Immortalis and the Banquet Scenes That Become Increasingly Excessive

In the shadowed halls of Morrigan Deep, where eternal dusk casts its pall over every gathering, the banquet stands as both ritual and revelation. These are not mere meals, but theatres of power, where the Immortalis lay bare their dominion through the slow orchestration of excess. From the refined savagery of Castle D’Aten to the grotesque indulgences of Corax Asylum, the banquet evolves, each iteration more audacious, more unyielding, until the line between sustenance and spectacle dissolves entirely.

Theaten’s table at Castle D’Aten offers the first glimpse of this controlled barbarity. Here, tribute arrives stripped, basted, and arranged upon mango slices, a living centrepiece for the Ducissa Anne and Count Tepes. The ritual is precise: Anne blesses the meal, Tepes provides the dagger for ritual incision, and Klouthe pours crystal glasses of wrist blood. Theaten slices thigh with the air of a connoisseur, discussing Immoless fates over tender flesh. The cadence is deliberate, the violence cloaked in etiquette, yet the excess is unmistakable. Red-heads are discarded for blondes at Anne’s whim, breeding programs reshaped overnight. The men of the villages oblige without protest, for the alternative is tribute status. This is banquet as governance, where appetite enforces hierarchy.

Contrast this with Nicolas at Corax, where refinement gives way to carnival. His banqueting suite, reserved solely for himself, hosts no guests but echoes with imagined company. Lucia, the second Immoless, arrives not on silver but wheeled on a skillet, her exterior crisped while her interior writhes. Nicolas sharpens his carving knife with rhythmic menace, blood dripping from his chin as six illusory selves toast her fate. Theaten receives her in buckets, a delivery of moistened remains. Excess here is not veiled; it is the point. Straps, gurneys, and underfloor heating ensure inmates burn their soles before dining, chairs levitate, and music amplifies the symphony of suffering. Nicolas trades hygiene for hygiene’s opposite, his chambers immaculate while the asylum festers.

The escalation peaks in the absurdity of International Teapot Day. Teapots boil tributes alive, judged by metrics of blister and scream. Absolem’s offspring emerge from a living womb, devouring their host as spectators applaud. Croquet hoops become naked bodies, mambas mallets, and wasps balls, the game devolving into a frenzy of stings and screams. The circus tent, repurposed for spectacle, hosts trapeze dismemberments and flea infestations, the audience drugged into compliance. Banquets transmute from noble repast to public execution, the table a stage for the Immortalis to feast on both flesh and fear.

These scenes chart the Immortalis progression from veiled cruelty to unbridled horror, each banquet a mirror to their nature. Theaten’s measured cuts belie the breeding farms that sustain him; Nicolas’s skillets expose the asylum’s core as consumption chamber. Excess is not accident but architecture, the banquet the perfect vessel for their appetites. In Morrigan Deep, to dine is to dominate, and the table grows ever bloodier.

Immortalis Book One August 2026