that boy was onto something i fear

The Vampire Armand, Anne Rice, 1998. p. 389

First half of the first chapter of an early version of The Vampire Armand from the Anne Rice collection at Tulane University.

Second half to follow via reblog.

@thecactifindahome has posted the earliest chapters of this draft (link, and/or search Tulane University), and then I had the next box which continued here. Here are Parts 1, 2, and 3 of a large early draft of The Vampire Armand!

Part 1: Download Link

Part 2: Download Link

Part 3: Download Link

Here are the earlier chapters:

Chapter 1: Download Link

Chapter 2: Download Link

Chapter 3: Download Link

Chapter 4: Download Link

Chapter 5: Download Link

Chapter 6: Download Link

Chapter 7: Download Link

the thing about armand in tva is we know from the start exactly when he dictating this book to david and why. he's doing it for benji and sybelle - the latter in particular, so much so he says david should title it 'song for sybelle'. he has no real idea of it being published beyond that, and the epilogue is specifically written at a later time, so the hopeful tone he has about 'his kids' (sybelle is literally a grown woman, but whatever that's how he thinks of her) throughout the book can be contrasted with his horrified reaction to their fates at the close.

we know he's telling the version of his past he wants benji and sybelle to know. the point is so they can know how much meeting them meant to him, not to necessarily give them a comprehensive view of his life. i mean he spends almost the whole book on a couple years of his life despite being centuries old. and if you compare it to marius's account of their time in venice in blood and gold, armand is purposefully leaving out how unhappy he was at times during that period. to be clear, i definitely don't think marius is a more trustworthy source than armand, but i also don't think he has a reason to lie, because marius often comes off worse in his version of events and in many of the events described he was able to read armand's mind. in tva armand spends little time on how his loss of memories impacted his day to day life, but marius spends a lot of time talking about the distress this caused armand and how it made him physically ill. armand paints marius as turning him only to save his life, but marius is very explicit about the fact he decided to turn armand the day they met and he was just waiting until armand had matured some (which, fwiw is more in line with what others like louis said in previous books when recounting what armand told them of his past). he doesn't share how he was initially distraught after being turned and unable to confide in bianca, nor does he spend time describing how he secretly told her about vampires and marius's true nature. he doesn't recount at all a rift forming between he and marius after they visited armand's homeland (though this one i am possibly more inclined to believe might be marius exaggerating, because he can no longer read armand's mind, and i can imagine marius possibly growing more distant from armand in a way he might not register). nevertheless, armand confesses he hated marius at times as the centuries passed, but generally paints a much more harmonious picture of his life in marius's household than marius does. part of this i do think is armand selectively remembering to shield himself from the horror of what he lived through, but part of it i do think is that these events simply don't serve the narrative he's crafting for benji and sybelle. he wants benji and sybelle to know he was an outsider and had conflicted religious feelings, he doesn't really spend as much time talking about how much he missed his father. he talks about the horrors of living through the children of satan's onslaught, but doesn't talk about how the night before he and marius were having another argument about turning bianca into a vampire, because armand couldn't bear the thought of her dying and hated deceiving her. his shifting feelings on the idea of fledglings don't factor into what he's trying to tell two of them, because the thought they'd ever need to think about taking the dark gift doesn't occur to him.

he actually highlights how benji and sybelle enjoy the riches and mortal luxuries he gives them unlike daniel, but they've only been together a few weeks. daniel and armand were together for a decade. it's not really a reasonable comparison. but he wants this to be a happy ending, telling benji and sybelle why their lives with him are different and special. their love is different from any other love he's had and that's why their bond is unbreakable. armand quite literally tried to kill himself a few weeks ago, i just cannot buy that his life has totally turned around like he describes.

his happiness reeks of mania to me - he's made benji and sybelle his new reasons for living so he has a reason why it was good his attempted suicide failed. he emphasizes how much they love him and vice versa to let them know how appreciative he is. he even says sybelle is the first mortal to say 'i love you' to him, even though we know from the devil's minion daniel said it to him (and presumably more than once, given it's said as part of a summary of things daniel would often say during arguments). but that relationship has soured. so that love doesn't count. he is similarly bitter and petty when describes his relationship with louis, who we know he passionately loved. he's just not in a space where he feels good about any of his past great loves. he gives them both like, a few pages in the tome of his life - even though he and louis spent a lifetime together and he let his entire coven be destroyed and committed horrors so they could run away together. even though he broke a vow he clung to centuries purely for the love of daniel and told him he wouldn't have cared about about the apocalypse a few years ago, but now he felt differently because he had daniel. i don't think that slim page count or his catty insults means they weren't actually central figures in his life. the basic facts of what he did for them contradicts that. rather, to me it indicates the hurt is still very raw and he doesn't want to get into it and think about the ways he's still upset about what happened when this is a song for sybelle, an ode how parental love fixed his heart. not about how he's still smarting. even with lestat, who he is the most tender with as he desperately misses him, he still can't help but be snarky and reference to how lestat always spurned him. he alludes to the fact he has hated marius, but spares benji and sybelle the details because to much would interfere with the idyllic 'before' he wants venice to be, and after all they know marius at this time and have already started staying with him at the time david has him start this project. they don't need to get into that.

none of the narrators in tvc are without agenda and biases - that's part of the fun! but i do think it's notable that armand's in particular is given this very specific framing in a way most of the books aren't, and i do think that's done to contrast his tone of voice when he's telling the story to his mortal kids of how they saved him from his suicidal despair vs the resignation that he has in the epilogue when he realizes he's lost the life he'd just spent the last several hundred pages hyping as his drive into the sunset moment.

Most of them are probably apparent but the code names to characters in the mr and mrs smith au oneshot are:

Armand - Maître (and ‘Botticelli’ to Marius), Louis - Saint, Santiago- Iago, Sybelle - Pianist, Benji - Radio Star, Allesandra - Crone.

Marius - The Roman, Lestat - Wolfkiller, Pandora - Anesidora, Bianca - Viper, and Santiago (again) - Iago.

❤️❤️❤️.

Finished tva.

1. Armand needs a few centuries worth of hugs and therapy. Buddy you're a bit bitter and more than a bit messed up. You're also a lying liar who lies. I don't even need to have read Merrick to know that this is not how Lestat woke up. Would have been cute but there is nothing you can say to convince me that happened.

2. Benji is a precious angel and I, too, would tear off the limbs of anyone who harmed him, which is why

3. I need Marius to be pushed off a very tall building. And I don't mean medieval French Tower tall but Burj Khalifa tall. Sometimes being an absolute moron needs to come at the price of excruciating pain. I get it man, your heart was in the right place, but timing?! He just got through two existential crises in under six months, couldn't give him a decade to recover? Humans don't age that fast. No, please go jump off a building, and take Santino with you while you're at it.

Okay so I've been trying to put together for myself how I think Armand in canon views Marius and obviously there's no one right answer but here's a collection of quotes from IWTV to TVA that I view as representative.

Obviously a lot changes from IWTV to Everything Else but still, our first introduction to the concept of Marius is as him representing a maker who loved their child dearly (and vice versa), and of Armand still desperately missing Venice:

His own recollection of meeting and then losing Marius has nothing but feeling love and safety with him and then immense loss after:

He goes so far as to tell Lestat that the real world is the one where Marius lived:

In TVA, after his entire backstory has been recalled, this is how he chooses to finally talk about Marius:

After talking through everything that happened, even after Venice, his fear of Marius is only that Marius won't feel "passion" for him.

In fact, he otherwise seems to view Marius as a good example of both providing for mortals:

And as a sire, comparing himself negatively to his maker:

The last we hear of Marius in TVA, despite their fight over Benji & Sybelle, is this:

By all accounts across the books, even after everything, Armand loves Marius, views him as overall a good father and maker, misses their time in Venice, and hopes Marius can still feel passion for him.

That doesn't mean there isn't fighting or distance between them, as seen above! Armand describes it as being like a glacier between them, and theres plenty of resentment and regret to go around. This is still TVC, it'd be shocking if there was't - but overwhelmingly the final impression is of love.

(At least, to me.)

IWTV S2 Ep4 Musings - Armand's Backstory (Spoilers)

AMC IS PULLING ZERO PUNCHES!

Lestat's shady smirk, GOD, go away.

Inquiring minds want to know! Cuz I don't trust you yet!

OH GOD!?!!

BEARDED Marius, wtf?

WAIT. So 20 y/o Armand was offered as the donation/payment for the painting!? 😱 (NGL, AMC, y'all couldn't find a better matching painting? That don't look at thing like him.)

AMC SAID EFF MARIUS, OMG. 💀

But yeah, that kinda tracks with the book--Marius pushed Amadeo into sexcapades he really didn't want to join. This seems way skeevier though.

book!Armand was around 15 when Marius bought him, so that tracks. Arun, meaning "tawny/reddish/red-headed" in Sanskrit -- AMC thinks they're HILARIOUS!!!! That's why they gave him reddish/orange eyes--I see you!

OK, so they kept the sex slave background intact, but what about the religious zealot icon-painter childhood? Was he Hindu? Muslim? (I assume Muslim?)

TVA spinoff WHENNNNNNN?

Ok, so they're taking out Armand's boyfriend Lord Harlech poisoning him. Armand was 27 when he was turned--WOW. book!Armand was 17! So he lived with Marius for 12 years--that's A LOT longer than in the books. 👀 How was Marius able to hide his vampirism from him that long without Amadeo taking an axe to his door? 😅

I wanna see Santino & Alessandraaaaa.

I wanna see Marius on fiiiiiiiiire. (He'll be fine. 😅)

I HATE this change--PLEASE stop associating Magnus with the Children of Satan/Darkness. He legit had nothing to do with any of them, omfg.

I hope that was Sam's nerd fanboy rejecting that bit of the story.

Unfortunately, Coven Master pretty much becomes part of Armand's identity in the books. He's the boogeyman of the younger fledglings, and Lestat's left hand in the Prince Lestat trilogy, basically. :\

My question is: did Marius actually kick him out of the villa when Amadeo turned 17/18? At that age you were a full adult in Venice--Amadeo would've been treated like the other boys Marius sponsored; given money and a job/position somewhere--Marius offered Amadeo way more though, ofc, as his favorite. So did Armand have a career before he was turned? What was he doing from 17-27? Unfortunately, I assume not much. Cuz Armand seems to have nothing he's been living for or aspiring to.

AMC, I DEMAND a full season with Armand & Marius & Bianca & Santino & the CoD/S and Benji & Sybelle.

Unhinged Sybelle and Benji tangent (cw references to abuse csa trauma etc)

yeah so Marius’s turning of Benji and Sybelle isn’t about whether or not that was the right decision to make and isn’t made better by their contentment living as vampires in late canon. Benji and Sybelle’s relatively happy lives as vampires are irrelevant to me. The cruelty of how he did it is made worse by the hypocritical nature of turning a kid into a vampire after so firmly insisting that turning children is morally abhorrent and smth he should’ve never done, yeah, but that’s only a small part of it.

It was so awful and upsetting to me bcus of the deliberate stripping of Armand’s agency. See, we have a whole book where Armand tells the story of how throughout his entire life and childhood he was forced into the role of submissiveness and/or dependency. whether that be his childhood religious devotion that would eventually lead to his being buried alive for God or being sold into sexual slavery or Marius’s mentorship of him that ultimately intended to teach him to stay loyal and dependent on Marius’s authority to Marius’s relationship with him sexual and otherwise to the cult indoctrination, up until Lestat comes along and tilts his own view of submission and devotion as his only way to survive and function in the world onto its head.

He gives him a theater and then he gives him Louis. Armand floats around, tries to find purpose without devotion through using Louis and Daniel as tools to understanding the modern age. The modern age to Armand is possibility and independence, things he’s never had so much access to and doesn’t know exactly how to apply to himself until the devils minion chapter when he’s like ah ok I get it, life without devotion is something I’ve always been familiar with—it’s what Marius taught me! I Am The Master now with my excessive indulgence and my Boy and my sea side paradise.

But Armand is a Void™️ with no concept of self besides a collection of concepts and experiences and people he’s been exposed to throughout his existence, so rlly he’s kind of a fraud. Internally he’s still a saint who yearns for a God to follow, he’s no Marius, and this all comes to a head in Memnoch the devil when he throws himself into the sun for Jesus etc. and so TVA Armand is mixed the fuck up, he’s lost everything he’s been building for himself, he’s like an open wound, like red and gold sand art shaken around until it’s sludges of brown.

Armand believes himself to have no coherent narrative of a life, no coherent and consistent sense of self, just a collection of unrelated sequences that he draws from to occasionally preform personhood, and at the beginning of TVA he is very much just that. No thoughts only colors and pain. But he’s trying to rebuild himself as best he can, he has these young humans who he’s caring for, and through caring Armand finds meaning.

These humans are very much reflections of himself, or who he used to be, and seeing a personhood reflected back at him through these two gives him insight into his own value as an individual, as someone who is inherently worthy of having a life. So with Benji and Sybelle he tries to rebuild his own sense of personhood by giving them what he would want in there place. The conclusion he reaches at the end of his story to David is that after everything ultimately he is learning and rebuilding, gaining fulfillment and individuality he’s never had before through his empathy and care for these two people in his life. Benji and Sybelle are representative of Armand’s healing process!!! They mirror him bcus they are him!! He’s literally nurturing his inner child!! And with that there comes self care and self love etc etc. but then the book doesn’t end!!

Then after all that trauma and all that healing everything that Armand was tenderly attempting to build for his new life is stripped away ! When Marius turns Benji and Sybelle it doesn’t matttttter that they like being vampires. What matters is that when Armand finally gained agency and individuality Marius decided to take that from him! Marius decided that he actually knew better then Armand, and if Armand would just allow him to do what’s best for him then everything would be so much better and so much easier. And when Armand starts sobbing and screaming and fighting him that’s just justification to Marius that Armand isn’t capable of independence or self sufficiency, that he’s a child throwing a tantrum who can’t make his own decisions, that he should just be dependent on Marius like he used to be and trust that other people know what’s best for him.

That’s why it’s so tragic! That’s why it’s so frustrating and so sad. Armand was on the road to healing but then Marius stormed in like the symbolic representation of his past telling him that no matter what he does or the progress he makes he’s still Armand in the catacombs, Amadeo on the red sheets, Andrei waiting to be buried alive. So I don’t really give af if ultimately Benji and Sybelle are fine! It’s great that despite being a child vampire Benji is able to function independently and contently as an adult with minimal body dysmorphia and existential dread, but you know who’s not able to do that? Armand 😭😭

hey, yesterday i was reading TVA in the best setting possible, like right next to mary madgalena's relics and an icon, it was quite the experience 🖤

So I realized that I never shared my Blood & Gold re-read thoughts due to shadow-ban issues on the old blog, thoughts under the cut! It's long!

It was interesting to read this immediately after TVA, it really highlighted Anne's talent for developing distinct voices for her characters as the two books are so different in structure and voice. Where TVA is fevered and rambling with tonnes of evocative metaphor this is logically ordered and somewhat detached. This has none of Lestat's conspiratorial chumminess interspersed with catastrophic existential crises, none of Louis' melancholy poeticism, we're just getting straight facts from Mr Marius . So Marius' voice is a bit drier than a lot of the other narrators in the chronicles but that does feel correct and it gives the book a bit of a cosier and more chill vibe than most of the other entries. It's like story time with Marius. 

It's interesting that this one isn't framed as a book being written for publication but as a quiet and private conversation between a lonely guy and a stranger who showed up on his door step happy to listen to him. I think that makes sense for Marius, he doesn't seem like he would publish his life story, he's too private and he would probably have been more tactful land less honest about certain things if it was for publication - less interesting for us!

You do still have to read a lot of his inner journey between the lines nonetheless. He's not really telling you how he was doing day to day after he abandoned Pandora entirely (following an argument about how to deal with the emerging cult of satan worshippers) then spent centuries in Rome pretending he wasn't dying for Avicus' (and Mael's?) company while letting partying mortals have run of his house as he painted the walls subconsciously with dozens of Pandora faces... but you can imagine, he's probably not feeling great!

It was fascinating to get more detail on how he was recruited to be keeper of the parents and to see his tense arms-length relationship with Mael play out over the years. Eudoxia is a great addition to the story as brief as her time in it is and getting his version of Armand's story is very welcome (and of course interesting to contrast with Armand's telling). Getting more Bianca was also welcome, she's such a big presence in TVA, I liked getting Marius' perspective there. 

I've got some of the same kind of complaints I had with TVA about what was left out. I guess that structuring a life story that spans millenia is no easy task and it's inevitable that some stuff is gonna get left out. Anne probably didn't want to rehash the same events form different perspectives over and over again but I really was disappointed that the narrative doesn't touch on his thoughts on his reunion with Armand in QotD, the brief Night Island coven times, how Daniel came to be in his care (???), his reaction to Armand's suicide attempt (!?), how was it that he and Santino ended up being the team on clean up duty together for that anyway (???), his reaction to learning that Armand was in fact alive(!) and his subsequent turning of Benji and Sybelle.

Marius:

And Pandora of course, I hadn't read her book at the time of reading this so I was disappointed about how little detail we get on the centuries they spent together. You can imagine his motivations for leaving a lot of this stuff out, it seems that some things are still too painful to talk about and he is also telling a specific story to a specific audience here (to influence a particular outcome, perhaps? *squints suspiciously at Marius*) so it makes sense for him to brush over or leave some things out entirely but it's not always the most satisfying result for a reader that's already invested in these characters and their stories.

The framing device with Thorne is great, I can't emphasize enough how immediately I fell in love with this guy, this stoic but sensitive viking titan of a vampire. I found the final chapter to be the most exciting really, I guess because where most of the story is Marius explaining from his perspective why he's alone (apart from Daniel who doesn't count because he's too obsessed with his model cities, sorry Daniel!), it's all a foregone conclusion where we're heading and we know what happens to most of the major characters but once we get back to Thorne's contemporary POV hey, anything can happen! And thanks to Thorne, stuff does happen! He's kind of the MVP of this book. We also get a teeny bit of Daniel in the framing chapters at the start of the book and hey, it's nice to see him alive and still sassy, if a little worse for wear.

Overall I find it a pretty enjoyable vampire chronicle. I do love the lore of Anne's vampire universe, how rich it is both with historical details and with her own world building and Marius is, of course, very key to it as guardian of the parents for millennia, so I do want to know everything about him and I'm glad this book was written to give us more of his story. His chronicle of his very lonely life, caused in no small part by his own stubbornness and terror of losing control is sad and often frustrating but I did find all of it a compelling read. He's a very strange guy and it really is fascinating to get more of his perspective, even if he doesn't quite have the zazz of a Lestat or the poetry of a Louis.

If we want to take things from drafts or notes, add Benjamin to the number of characters who have siblings they just do noooot contact after dying

(Tulane University Special Collections - Anne Rice)

so with the recent discourse, i was thinking about how, as he's presented in tvc, armand's biggest flaws as a narrator are that he tends to tell massive lies of omission or rewrite people's atttitudes/motivations (including his own) to suit his own purposes.

discussions of csa under the cut

(the only time i can recall someone being accused of inventing an event altogether is lestat claiming louis fabricated their meeting at the end of iwtv, but i digress.)

one of the biggest examples of this is how armand presents his turning in tva. as armand tells it in tva, marius was against turning him all along and he only relented when armand was at death's door. however in iwtv and tvl, louis and lestat respectively show armand telling them that marius turning armand was a pre-meditated decision.

marius in b&g takes it one step further, portraying himself as always having intended to turn armand from the time they met and having only delayed as long as he did so as to have more time to groom armand into being his vampiric 'companion'. (also noteworthy he generally portrays armand as being pretty miserable a lot of the time in venice and terribly missing his family, which is not something armand dwells on in any account.) marius does also depict armand as being seriously wounded and having to turn him right away because of this, but, as marius tells it, he and armand had literally had a conversation the night before armand was attacked where marius confirmed his intent to turn armand.

so armand's tva version where marius's hand was 'forced' is not something he arrives at by inventing events out of thin air; rather, he ignores things like a conversation the day before explicitly contradicting this narrative and ascribes to marius different motives so that it would better fit his 'vampirism is bad and only foolish humans ask for it and ignore the vampires telling them it's a bad idea' moral for sybelle and benji - which is the whole reason he's dictating tva. it seems to me that's the biggest reason his account in tva differs from what he told louis and lestat - he has an explicit moral to the story he's pushing this time. (perhaps he's also trying to present himself as having more agency than he did; he persistently asked for vampirism so marius gave in, when in fact that was marius's plan all along.)

to further emphasize his point, he explicitly compares marius turning him to his turning of daniel, and says he only gave daniel the dark gift because he had no choice and he knew all along it would spoil their love and look he was right, why won't humans ever listen 😞 (there's also an element of armand being bitter about his failed relationship and trying to act like it was always doomed from the start, instead of something that fell apart due their failure to make it work. he also talks about louis as being 'easy to abandon', despite having stayed with him for a hundred years trying to revive their marriage.)

and the kicker is that in the end, after he does all that, marius straightforwardly decides to turn benji and sybelle with no handwringing or justifications beyond possibly thinking it would be a gift to armand. armand went out of his way to rewrite marius into someone trying to save armand from himself by denying his vampirism, but that doesn't change who marius actually is. he wrote this story to try and warn people he loved not to ask for it, but the truth is it didn't matter if they wanted it or if armand wanted it, because that was never the reason for what happened. what happened was that marius decided what he wanted to happen and imposed his will onto others.

i don't think you can separate armand's backstory, or any of anne rice's work, from her pedophilia/slavery/rape apologia. the series is never going to truly acknowledge the horror of what it's depicting because anne rice didn't think it was wrong. but i do think it's interesting that within the series, it is implied that armand is intentionally rewriting his time with marius in a way that is ignoring the reality of what the situation was and downplays his pain. it is absolutely not a substitution for the text understanding and acknowledging the evils it is depicting, but it does provide some insight into armand as a narrator.

Can Armand fly? Like does he have the ~Cloud Gift~ so to speak, or does he not? I can’t remember..

And he doesn’t seem to have/use the Fire Gift too right, or am I wrong?

Armand’s powers are so interesting to me, the way he can make life like illusions like no other (at least I can’t remember an Anne Rice vampire making that kind of illusions, maybe I’m wrong) is somehow so ‘compliant’ with his character.

I remember when Daniel is about to be turned, Armand creates this illusion for him and Daniel’s description is so haunting for some reason, like he can actually smell the flowers, he can see the stars, he can pick a leaf from a tree and he even sees Armand’s damp footprints on the ground(!) Imagine being able to conjure up an illusion like that.. jeez

And he seems to have been able to do it when he was a younger vampire too, right?

Like didn’t he draw mortals who were ready to die from their homes with some kind of illusion, so he could feed on them? (That is also so compliant with his character for some reason now I think about it)

God, he really is SUCH a good character I can’t get over him. I need to have his name tattooed on my body (like Armand definitely tried to convince Daniel to do. ‘Daniel, can’t you get this tattoo of my name on your arm? I want to see how it is done :3’)

Armand does have the Cloud Gift!

The very first mention of Armand being able to fly is in MtD, where Lestat seems rather surprised to realize that he can:

The steel buttons of his [Armand's] denim jacket were icy cold, as though he had come from some far worse winter in a very few moments of time. We are never entirely sure about each other's powers. It's all a game. I would no more have asked him how he got here, or in what manner, than I would ask a mortal man how precisely he made love to his wife. ~ Lestat, MtD

Unrelated but I'm always so thirsty for any insights as to how vampires view their relationships to each other within vampiric norms, and I think it's fascinating that even two vampires who've known each other for so long and have such a complex, intertwined history as Armand and Lestat do don't really know how powerful the other is and it would be taboo to ask. Scandalous!

Thank you to @thecactifindahome for reminding me that Armand actually has known how to fly for quite a while!

By my own will, and with the first explosion of my blood in the light of the morning sun, I had been driven upwards, as high perhaps as I could go. For centuries I'd known how to climb to airy heights and how to move there, but I'd never pushed it to a conceivable limit, but with my zeal for death, I had strained with all my available strength to move Heavenward. My fall had been from the greatest height. ~ Armand, TVA

Armand also has the Fire Gift, which is first noted in PL:

“You go to New York, my friend, and Armand will burn you to cinders,” said Killer. “Oh, not Benji or Sybelle, no, and maybe not even Louis ... but Armand will do it and they won’t bat an eye. And they can do it too. They have Marius’s blood in their veins, those two. Even Louis’s powerful now, got the blood of the older ones in him. But Armand is the one who kills. There are eight million people in Manhattan and four members of the Undead. I warn you, Antoine, they won’t listen to you. They won’t care that Lestat made you. Least I don’t think they will. Hell, you won’t even have a chance to tell them. Armand will hear you coming. Then he’ll kill you on sight. You do know they have to see you to burn you up, don’t you? They can’t do it unless they can see you. But Armand will hunt you down and you won’t be able to hide.” ~ Killer to Antoine, PL

Armand has always been incredibly powerful — even a newborn vampire — which I think is due to a few different factors:

Marius ensured that Armand received plenty of his blood during his turning

Prior to making Armand, Marius hadn't created another vampire since Pandora, some 1,500 years ago so the power in his blood was very potent

Marius's blood was so powerful to begin because of the regular infusions he received from Akasha, so the vampires in his line do tend to be powerful and gifted

This accounts for Armand's early strength and Mind Gift abilities (spellbinding and illusions).

Seeing as the Cloud Gift didn't come until after QotD, I headcanon Armand received a blood power-up from Marius (or perhaps another of the old ones, similar to how Maharet offered Louis her blood). Vampire powers evolve with time/age, surviving a burning, taking the blood of a much more powerful vampire.

Age gave him the Cloud Gift, and following his suicide attempt, Armand did drink from Lestat — so the combination of the burning and Lestat's blood likely contributed to him developing the Fire Gift soon afterwards.

Armand is also telekinetic:

I have most-powerful abilities to cast spells, to dislocate my vision, and to transmit my image over distances, and to affect matter both at close range and matter which is out of sight. ~ Armand, TVA

And last but not least, he may have the power to astral project although I don't believe it's explicitly spelled out but even as a mortal, he has an out of body experience witnessing himself dying, and later on when he's recounting his suicide attempt in TVA, he says this:

That is, having fallen on the roof, burnt and in unspeakable torment, I might have sought a desperate mental escape, projecting my image and my strength into Sybelle's apartment long enough to kill her brother. It certainly is possible for spirits to exert enough pressure on matter to change it. So perhaps that is exactly what I did-project myself in spirit form and lay hands upon the substance that was Fox, and kill him.

However, he doesn't actually believe that that's what happened in this particular instance, but it's the possibility that he is, in fact, powerful enough to do so. Armand was already so unique and "different" as a mortal child and adolescent (I would call this neurodivergent but that wasn't a term in the 15th century or anytime shortly after), that it makes sense his powers would be easily amplified and exceptional in their own right.

Re: his hunting style, it's described by Lestat when they first meet as:

He [Armand] had learned to summon those who truly wished to die. He had but to stand near the dwellings of mortals and call silently to see his victim appear. Old, young, wretched, diseased, the ugly or the beautiful, it did not matter because he did not choose. Dazzling visions he gave, if they should want to receive, but he did not move towards them nor even close his arms around them. Drawn inexorably towards him, it was they who embraced him. And when their warm living flesh touched him, when he opened his lips and felt the blood spill, he knew the only surcease from misery that he could know. It seemed to him in the best of these moments that his way was profoundly spiritual, uncontaminated by the appetites and confusions that made up the world, despite the carnal rapture of the kill. In that act the spiritual and the carnal came together, and it was the spiritual, he was convinced, that survived. Holy Communion it seemed to him, the Blood of the Children of Christ serving only to bring the essence of life itself into his understanding for the split second in which death occurred. ~ Lestat, TVL

Definitely within character, I agree :') for a character that to me reads as having been passively suicidal for most of his life, there is a bittersweet irony and perhaps even a misguided sense of mercy behind it.

AND YES YOU SHOULD ABSOLUTELY GET AN ARMAND TATTOO I WANT ONE SO BAD!!! character of all time, love of my life, etc etc you guys already know!!!!!

My favorite moment from TVA might be when Marius finds out Armand is still alive, because there's just so much packed into so little space.

Marius, having clearly been in a state of grief, calling Armand son and embracing him is obviously the part that hits you over the head but then there's Armand's reaction. Armand hugging him back and being the one to initiate kissing him, Benji and Sybelle stepping away when they realize Armand is safe through that. Armand describing Marius as "so softly full of love".

So much tragedy and love and tenderness in so few words.

Marius and Armand share one of the most sincere and beautiful love stories ever written. A love that transcends all else. Marius gave Armand another chance at life, and god was Armand happy with him. So happy. He never forgets his time in Venice, both as a mortal and a new vampire. His memories of that time are so fond: "For two months I remained in New York with Sybelle and Benji, living as I've never lived before, not since those long-ago nights with Marius in Venice." (TVA pg 357)

Their story is tragic. The hurt is real. The mistakes were real. But their love of each other never extinguishes. And it is so beautiful.