How Corax Asylum in Immortalis Functions as a Kingdom Disguised as Ruin
Corax Asylum squats in Togaduine like a festering carbuncle on the skin of Morrigan Deep, its stone facade crumbling under the weight of deliberate neglect, its corridors choked with the stench of sewage and despair. To the thesapiens of the surrounding villages, it is a repository for the mad, a grim necessity administered by the erratic Doctor Nicolas DeSilva. Yet beneath this veneer of institutional decay lies a sovereign domain, absolute and impenetrable, where Nicolas wields power not as physician but as unchallenged monarch. The asylum is no mere prison or hospital; it is a kingdom engineered for one purpose: the sadistic dominion of its lord.
Its architecture alone betrays the truth. Nicolas enforces a labyrinthine design of shifting secret passages and hidden rooms, constructed in layers by rotating bands of builders who never grasp the full plan. Only he navigates its bowels with certainty, emerging unpredictably from walls or mirrors to assert control. The ground floor hoards his private banqueting suite and library, forbidden to all but him, while the east wing cells cram inmates together for calculated discomfort. Dungeons below offer beds equipped with straps and handcuffs, surgical racks gleaming with rust, and corridors lined with clanging clocks and reflective glass that distort reality into perpetual disorientation. Upstairs, torture chambers house bespoke horrors: the iron maiden, brazen bull, hall of mirrors. Even the washrooms spew sewage from open walls, a deliberate cruelty masked as hygiene.
This is no accident of mismanagement. Nicolas acquired his medical license through Irkalla barter, trading ravaged tributes for the authority to declare anyone insane and cage them indefinitely. Once imprisoned, he breaks them methodically, proving his diagnosis through inflicted madness. Thesapiens, vampires, tribute stock, all feed his appetites for blood, flesh, and violation. Red-haired women, his favourite, receive special attention in the west cells. Dead inmates go to Irkalla, sustaining Behmor’s bureaucracy or purgatory. The living endure petty tortures: speeches in the meeting hall, electric surges, underfloor burns. Nicolas revels in the chaos, his hygiene pristine in attached chambers, the rest a mire of filth he savours.
Corax operates as a feudal realm under Nicolas’s iron rule. He is king, judge, executioner, architect of suffering. Its isolation in Togaduine ensures autonomy, its secrets deny invasion. Rumours of madness repel outsiders, while the Thesapien Medical Board rubber-stamps his abuses. Trade with Irkalla cements legitimacy, souls flowing one way, authority the other. Inmates are subjects, bound by his whim; tributes, livestock for his table and bed. Even ghouls like Chives serve at his caprice, renamed and decaying.
Yet the disguise holds. Villages whisper of the lunatic doctor, not the tyrant enthroned in gore. Nicolas’s theatrics—levitating chairs, pocketwatch tinkering, raven flights—sustain the illusion. Corax endures as ruin to the world, kingdom to its master, a grotesque sovereignty where control is absolute, suffering eternal, and Nicolas reigns unchallenged amid the mirrors and the mire.
Immortalis Book One August 2026