Do Not Pick Up Immortalis If You Want Predictable Storytelling
Expectations in fiction serve as scaffolding, structures upon which narratives are meant to climb toward resolution. Readers arrive with assumptions, drawn from genre conventions or prior tales: heroes triumph, villains fall, love redeems, power corrupts in tidy arcs. Immortalis dismantles such comforts with methodical precision, its world a labyrinth where every apparent path loops back into subversion. This is no accident of plotting, but the deliberate architecture of a tale that thrives on betrayal, where the Ledger itself, inscribed in Hell’s second circle, narrates not truth but the illusion of it.
Consider the opening disruptions in Khepriarth and Sapari, where hats laced with plague fleas and magnetic anchors disguised as gifts shatter communities in hours. No noble quest follows; instead, lords bury the living with the dead, and chaos begets further chaos, complaints cascading upward to indifferent Immortalis. Predictability would demand investigation, justice, restoration. Immortalis offers only rumour, the anonymous sender’s shadow lingering like dusk itself. The Jester, Nicolas DeSilva, embodies this ethos, his asylum a state-of-the-art crypt where cure undermines profit, insanity is declared by fiat, and patients are strapped for nocturnal convenience.
The Immoless saga exemplifies the rupture. Bred as sacrificial pawns, they arrive with Electi doctrine: raise Elena’s ghost, unseat the Immortalis. Lucia fails spectacularly in the hall of mirrors, her mediumship drowned in cacophony. Stacia tears apart in a tug-of-war. Allyra, the bastard anomaly, rejects the script entirely, boiling vampires for knowledge, negotiating with Hell’s king, extracting truths from the unwilling. No heroic ascent; she spies Nicolas as raven, endures his games, and turns predator herself. The Electi’s ancient tomes prove not wisdom, but recursive folly, their Immolesses dispatched to inevitable ends.
Even the Immortalis defy lineage’s logic. Primus splits Theaten into Vero and Evro to curb sadism, yet Nicolas fractures further, his personas splintering into Webster’s rationality, Chester’s primal lust, Elyas’s necromantic detachment. The Ledger, that plain-speaking guide, reveals itself not impartial chronicler but architect of the farce, its entries binding fates with sardonic finality. Love warps into possession, mercy into torment, creation into abomination. Tanis, sewn from soldiers on The Erebus, awakens not as saviour but monster; the asylum’s washrooms flood sewage from the attic, a testament to engineered ineptitude.
Immersed in Morrigan Deep’s eternal dusk, where suns hang horizon-bound and souls barter with Hell, Immortalis compels confrontation with the unreliable. Villains orchestrate from shadows, heroes unravel under scrutiny, systems designed for balance perpetuate imbalance. Predictability crumbles beneath the weight of deliberate misdirection, leaving readers adrift in a narrative that circles back, ever mocking the expectation of straight lines. Those seeking tidy conclusions, unambiguous morals, or heroes unscarred by their victories will find only the Jester’s grin, wide and unyielding, in the glass.
Immortalis Book One August 2026