Akasha's Song (Queen of the Damned fansong)

[thrasherpix]

Just sharing for anyone interested, a fan made a song devoted to Akasha (featured in the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice, particularly Queen of the Damned). I'm not sure what I think of it exactly, but seems to get what a narcissist Akasha was (though do such words as "narcissist" truly apply to ancient royalty turned First Vampire, upon which each vampire that feeds on humanity is at her mercy?).

In the lore given by Anne Rice, many of the first vampires became the gods of humanity, and Akasha was thus the mother of all gods, all gods under her power as well as being of her creation. (They weren't really gods, though after centuries and millennia they became comparable to gods in the Buffyverse.)

Akasha was not above burying vampires alive to torment them with undying hunger.

It's a long song and it proved difficult to copy/paste in an email, so I'll just share a few of the lyrics. The rest are in the description of the video. I only share the first verse.

Lyrics:
[Verse 1]
I have tasted every century,
Licked the veins of kings and gods.
Men who swore they’d stand above me,
Fell to whispers, fell to rot.
Their hands once built the world I gifted,
Now they shackle, now they kneel.
They beg for love, they beg for mercy—
Let them learn how hunger feels.

[Pre-Chorus] I am the Mother, the wound and the knife,
I am the death that is sweeter than life.
No gods above, no man below—
Only the dark, only my throne.
[seductive whispers] "I am your queen, you will not defy me."

[Chorus] Come drink the blood of the mother,
Come taste the fire, taste the flood.
Drown in pleasure, drown in suffering,
Drown in rivers thick with blood.
This world was made for my desire,
I take, I break, I set the pyre.

[MORE]

 

[Canyon]

Great song! Really enjoyed this! 🤟

 

[ILLYRIAN]

The way I understood it, the ancients were older than Akasha.

Shame about the Egyptian flavour of the surroundings. The Queen with glowing eyes, it made it seem as though she was too much like the bad guys from Stargate.

 

[NotASlayer]

Shame about the Egyptian flavour of the surroundings. The Queen with glowing eyes, it made it seem as though she was too much like the bad guys from Stargate.

In fairness, The Queen of the Damned preceded Stargate and she was Egyptian in the novels. Glowing Eyes of Doom are also a pretty standard trope.

 

[ILLYRIAN]

Stargate was being prepared for a decade before it was aired.

 

[NotASlayer]

It would be rather hard to be influenced by something that had not been released, though! The Vampire Lestat was released in 1985, and The Queen of the Damned was a continuation of that story, so it seems reasonable to assume that Rice was working on the story before 1984.

 

[thrasherpix]

Perhaps I should say something given that the movie differed somewhat from the book. A lot of this is from memory from reading The Vampire Lestat and (especially) Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice.

Summing up, it reaches back to what would become Ancient Egypt. Akasha was royal (and a narcissist, though I'm not certain that term applies when raised as royalty in the ancient world) and she needed validation and to have her ways imposed upon others. She also had occult interests (and wanted to hear how special she was and loved by the gods).

She heard of twin sisters (I think the movie reduces this to just one woman) who were powerful witches, named Maharet and Mekare. Their village practiced ritual cannibalism (but this was seen as an act of love and reverence rather than degradation). They did have power with some spirits that were essentially summed up as childish beings. They weren't particularly bright or ambitious (though some masqueraded as gods), but they could find out things and loved attention.

One spirit called Amel was different with the unique ability to create pinprick bleeding.

The twins refused Akasha's call so the queen (Akasha) had the village wiped out for cannibalism (and disrupted a holy act by doing so) and the sisters brought to her for essentially her own amusement and validation, and was less than pleased with what they had to say of spirits (including the Egyptian gods--though the later vampirism would later affect Egyptian mythology).

The twins were made to endure vile acts (and would get trigger warnings if made today) and released. The more vengeful twin sent Amel to torment the court (especially Akasha) as a poltergeist that could draw on blood (and bragged of being able to feed on it).

At this same time a perfect storm happened in which Akasha and her husband were targeted by assassins (this is complicated and includes events that had no direct connection to the twins), and when Akasha lay dying the spirit sent to vex them launched into Akasha's blood, creating another perfect storm.

Akasha then fused with the spirit, and suddenly hungry for blood. The spirit's essence or matrix was seemingly infinite and fused with Akasha's mortal spirit and body, something it could only do as Akasha lay bleeding out. (There are more details given in the book.)

This essentially made Akasha a hybrid human-spirit, material but with qualities of the spirit Amel. Amel seemed to have lost consciousness, however, now just Akasha. (As thousands of years passed Akasha became less human and more spirit, though she always remained corporeal.)

Akasha crawled to her dying husband (I think) and thus some of her blood mixed with the king who thus became the second vampire.

Skipping a lot more, the twins were brought back, treated more horribly, and Akasha and her husband both were ravenous, and found that by spreading the essence that the constant hunger became bearable. In short, Amel's essence spread among other bodies (vampires) that, with all feeding, made the hunger all felt more bearable.

The twins were both made into vampires, I believe, to allow for eternal torment and hunger, but...well, that's a long story over thousands of years.

As the spirit Amel remained in Akasha, those it spread to via vampirism was sensed by Akasha (essentially Akasha-Amel), and she had ultimate power over them, at least at first. As the centuries and millennia passed there were more intrigues, but no one could become the new Queen (or King) of the Damned, that spirit remained in Akasha.

Eventually the royal pair fell into a type of hibernation. The sun was deadly to vampires, though it becomes less so (even bearable) to those who existed for thousands of years. A keeper (watching over the sleeping queen and king) put the sleeping Akasha to the sun, and this bronzed the now marble white Akasha and caused every vampire in the world to experience the burning. Only the most ancient survived, and they were badly burned.

Many didn't know why they burned, so created new vampires to go find out, including to find out what happened to Akasha. This would lead to a new generation of vampires such as Marius who would later interact with Lestat.

Put another way, killing Akasha would kill every vampire on the planet. That's a major obstacle when Akasha later decides to remake the modern world (and shows that even thousands of years later she's still the same type of person she was when she was transformed into the first vampire).

When Akasha awakens in the modern world she can sense all vampires as the spirit's essence that made her into a vampire is linked to all other vampires as well (they're essentially part of her), and so she followed them (she didn't need to smell them out as the movie put it) and killed those she could (only the most ancient could resist her, and even then she could always sense them) save those that she had a plan for.

Vampires gain powers and strength as they age, and as the original vampire thousands of years old Akasha had powers to make her somewhat like Superman, able to fly and kill with her mind. (The sun no longer burned her, which was a blessing to the other vampires, though she had no trouble killing off so many on her own.)

She lacked the true powers of a god as she could not heal or raise from the dead (other than to infect them which had to be done before death), but she was an unstoppable killing machine (though she preferred underlings handle such trivial tasks, and one of the reasons she fed Lestat her own blood was to power him up to kill ancient vampires for her).

This goes well beyond what vampires only a few centuries old could do (though by drinking ancient vampire blood they could become much stronger and gain powers unknown to most of their peers). Relatively young vampires were closer to what people think of as vampires.

I'll not spoil the ending with the twins, but what happens to Akasha is poetic karma heralding back to the evil deeds of Akasha while she was still a mortal woman. The ending in the movie lacks this ending (though it roughly mirrors it, very darkly and dimly). And just skipping to the end in the book wouldn't reveal it (at least it wouldn't make much sense) without reading other parts like how Akasha, as a mortal queen, had the village of the twins destroyed in the books.

I doubt a visual medium (beyond comic as long as the book) could do justice to it, but if it could then it would have to be a series with multiple seasons, not just a lone movie.



As a final note, I'm not that familiar with Stargate. I think I do recall a pharaoh God-King that used advanced technology. If what I remember of Stargate is right then Akasha was worse, a creature similar to Superman power wise who intended to create a tyrannical theocracy (and did pull off some massacres early on of both vampires and humans) which would include killing off 90% of the males (down to the infants) with herself as a supreme goddess. And not even the vampires almost as old as Akasha could stop it (at least not without destroying themselves in the process). So, all in all it sounds worse.

 

[Anyanka Bunny Slayer]

I'll not spoil the ending with the twins, but what happens to Akasha is poetic karma heralding back to the evil deeds of Akasha while she was still a mortal woman. The ending in the movie lacks this ending (though it roughly mirrors it, very darkly and dimly).

What happened to Akasha was brutal, and she definitely deserved it.

Also, the way she was portrayed in the movie reminds me so much of Illyria. Her manner of speaking, the arrogance...and the sheer contempt she had for 99% of those she encountered.

Akasha had Lestat, and Illyria had Wesley.

 

[Anyanka Bunny Slayer]

"At her core, Akasha is extremely nihilistic, believing only she is capable of correcting what is wrong in the world." — Maharet

The very same thing could be said of Illyria.