Immortalis and the Banquet Hall of Flies That Reveals Excess and Decay

The banqueting suite at Corax Asylum stands as a singular monument to isolation amid the ceaseless rot of Nicolas DeSilva’s domain. Tucked into the west wing, adjacent to his private chambers, it serves no communal purpose. No inmate crosses its threshold, no ghoul disturbs its silence. Only Nicolas enters, and even he uses it sparingly, reserving it for solitary indulgences or the occasional pointless address to the damned. The room gleams with a veneer of opulence: polished oak tables, crystal decanters, silver cutlery arranged in mocking precision. Yet this perfection curdles into excess, a sterile excess that mocks the asylum’s pervasive decay.

Flies gather here first. They emerge from the crevices where the asylum’s filth seeps through, drawn to the faint rot that clings to every surface despite Nicolas’s fastidious hygiene in his own spaces. The banqueting hall becomes their nursery, a buzzing congregation amid the unused finery. One imagines them alighting on the untouched platters, tracing the edges of goblets where blood wine might have stained the rim had any guest been permitted. The flies do not merely infest; they reveal. They cluster where the pretence of grandeur meets the truth of abandonment, their wings a droning indictment of the hall’s purpose: not sustenance, but spectacle for a solitary god.

This excess speaks to the Immortalis condition at its core. Nicolas, fractured into Vero and Evro, Vero and Chester, embodies appetite without limit. The suite, forbidden to all but him, mirrors his primal isolation. Theatens castle hosts refined dinners with Anne and Tepes, a ritual of shared savagery under candlelight. Kane devours in the forest’s primal dark, his cabin a butcher’s den of bone and wire. But Nicolas? His banqueting hall lies fallow, a temple to what he denies himself: connection. The flies thrive in this void, feasting on the scraps of indulgence he withholds, their presence a sardonic commentary on the decay beneath his control.

Consider the ledger of Corax. Inmates strapped to gurneys, cells reeking of sewage, torture chambers humming with Websters contraptions. The banqueting suite floats above this mire, pristine yet tainted. Flies bridge the gap, slipping from the east wings soiled wheelchairs to the west wings empty tables. They symbolise the entropy Nicolas cannot contain. His dominion over the damned is absolute, yet the asylum erodes. Straps fray, clocks desynchronise, mirrors crack under his tantrums. The hall of flies lays bare this truth: excess begets neglect, and neglect invites rot.

In the broader tapestry of Morrigan Deep, such halls recur as microcosms of Immortalis rule. Primus banqueted in the void’s light before creating Lilith, only to fracture under her ambition. Liliths cult feasts in Neferatens sands, her ziggurats choked by aardvark pits and mutant ants. Even Irkallas circles, from Mortraxiss purgatorial slop to the Anubiums mirrored gaze, hum with the buzz of unspent hunger. Nicolas’s suite, with its flies, distils this pattern. It reveals the banquet not as communion, but as the prelude to isolation, where appetite devours the host.

Yet Nicolas persists. He dances through the swarm, cane in hand, declaring the flies marginalised souls deserving legs. Absurdity shields him from the decay they herald. The Immortalis endures not through denial of rot, but through its embrace. The banquet hall stands, flies and all, a testament to excess that consumes itself, leaving only the lord amid the remnants.

Immortalis Book One August 2026