Immortalis and the Clock Filled Rooms That Measure More Than Time
In the perpetual dusk of Morrigan Deep, where the suns hang eternally on the horizon and time refuses to march in any sensible order, the asylum of Corax stands as a monument to measured madness. Its corridors, its chambers, even the very air one breathes there, hum with the relentless ticking of clocks. Not one clock, mind you, but hundreds, thousands perhaps, each set to its own discordant rhythm, chiming at intervals that defy logic or mercy. They are not mere instruments for telling the hour. They measure something far more profound, something intrinsic to the Immortalis condition itself: the slow erosion of sanity, the weight of eternity, the primal pulse beneath civilised veneer.
Consider Nicolas DeSilva, the asylum’s proprietor, an Immortalis whose appetites exceed even those of his fractured brother Theaten. Nicolas surrounds himself with these timepieces as others might hoard gold or flesh. In his chambers, candles flicker beside clocks that whisper different truths; in the halls, they clatter like the bones of the damned. He tinkers with pocket watches, complains of their inaccuracies, yet ensures none agree on the present moment. Why? Because for an entity like Nicolas, who exists split between Vero restraint and Evro savagery, time is not a line but a cage. The clocks remind him, and his inmates, that escape is illusion. Every tick counts the seconds until the next indulgence, the next torment, the next fleeting merger of his divided self.
The Rationum, that inscrutable ledger of Irkalla, inscribed Theaten as the first Immortalis, a being of unnatural hungers. Blood, flesh, carnality, all amplified beyond vampire excess. Primus, foreseeing unrest, sundered him into Vero and Evro, true self and beast. Yet the clocks of Corax suggest this division never fully holds. They chime asynchronously, overlapping in cacophony, much as Nicolas’s personas bleed into one another. Webster, the rational shadow in the glass, designs horrors like the Nerve Harp or Void Capacitor Chair, calibrated to exact agonies. Demize, the rotting head on the gramophone, mocks from the periphery. Chester, the Long-Faced Demon, emerges in moments of raw urge. And Nicolas? He conducts the discord, his pocket watch open like a judge’s gavel.
These rooms measure more than hours. They quantify suffering. Inmates strapped to gurneys hear the relentless cadence as straps tighten, oxygen fades. Mirrors reflect distorted selves amid the din, amplifying isolation. The washrooms above spew sewage to the rhythm of dripping faucets, wounds festering in time with the pulse. Nicolas crawls cell to cell, complaining of levitating chairs or floating hats, his horological mastery a cruel jest. Clocks stop on command, chime in unison to drown screams, resume as he passes like obedient sentinels. They mark the intervals between his petty tortures, the moons of debauchery traded for Irkallan favour.
Yet the Immortalis endures beyond such petty metrics. Primus crafted them eternal, appetites unquenched by sundered suns. The clocks of Corax, then, serve as both prison and sacrament, binding the fractured soul to its endless now. Nicolas, gorging on tribute or plotting sovereignty, hears them always. They whisper of mergers that heal and sunder, of Vero civility cracking under Evro howl. In their clamor lies the truth of Immortalis: time does not pass. It devours.
Immortalis Book One August 2026