| abstract
| - Maharet and Mekare were twin sisters and powerful witches living in a beautiful valley not far from Egypt six thousand years ago. They had curly red hair and green eyes. They were hereditary witches who could communicate with spirits. This attracted the attention of Akasha, the young queen of Kemet (now known as Egypt), who sent them an invitation to visit her when they were sixteen years old. They refused, sensing something ominous about the request. Akasha's next request came in the form of violence, when the twins were performing cannibalistic funeral rites for their mother. The queen, who had made a policy of stamping out ritual cannibalism, sent soldiers to their village, killing everyone in their path and dragging the sisters away. When the twins arrived in Kemet, they were looked on in awe and fear by all who saw them. These people had never seen red hair, and twins were taboo in the country. They answered with truth all the questions about spirits and gods put to them by the Queen. However, as their answers did not fit with Akasha's beliefs, they were labelled as blasphemers and were thrown into jail. The next morning, the Queen sent and put the same questions to them. Mekare called on a mischievous spirit named Amel, against the wishes of her sister, to display her power. This terrified the queen and her husband, King Enkil, and the twins were thrown into jail again for three nights and days before they received their punishment. Their punishment was to be raped by the King's steward, Khayman, in front of the whole court. Khayman was not one to accept violence and hated to do the task, but had to obey his sovereigns' orders otherwise he and the twins would face death. The sisters were allowed to go home after the rape. After a difficult time, Maharet and Mekare eventually returned to their homeland, and there Maharet bore a child, Miriam, conceived from Khayman's rape. The sisters put their trials behind them, and settled in to rebuild their life in the valley. But their peace was shattered a year later when Khayman arrived with an army. He took them back to Kemet, and on the journey there told them what had happened since their departure. The spirit Amel, furious at the humiliation of the twins, had run amok. He pestered the king and queen day and night, throwing and knocking things over, driving the pair mad. It had also been tormenting Khayman for his part in the rape, ripping his house apart and unearthing his father's body from its tomb. The nobles were displeased with their monarchs for bringing this trouble on them, and had plotted to kill them. The nobles had followed the royal couple to Khayman's house, where they were pleading with the spirit to let them be, and attacked them. But somehow Akasha and Enkil had survived, and all the nobles had been killed. Since then, the King and Queen had only been seen at night, and would not leave their palace. People were disappearing, and Khayman had resolved to bring the twins back in hopes that they could put an end to all these troubles. Upon reaching Kemet, the twins learned what had happened. Despite being an incorporeal spirit, Amel had the unique ability to draw blood from humans and liked the a taste of it. One of his favorite torments was pricking people and causing them to bleed. Akasha and Enkil had been stabbed by their would-be assasins, and as they lay bleeding to death, the spirit of Amel could be seen in the form of a hovering cloud of droplets of blood. The spirit was seen to dive into Akasha's body, and she somehow regenerated her body fully healed. Akasha fell upon Enkil, draining him of what remained of his blood, then feeding him her own. Like Akasha, Enkil became fully healed and they became the world's first immortal blood drinkers. Akasha and Enkil had summoned the twins in the hope that the witches could enlighten them on the form that they had taken, and how they could satisfy their endless thirst for blood. The twins answers were deemed to be unsatisfactory, and as punishment Mekare tongue was severed from her as were Mekare's eyes. As a gesture from Khayman, he brought the twins their severed organs to their mouths and they swallowed them so they couldn't be trampled on by their mutilators. Maharet and Mekare were then thrown into jail and sentenced to death the next evening. Hours before dawn, Khayman came to them in despair. He had been betrayed by his king and queen, who had made him an immortal blood drinker like them to test if the twins' counsel how to diminish their insatiable bloodlust were true. To seek revenge against Akasha and Enkil, Khayman made Mekare into a blood drinker, and in turn she made Maharet into one. They escaped the prison and made more blood drinkers as they went, hoping to create an army to defeat the evil king and queen. This army of blood drinkers would become known as the First Brood. Weeks later, the twins were captured in Saqqara while Khayman managed to escape. The twins were put into stone coffins, each set adrift in the ocean: Mekare to the west, Maharet to the east. Maharet landed on the southern coast of Africa, and wandered for the next six millennia, tracking the bloodline of her daughter Miriam and searching for Mekare. It is not known for sure what became of Mekare, but pictures were found thousands of years later in South America of a red-haired woman. Similar pictures had been found in Africa. Maharet and others suspected that Mekare had gone wild and spent all that time in the jungles, avoiding civilization. Khayman wandered throughout Europe, losing his memory every few centuries. He did not see the twins again until events of The Queen of the Damned, when Maharet brings the surviving vampires together in her Sonoma compound in California. There, they encounter Akasha, who fails to convince them to play the roles of her angels in her New World Order. When she is about to destroy them for refusing her, Mekare appears and charges at Akasha, crashing into a pane of glass which falls on Akasha and severs her head. Because all vampires in the world are connected to Akasha and her death would mean the death of them all, Mekare quickly consumed Akasha's heart and brain, taking the Sacred Core of the spirit of Amel into herself, replacing Akasha as the new Queen of the Damned. Maharet makes a brief appearance at the end of Memnoch the Devil, when she chains Lestat in a monastery after he goes mad from his latest adventure. She also appears briefly in Merrick when she is said to have offered Louis her powerful blood only to be turned down. She appears again in Blood and Gold, where she receives new eyes from Thorne, and one more time through the use of email in Blood Canticle offering her assistance to Lestat and Mona Mayfair in tracking down the Taltos.
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