#memnoch

[leojoxaren]

Memnoch the Devil reading and sketching ~

[agdistis-sanctified]

Really obsessed with that part of Memnoch the Devil where Lestat explains everything that happened with Memnoch and Armand goes "babe, that's Divine Comedy??"

[tulinokkaelain]

"What do you think Hell is?" -Memnoch the Devil

I, a tumblr user at 2am, have figured it out. Feel free to use if you have your own thoughts about Hell. ;)

[v-e-l-v-e-t-g-o-l-d-m-i-n-e]

Lestat/Armand + Moments that makes me feel Insane

If there had been a summons, I never heard it. If there was a greeting, I didn't sense it now. He was merely looking at me, a radiant creature in jewels and scalloped lace. And it was Cinderella revealed at the ball, this vision, Sleeping Beauty opening her eyes under a mesh of cobwebs and wiping them all away with one sweep of her warm hand. The sheer pitch of incarnate beauty made me gasp. Yes, perfect mortal raiment, and yet he seemed all the more supernatural, his face too dazzling, his dark eyes fathomless and just for a split second glinting as if they were windows to the fires of hell. And when his voice came it was low and almost teasing, forcing me to concentrate to hear it: All night you've been searching for me, he said, and here I am, waiting for you. I have been waiting for you all along. - The Vampire Lestat

He looked to Gabrielle, who stood near the fire, and then to me. And silently, he said, Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me. This silent entreaty had an eloquence, however, that I can't put into words. "What can I do to make you love me?" he whispered. "What can I give? The knowledge of all I have witnessed, the secrets of our powers, the mystery of what I am?" It seemed blasphemous to answer. And as I had on the battlements, I found myself on the edge of tears. For all the purity of his silent communications, his voice gave a lovely resonance to his sentiments when he actually spoke. - The Vampire Lestat

"It wasn't that I wanted vengeance," he whispered. His face was stricken, his heart broken. He said. "But you came to be healed, and you did not want me! A century I had waited, and you did not want me!" And I knew, as I had all along really, that my restoration was illusion, that I was the same skeleton in rags, of course. And the house was still a ruin. And in the preternatural being who held me was the power that could give me back the sky and the wind. "Love me and the blood is yours," he said. "This blood that I have never given to another." I felt his lips against my face. "I can't deceive you," I answered. "I can't love you. What are you to me that I should love you? A dead thing that hungers for the power and the passion of others? The embodiment of thirst itself?" [...] Yet memory plays its tricks. Maybe I imagined it, his last invitation, and the anguish after. The weeping. I do know that as the months passed he was out there again. I heard him from time to time just walking those old Garden District streets. And I wanted to call to him, to tell him that it was a lie I'd spoken to him, that I did love him. I did. - The Vampire Lestat

In a way, he made me think of a child doll, with brilliant faintly red-brown glass eyes—a doll that had been found in an attic. I wanted to polish him with kisses, clean him up, make him even more radiant than he was. “That’s what you always want,” he said softly. His voice shocked me. If he had any French or Italian accent left, I couldn’t hear it. His tone was melancholy and had no meanness in it at all. “When you found me under Les Innocents,” he said, “you wanted to bathe me with perfume and dress me in velvet with great embroidered sleeves.” “Yes,” I said, “and comb your hair, your beautiful russet hair.” My tone was angry. “You look good to me, you damnable little devil, good to embrace and good to love.” We eyed each other for a moment. And then he surprised me, rising and coming towards me just as I moved to take him in my arms. His gesture wasn’t tentative, but it was extremely gentle. I could have backed away. I didn’t. We held each other tight for a moment. The cold embracing the cold. The hard embracing the hard. - Memnoch

Lestat, not a bad friend to have, and one for whom I would lay down my immortal life, one for whose love and companionship I have ofttimes begged, one whom I find maddening and fascinating and intolerably annoying, one without whom I cannot exist. - The Vampire Armand

I wanted to take him in my arms. I wanted to comfort him, to tell him wherever he'd gone and whatever had taken place, he was now safe again with us, but nothing could quiet him. A deep exhaustion saved us all from the inevitable tale. We had to seek our dark corners away from the prying sun, we had to wait until the following night when he would come out to us and tell us what had happened. Still clutching the bundle, refusing all help, he closeted himself up with his wound. I had no choice but to leave him. As I sank down that morning into my own resting place, secure in clean modern darkness, I cried and cried like a child on account of the sight of him. Oh, why had I come to his aid? Why must I see him brought low like this when it had taken so many painful decades to cement my love for him forever? - The Vampire Armand

Two hundred years ago he stripped me of illusions, lies, excuses, and thrust me on the Paris pavements naked to find my way back to a glory in the starlight that I had once known and too painfully lost. But as we waited finally in the handsome high-rise apartment above St. Patrick's Cathedral, I had no idea how much more he could strip from me, and I hate him only because I cannot imagine my soul without him now, and, owing him all that I am and know, I can do nothing to make him wake from his frigid sleep. - The Vampire Armand

Of course I knew the very moment that he left this world. I felt it. I was in New York already, very near to him and aware that you were there as well. Neither of us meant to let him out of our sight if at all possible. Then came the moment when he vanished in the blizzard, when he was sucked out of the earthly atmosphere as if he'd never been there. Being his fledgling you couldn't hear the perfect silence that descended when he vanished. You couldn't know how completely he'd been withdrawn from all things minuscule yet material which had once echoed with the beating of his heart. - The Vampire Armand

“Armand,” I said. “Please.” I dropped down on my knees in front of him, looking up into his face. All the emotion he had held back was printed there now. He was in a rage. “Is your heart totally turned against me?” I asked. “Do you have no faith in what we seek to build here?” “Fool,” he said again. His voice was roughened now by emotion he couldn’t suppress. “I have always loved you,” he said. “I have loved you more than any being in all the world whom I’ve ever loved. I have loved you more than Louis. I have loved you more even than Marius. And you have never given me your love. I would be your most faithful counselor, if you allowed it. But you don’t. Your eyes pass over me as if I don’t exist. And so they always have.” - Blood Communion

“I love you still,” he said. “Yes, even now, I love you, as they all love you, your minions seeking just a smile or a nod or a quick touch of your hand. I love you like all those throughout this palace who are dreaming of drinking just a drop of your blood. Well, you can leave me now. I’m not going anywhere. Where is there to go? I’ll be here if you want me. And grant me my wish for the moment, you and your august friends. Go and leave me alone.” - Blood Communion

Armand suddenly began to weep. “Don’t do it, don’t trust him,” he said. “Lestat, he’ll just destroy you. And if you are gone—.” Ah, such sweet words from one who only hours ago had been cursing me with his every breath. - Blood Communion

The only thought in my mind, the only image, the only idea, was of Armand, and how Armand would feel when he too could hold Marius like this and know that Marius lived, that Marius had been restored, that all of them were safe and secure, and using my strongest power I sent the word to him. I sent the news. And I sent my love to Armand with it. - Blood Communion

[cbrownjc]

“And, side note: it's also why Rolin has started to talk a bit about Memnoch, IMO. Because after I finally finished reading Realms of Atlantis (the day before the SDCC 25 panel, too), using Memnoch as a bridge into the Prince Lestat trilogy -- and the Amel story -- fits rather easily IMO.”

Hi, hope you are doing good! Would you mind elaborating on that a bit? :) I read all the books but I don’t follow your logic on why Memnoch would be a good brigde. Its been a long time I read these books and I forgot a lot of the details. Memnoch was definitely one of my favorites but I really thought they wouldn’t adapt it to the show, so I was already resigned to that. I would love to get a Memnoch season, but I just don’t see it in this show.

Hello!

Now, this answer contains spoilers for the book Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis.

So please, everyone -- if you haven't read that book and don't want to know anything, then stop reading this post right now.

:

Okay, so. To make a long story very, very short, if you remember PLatROA, you'll remember that in that book that we learned that Amel had a love/hate relationship with a character called Maxym. And that Amel and Maxym were basically the only two high-intelligence immortals on Earth.

And that when their bodies were destroyed, they both became spirits.

Well, the spirit Maxym became is revealed to have been Memnoch.

So yes, Amel and Memnoch not only knew each other, but loved each other, but also hated each other. And that was because, for who knows how many millennia, they were the only two high-intelligence immortals on the planet Earth. Amel even talks about the kind of loneliness that existence can bring you:

And then, earlier in the same book, Lestat meets up with Magnus' spirit. And he talks about having been in one of Memnoch's hells after he went into the fire to end his life, and what Memnoch is:

This is all very much the same themes Maxym and Amel were arguing about, regarding humanity, before their bodies were destroyed and they became spirits.

So yeah, Amel and Maxym/Memnoch have a connection and tie into each other. And the show, being this show and what it does, then IMO, if they do adapt Memnoch the Devil, I expect this aspect of it all -- that Memnoch and Amel knew each other, and who/what Memnoch really is/was -- to be used in some way.

Which then can, IMO, all segway right into the story in Prince Lestat and Amel starting up the Second Burnings.

[virginiaisforvampires]

So people say different things about this, but do you think lestat lived akasha or do you think it was magnus all over again and he pretends ti love her to cope?

Lestat reframes his trauma as “love” to retain his agency. Magnus, Akasha, Memnoch, the “angels”, and Amel were all Lestat’s abusers.

Lestat would rather say it was “love” than have to acknowledge what it truly was, because it is so acutely painful and traumatic for him. He suffers from PTSD from what they did to him. He thinks Louis is going to hate him and no longer love him, because of what they did to him. He hates himself, because of what they did to him. He tries to kill himself, because he loathes what Akasha did to him with her blood. He says he deserved what Magnus did to him, because he escaped his fate by surviving the wolves. He is damaged by what they did to him.

Lestat in Queen Of The Damned:

It’s an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater luster to our colors, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn’t destroy us, if it doesn’t burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things. Please forgive me if I sound bitter. I don’t have any right to be.

What Lestat suffered at their hands was not love. It was more abuse and trauma piled upon already-existing abuse and trauma he had endured from his father and brothers. He did not want any of that. He did not deserve any of that.

[sizeofyoursoul]

Good Morning, People of the Page. Spoiler Alert Maybe --- Regarding "Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis," unfortunately some people who apparently did not read the book closely, or did not finish it, or only heard about it --- came to the conclusion that the vampires are descended from aliens from outer space. This is not so at all. Amel, the spirit who fused with Akasha to create the first vampire, does indeed have a back story in the novel. But he is not an alien from outer space. And the story of who he was and how his spirit managed to infuse a tribe of connected vampires has to do with his own ingenuity and how that ingenuity infused his ghost or spirit making of him a unique being. I feel the need to say this because misinformation does indeed surround this novel and what it explores. Also the novel does not provide an explanation for Memnoch. One of the characters offers some speculation as to the origin of Memnoch but this is just speculation, nothing more. And for what it's worth, the speculation is wrong.

Anne Rice on Memnoch's true nature and misreadings of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis, from Facebook (2018)

[proffbon]

Imagine Lestat's fucking face when he learns that a spirit who lives inside his head and has arguments with him over drinking innocent blood and a spirit who hauled his ass into Hell and poked his eye out are bitter exes.