How Immortalis Uses Absurdity to Conceal Brutality
In the perpetual dusk of Morrigan Deep, where the two suns cling to the horizon like reluctant witnesses, the Immortalis wield absurdity as their sharpest blade. It is not mere eccentricity, nor the froth of madness, but a deliberate veil, spun from the grotesque and the trivial to shroud the raw machinery of their dominion. Nicolas DeSilva, that towering figure in his plaid jacket and top hat, embodies this tactic with a precision that borders on genius. His asylum, Corax, stands as a monument to the principle: the clownish facade distracts from the charnel house beneath.
Consider the hats that arrived in Khepriarth, labelled gifts for gentlemen, yet insufficient in number to prevent brawls over their distribution. Chaos erupted in the town hall, where the Lord’s ‘bee test’ for true gentility ended in slaughter, the hats themselves carriers of plague-ridden fleas. Absurdity in the form of a swarm deciding manhood concealed the brutality of mass burial, wives interred alive alongside the infected. No one knew the sender, but rumours lingered, as they always do in The Deep. This was no random jest; it was a scalpel, slicing through social order to expose the fragility of thesapien pretensions.
Nicolas’s own domain amplifies the pattern. His levitating chair spins without reason, clocks chime discordant times, and he crawls on all fours complaining to inmates who neither care nor comprehend. The gramophone bears Demize’s rotting head, which spins and cackles to off-key violin screeching. One might dismiss it as lunacy, yet beneath lies calculated horror: cells with rusty scalpels and whips, gurneys for compression torture, iron maidens and brazen bulls. The absurdity of a dancing head or floating furniture normalises the screams echoing from the washrooms, where sewage sprays open wounds. Inmates wash in filth, cuts festering under Nicolas’s watchful eye, all framed as ‘corrective facilities’.
This duality extends to his hunts. In Varjoleto Forest, Kane pursues lovers like Emilia and Edward with machete and wire, Nicolas cheering from the branches. The victims are granted ‘freedom’ only to stumble into bear traps or barbed thickets, their screams harmonising with the forest’s howl. Nicolas calls it sporting, yet the outcome is inevitable: bodies dragged to the pantry, heads added to the wall. Absurdity in the theatrical release conceals the predestined slaughter, much as the bee test masked extermination.
Theaten employs a subtler variant, his castle a bastion of refinement where tributes are basted and presented on mango beds, carved with silver amid blood-wine toasts. Yet the elegance crumbles under Nicolas’s influence: Kane’s stench offends Anne, Nicolas himself mounts the meal. Nobility’s rituals of control, absurd in their pomp, veil the savagery of prolonged suffering.
Even governance bends to this principle. Irkalla’s mirrors, the Ad Sex Speculum, surveil the Immortalis ceaselessly, yet Behmor watches his own reflection more than his peers. Contracts bind souls eternally, their gravity masked by bureaucratic formality. The Ledger, inscribed in the Anubium, records all with impartial cruelty, absurdity in its plain-speaking prose concealing the chains it forges.
Absurdity disarms, lulling victims into complacency, while brutality enforces the hierarchy. The Immortalis thrive in this shadow play, their pranks and pageants the perfect camouflage for dominion absolute. In Morrigan Deep, the jester’s grin hides fangs ever ready to bite.
Immortalis Book One August 2026