Avoid Immortalis If You Prefer Clear Moral Lessons in Fiction
In the shadowed annals of Morrigan Deep, where eternal dusk clings like a lover’s grasp, one truth endures: morality is a luxury for the weak, a tidy fiction spun by those who dread the void’s honest stare. Immortalis offers no such comforts, no neat parables where virtue triumphs and vice crumbles. Instead, it lays bare a world where power devours principle, where love twists into possession, and redemption is but a fleeting illusion shattered by the next inevitable betrayal. If your tastes run to heroes who conquer darkness through unyielding righteousness, turn away now. This tale revels in the murk, where the monstrous claim kinship with the divine, and every victory tastes of ash.
Consider the Ledger, that inscrutable arbiter inscribed in Irkalla’s second circle, the Anubium. It does not judge; it records. Primus, the Darkness itself, crafts souls into thesapiens and vampires, then splits his own progeny into Vero and Evro, true self and primal shadow, not to teach balance but to perpetuate appetite. Theaten, first of the Immortalis, gorges on blood and flesh until Primus fractures him into refinement and savagery. Nicolas, bastard son of a Baer warrior, emerges from demonic tutelage in Irkalla, his psyche splintered into a chorus of selves: the jester, the surgeon, the demon Chester. No moral compass guides these beings; they are engines of excess, their hungers codified in The Rationum as sacred law.
The Deep’s structures mock any quest for clarity. Irkalla, hell’s bureaucratic heart, enforces contracts with the cold precision of a scalpel, yet its king, Behmor, shirks duty while his Evro Tanis rampages through glaciers. The Pauci Electi, those seven thesapien priests, breed Immolesses every century to challenge the Immortalis, only for their daughters to meet grotesque ends: torn asunder, boiled alive, or chained in asylums. Lucia, the second Immoless, hears echoes of Nicolas’s fractured voices in Corax’s mirrors, her mediumship drowned in screams and clockwork cacophony. Stacia, the first, becomes a tug-of-war trophy between brothers. And Allyra, the bastard third, boils vampires for secrets, only to find her rebellion co-opted by the very monster she seeks to defy.
Moral lessons demand heroes who rise above savagery, villains who fall to justice. Immortalis denies this. Nicolas declares insanity with a sneer, trading tributes for psychiatric license, his Corax a labyrinth of strap-lined beds and rusting trephines where cure is bad for business. He splits Theatens Evro, Kane, into a forest beast, then watches gleefully as lovers like Emilia and Edward are hunted for daring affection. The Darkbadb Brotherhood, Primus’s watchers, devolve into clownish voyeurs at Dokeshi Carnival, their mirrors in the Anubium tracking fractured gods. Even Lilith, consort of the First, chains her son in ambition, her cult a veil for void-bound exile.
Love fares no better. Nicolas, that eternal jester, mesmerises milkmaids and seamstresses, only to orchestrate their rake-impalements and self-sewings when rejection stings. Theaten marries Calista only to tongue her out after Anne’s calculated seduction. Chester, the demon piper, beds glassblowers and veterinarians, leaving them acid-bathed or wire-wrapped. Yet Allyra, vessel of sovereign blood, submits to the triad’s embrace, her Orochi coiling through serpentine ecstasy, even as inhibitors dull her will. Possession masquerades as passion, consent as conquest, and fidelity fractures into shared depravity.
The Immortalis world thrives on this ambiguity, where the Ledger inscribes no sermons, only appetites. Systems like the Ad Sex Speculum surveil without intervening, contracts bind without mercy, and tributes breed in futile cycles. Harlon warns of Nicolas’s cage, Behmor of his ledgers, Elyas of his mirrors, yet Allyra returns, drawn to the chaos that birthed her strength. Here, virtue does not prevail; it adapts, endures, or devours. Villains do not repent; they rationalise. Heroes do not save; they survive.
If clear moral lessons are your solace, seek elsewhere. Immortalis is a mirror to the abyss, reflecting appetites unchecked, loves unrequited, powers undivided. It demands you confront the uncomfortable: perhaps the monster is not the one who devours, but the one who watches, enthralled.
Immortalis Book One August 2026