Immortalis and the Croquet Grounds That Reveal Structured Absurdity
In the perpetual dusk of Morrigan Deep, where the two suns cling to the horizon like reluctant witnesses, the Immortalis world unfolds as a grand, grotesque pageant. Games abound, each a meticulously rigged affair that lays bare the absurdity woven into its very fabric. Croquet, that genteel pastime of mallets and hoops, serves as the perfect emblem for this structured lunacy. Picture the manicured lawns of Khepriarth or the barren stretches near Corax Asylum, transformed not into fields of leisure but arenas of existential farce. Here, the Immortalis do not play for sport; they orchestrate rituals that mock the very notion of fairness, control, and consequence.
Consider the croquet grounds not as literal turf but as metaphor for the hunts and spectacles that define Immortalis dominion. Nicolas DeSilva, the fractured maestro of Corax, embodies this most vividly. His “Run Rabbit” is croquet writ large: tributes as balls, Immortalis as mallets, the asylum’s labyrinthine corridors as the pitch. The rules are simple, the outcome predetermined. A rabbit scurries, hopeful, only to find every hoop a noose. The structure promises chance, but the design ensures capture. Absurdity thrives in the gap between the game’s pretence of equity and the brutal inevitability of the strike.
This is no accident. The Immortalis, born of Primus’s void-born ambition, inherit a cosmology predicated on imbalance. Primus split Theaten into Vero and Evro to temper primal excess, yet the fracture only amplified the chaos. Irkalla’s circles, The Ledger’s inscriptions, the Ad Sex Speculum’s gaze, all impose order on a realm where souls rip from darkness and light, vampires hunt thesapiens, and Lilith’s cults fester in the sands. Croquet grounds, then, are the Deep distilled: hoops of bone and wire, mallets of flesh, balls that scream as they roll.
Nicolas elevates this to high art. His theatre at Corax, born of a whim amid Lucia’s screams, stages “The Thorn and His Rose,” where lovers carve each other into oblivion. Valkyrie and Dyerbolique, serial artisans, dissect siblings and fathers under spotlights, their cubist carnage applauded by thesapiens too drugged to flee. The structure is impeccable: pledge, turn, prestige. Yet the prestige fails, bodies refuse reassembly, and the audience cheers anyway. Structured absurdity at its pinnacle, where the game’s form endures even as meaning dissolves.
Even the hunts in Varjoleto Forest parody croquet’s precision. Kane’s machete arcs like a mallet swing, tributes as balls tumbling through traps of wire and thorn. Allyra, the anomalous Immoless, navigates this pitch, her trials a croquet match against primal forces. She strikes true, boars captured alive, vampires felled with efficiency. But the hoop is Kane’s wrist, the prize his blood, freely given only after she proves equal in savagery. The Immortalis game admits no amateurs; every player must master the absurdity or become the ball.
The Ledger, that inscrutable scribe, records it all, its entries a scorecard of hoops passed and lives struck. Primus’s darkness birthed this ledger of fates, where Lilith’s cults breed in Neferaten’s sands, and Nicolas’s Corax festers with clocks and mirrors. Croquet grounds reveal the truth: the Immortalis world is a perpetual match, mallets wielded by fractured gods, balls forever rolling toward inescapable nets. Play on, if you dare, but know the absurdity is the point. The structure endures, the players change, and the game, eternal, claims all.
Immortalis Book One August 2026