Control is the beating heart of Immortalis, a relentless pulse that courses through every vein of its world, every fracture in its characters, every contract etched into the Rationum. If you seek tales where power yields to tenderness, where dominance dissolves into mutual surrender, where the architecture of possession crumbles under the weight of free will, then turn away now. This is no romance veiled in shadow. It is a study in subjugation, a ledger of leverage, where love and ownership twist into the same barbed wire.
The Deep itself is a feudal machine, bartering souls and flesh under the eternal dusk Primus imposed to redress Lilith’s ambitions. Vampires hunt thesapiens, mobs retaliate, and Irkalla looms as the ultimate enforcer, its six circles a bureaucracy of torment where contracts bind tighter than chains. The Ledger, inscribed in the Anubium, does not merely record; it classifies, it commands. Immortalis like Theaten and Nicolas exist as dualities, Vero and Evro, true self split from primal urge, merging only by rare permission. Even gods fracture under the need to dominate.
Nicolas DeSilva embodies this most acutely. His Corax Asylum is no mere prison but a labyrinth of engineered despair, cells strapped with beds for his nocturnal whims, corridors lined with mirrors and clanging clocks to erode sanity. He declares insanity with the casual authority of a doctor licensed by Irkalla’s bargain, trading ravaged tributes for the right to cage the world. Chives, his decaying ghoul, hobbles through the filth, preparing corpses while Nicolas dances to his own screeching violin, a jester whose jests end in flayed flesh. Control is his breath; without it, he rots like his servants.
Relationships in Immortalis are contracts in disguise. Theaten’s refined banquets with Anne and Tepes mask the savagery of tribute carving, silver daggers drawing blood for crystal glasses. Lilith’s cult demands sacrifices every harvest, Owuo anointing virgins for the stake while Kufia rides backward on white mares. Even the Immoless, bred by the Electi’s futile pact with Irkalla, exist as weapons to unbalance Immortalis power, dispatched every century only to meet grisly ends. Allyra, the bastard third, boils vampires for secrets, her Baers guarding her against the very gods she hunts. Yet every bond frays under possession’s weight: Nicolas spies on her through ravens, Theaten wagers her like a chariot, Behmor trades her soul for mirrors.
The Ledger enforces this hierarchy with cold precision. Vero and Evro must accord to prevent civil war within the self; debts bind even gods. Primus split Theaten to curb his sadism, yet the fracture persists across all Immortalis, a reminder that appetite exceeds restraint. Contracts seal fates: Nicolas’s medical license lets him cage the sane, the Electi’s breeding yields doomed priestesses. Wishes from Ibliss twist literally, love from Kyrie becomes obsession until Nicolas claims her child and her death. Even the Ad Sex Speculum watches ceaselessly, six mirrors in Irkalla’s Anubium ensuring no Immortalis escapes governance.
Control manifests in the intimate cruelties too. Nicolas’s hall of mirrors warps reality, his Nerve Harp plucks agony from nerves, his gurneys crush breath from lungs. He lets Lucia escape only to hunt her through labyrinths, whispering “run rabbit” as blisters split her feet. Theaten’s dungeon holds Calista in thrall, wedding vows a cord of three knots unbreakable save by Irkalla. Allyra endures Theaten’s drain, waking chained in Tepes’s crypt, her sovereignty stolen until Nicolas intervenes—not from mercy, but claim. Love here is leverage, intimacy invasion, every touch a tether.
If such dynamics repel you, Immortalis offers no respite. Its world is a clockwork of coercion, where freedom is illusion and power the only currency. Theaters of torment, banquets of blood, mirrors that betray—these are not flourishes but foundations. Nicolas’s grin amid the screams, Lilith’s cult feasting on virgins, the Ledger’s unyielding ink: all proclaim the same truth. To enter Immortalis is to surrender the self, body and soul, to the inexorable machinery of control. Proceed if you dare; otherwise, seek solace elsewhere.
Immortalis Book One August 2026