Immortalis and the Ritual of the Immoless That Sustains the System
Every century, the Pauci Electi, those seven withered thesapiens priests clinging to their hollow authority, dispatch two girls into the eternal dusk of The Deep. Bred from demoness flesh and priestly seed, these Immolesses are their grand ritual, a desperate pantomime of resistance against the Immortalis. One for Theaten, one for Nicolas, and occasionally a spare for Behmor, though he rarely bothers with the charade. The girls, trained in some arcane gift or another, are meant to unbalance the scales, to pierce the veil of Immortalis dominance with magick or guile. It never works. It was never meant to.
The ritual endures not because it succeeds, but because it must. Without the Immolesses, the tribute system crumbles. The thesapiens villages, those wretched hives west of the Varjoleto and along Sapari’s fetid port, breed their daughters for the pyres of Theaten’s castle and Nicolas’s crypts. The Immoless ceremony is the fiction that justifies it all, the blood price paid to keep the mobs from forming pitchfork legions. The Electi whisper of ancient tomes and divine right, but their words are dust. The Ledger in the Anubium records the truth: failure after failure, century upon century, the girls arrive, they suffer, they die. The Immortalis feast, the system hums on.
Consider the ledger of such rituals. In 1436 P.V., the twins Elara and Mira, gifted with pyromancy, were sent to Corax. Nicolas welcomed them with open arms, or rather open cells. Elara burned herself trying to ignite the hall of mirrors; Mira lasted three days before the underfloor heating cooked her soles to char. The Electi mourned their loss in Sapari’s rotting shipwreck, raised a toast with tainted wine, and bred the next pair. By 1536 P.V., the pattern held firm. Stacia, the first, torn asunder in a tug between Theaten and Nicolas. Lucia, the second, boiled alive on a skillet for Theatens table. And Allyra, the third, the anomaly born of Solis’s sloppy contract with Irkalla, who dared to boil vampires and chase sovereignty herself.
Yet even Allyra, with her Baer guardians and her shuriken thirst, followed the script. She drank the bloods, merged with Orochi, swallowed Lilith whole. The Deep trembled, headlines screamed of the Orgy Gang and the serpent-god Absolem, but the ritual’s end was the same: subjugation. Nicolas chained her in immortal cuffs, declared her his by Irkalla’s ink, and paraded her before the Deep as trophy and bride. The Electi remnants scattered, their shipwreck Solis a tomb of poisoned chalices. The Darkbadb, reformed under Demize the Fifth and Primus himself, preached of Anti-Primus particles and cultish drivel from Tepes Castle. But the system? It sustained.
The Immoless ritual is the Deep’s eternal heartbeat, a farce that props the tribute mills and silences the villages. Without it, the thesapiens would remember their mobs, their pitchforks, their War Before the Dusk. The Immortalis would face real rebellion, not these perfumed girls with their failed spells. Nicolas knows this best. He who split Theaten from Kane, who forged Behmor from stolen flesh, who etched the Ledger’s rules in his own blood. He sustains the ritual because it sustains him: a century of quiet tribute flow, punctuated by the screams of two doomed challengers. Allyra was the exception, the vessel who drank the blood mosaic and birthed Absolem, yet even she ended bound, her Orochi form a glittering cage under Nicolas’s gaze.
Dear Reader, trust the plain-speaking guide who inscribed this in the Anubium. The Immoless do not threaten the Immortalis; they affirm them. Each girl dispatched is a reminder: the system endures because it must. The Ledger turns, the tributes breed, the dusk never lifts. And Nicolas, that fractured god in plaid and possession, watches it all, his pocketwatch ticking toward the next ritual, the next farce, the next perfect failure.
Immortalis Book One August 2026