicles.

The frame is simple: Thorne, a northern vampire who has been locked in ice for hundreds of years, wakes and asks the older Marius for his history. Marius tells it, and the novel becomes his account of a long life. He was a Roman patrician when druids took him and tried to make him the successor to the thing they kept in a chamber under a tree, a being they worshipped as a god of the grove. Marius refused the role, escaped, and travelled to Egypt, where he found Those Who Must Be Kept, the mother and father of all vampires, and understood that their deaths would mean the deaths of every vampire alive. He carried them to Rome and spent the next two millennia protecting them, through the sack of the city and the collapse of everything around him, and through his love for the mortal woman Pandora, whom he made immortal and then lost. Rice tells it as a scholar's account of duty rather than as a horror story.

The book follows the pattern of the series in giving an old character a voice of his own, and it fills in the mythology the earlier novels had only gestured at.