Allyra Cavidini forms a genuine attachment to Nicolas DeSilva even though he remains thoroughly monstrous in his violence, manipulation, narcissism, sexual excess, possessiveness, and capacity to irritate. Many readers of Immortalis focus on whether his feelings for her are real, yet an equally sharp question is what draws her to him. The bond does not rest on any hope that she might alter him, on any failure to see his cruelty, or on the idea that a better man hides underneath. Instead she responds to what he alone supplies.
Sexual compatibility supplies one of those elements. Nicolas occupies 216 separate bodies, and Allyra holds a clear preference for male physical form. The resulting group of Nicolai leaves her with abundant partners. The attraction runs both ways. She is not limited to receiving his demands; she possesses her own appetites, among them a liking for certain of his less ordinary practices. Being whipped by him is something she actively enjoys. What an observer might find appalling can, in the right setting, become an experience she seeks. Their physical relationship follows no ordinary pattern and is not meant to.
He can also amuse her, though seldom when his arrogance, insults, and excessive demands land on her directly. Once he directs the same qualities at another person, the effect often strikes her as comic. His exaggerated sense of his own importance, his twisted reasoning, and his total blindness to his own foolishness become entertaining under those conditions. There are moments when she does not wish for better conduct from him. She simply prefers that the irritation fall on someone else.
His attention further fills a gap left by others. For much of her life Allyra has been surrounded by people who carry plans for her, hold expectations of her, or take interest in what she stands for. Nicolas stands apart because he wants Allyra herself. He does not limit his interest to the Immoless, the anomaly, or the tool of another person’s designs. He wants the individual who answers with defiance, sarcasm, and stubborn independence. The resulting presence is frequently overwhelming and difficult to breathe under, yet it remains steady. Whenever she requires him, one version of Nicolas tends to be close at hand. That reliability takes on real weight for her.
The arrangement also echoes the dark romance she already knew from books. She dotes on Fanu’s Molluscs and Boners, a set of thoroughly trashy novels in the genre. Nicolas acts as if he has taken the whole tradition as a set of instructions. The main Nicolai each play a distinct part drawn from those pages: the pirate, the scientist, the obsessive lover, the dangerous aristocrat, the adventurer, the protector, and further versions of the same man. He does not stop at resembling the fictional figures she once read. He places an entire collection of them around her and floods her world with himself.
The Nicolai further distinguish themselves by treating her as someone who can learn. The Electi raised her, directed her, and shaped her toward a fixed purpose; they never regarded her as a person with her own potential. The Nicolai do. They instruct her in seamanship, survival, combat, and other practical abilities. Each adds knowledge she would otherwise lack. They also mock her, laugh at her errors, and make the lessons more disagreeable than required, yet the teaching continues. They press her because they judge her capable of meeting the pressure. Where the Electi saw only a role to fill, the Nicolai see someone worth the effort of training. Their approach is monstrous, but the belief in her ability is not feigned.
Nicolas also creates a family for her, however misshapen. Corax Asylum offers no model of ordinary domestic life. Still, the structure gives her connections she has not previously known. Behmor stands as her stepson and as King of Irkalla. Vlad and Absolem are her sons, brought up inside the Chronocell; she first meets them as adults, and the maternal response arrives at once. Absolem later makes her a grandmother. Her granddaughter Bebhuna is a monstrous infant whom Allyra at first finds hard to grasp or accept. With the aid of Nicolas’s serum she reaches a point of acceptance. The whole arrangement remains far from conventional, yet the ties become emotionally significant to her.
Rest itself turns into something he can grant. Nicolas stays almost constantly in motion. His thoughts race and remaining still runs against his usual state. When Allyra reaches complete exhaustion she asks him to place her under a mesmer that will give her deep sleep. He complies, and he permits the sleep to continue well beyond the length she asked for. For a figure who is restless, demanding, and fiercely possessive, the choice carries weight. He seeks her attention without pause, yet in that instance he allows the recovery she needs. It counts as a quieter sign of the attachment.
Protection appears in a more violent form. When Theaten moves to drain Allyra’s blood, Nicolas responds with genuine fury. The reaction is not staged. He refuses to accept threats from others against the person he regards as his beloved. The contradiction sits in plain view: he can inflict extreme cruelty on her himself, yet he also defends her with intensity. Both the defence and the cruelty are authentic; neither removes the other. Allyra comes to experience a measure of safety under that defence, not because Nicolas poses no danger, but because the world around him can prove still more hazardous in his absence.
The 216 Nicolai do not function as identical copies. They represent separate expressions of the same man, each carrying its own interests, skills, temperaments, and manner of relating to her. One teaches, another amuses, another protects, another challenges, and others offer company, intellectual exchange, or physical closeness. Together they open a broad range of experiences. Allyra does not fix her attachment on one side of Nicolas. She fixes it on the full and contradictory combination, and that choice becomes both the force of the bond and its clearest point of weakness.
The cost of the bond shows itself most sharply when she departs. After Nicolas attempts to paralyse her with the spine cracker, she seeks support from the Nicolai. She does not recognise that this move also belongs to his design. He then removes everything: his own presence, the Nicolai, the family, and the web of relationships he has formed around her. The woman who had been nearly overwhelmed by him suddenly confronts an existence in which no one wants her company. The isolation becomes intolerable. She withdraws to the Lost Tower, drugs herself, and starts to hallucinate the Nicolai she no longer has. Months go by. Nicolas later returns in the disguise of a beggar. Allyra fails to recognise him. She tells the apparent stranger that she wants Nicolas back at any cost. He has spent so long rendering himself essential that his removal proves crushing. Because he arranged the sequence, her admission is at once a real expression of feeling and the product of calculated manipulation. The feelings exist. So does the trap.
Love and monstrosity can occupy the same space. Nicolas seeks to marry her, protect her, amuse her, possess her, and hold her beside him without end. Allyra takes pleasure in his company, desires him, laughs at his absurdities, values the instruction the Nicolai give her, and grows attached to the family they assemble. At the same time he manipulates her, frightens her, harms her, and steadily constructs conditions that make life without him harder to endure. Her love does not render his conduct acceptable, and his cruelty does not render the love false. The two stand together, which is what makes the relationship unsettling.
When the chance of losing her persists, Nicolas answers by rebuilding her from himself. After fifteen centuries spent among versions of his own mind, he encounters someone separate from him whom he loves. He then folds her into that mind so she cannot depart. The step amounts to an extreme expression of devotion, possession, and obsession. It is also monstrous.
He irritates her. She drives him to distraction. They leave each other laughing, furious, jealous, excited, and at times miserable. Neither can picture a life in which the other is absent. In Immortalis that fact is not offered as a happy ending. It remains a horror story.
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