In the shadowed corridors of Corax Asylum, where mirrors multiply every glance into infinity and the air hums with the ceaseless discord of timepieces, one truth persists amid the madness: the clocks never agree. They tick, chime, and groan in perpetual rebellion, each insisting on its own fractured hour. This is no mere architectural quirk, no oversight in the sprawling labyrinth Nicolas DeSilva has wrought from Ducissa Elena’s former palace. It is the pulse of Immortalis existence itself, a mechanical symphony of disunity that echoes the fractured soul at its heart.
Nicolas, the Vero of his own divided self, presides over this cacophony with the devotion of a horologist turned despot. Pocket watches dangle from his chains like trophies, each wound to a different rhythm, and he tinkers with them endlessly, priding himself on mastery where chaos reigns. In his chambers, candles line the walls behind the gramophone, framing a gallery of clocks that mock consensus. During the pursuit of Lucia, the second Immoless, they halt and chime as one in a monotonous groan, only to resume their quarrelsome babel. The asylum’s corridors amplify the din, turning every step into an assault on the senses. No inmate escapes the ticking; it invades sleep, screams, and silence alike.
These clocks are not tools for measurement but instruments of torment, symbols of the Immortalis condition. Consider Nicolas’s nature: split by Primus into Vero and Evro, true self and primal urge, he embodies eternal disagreement. Webster, the rational projection in his mirrors, chides and corrects, while Demize’s rotting head cackles from the gramophone. Elyas lurks in shadowed reflections, and the Long-Faced Demon elongates his features when lust or rage overtakes. They clash within him, each voice pulling time in its direction, just as the asylum’s mechanisms diverge. The Vero seeks order, the Evro chaos; one crafts intricate tortures, the other devours without restraint. Their rare mergers yield power, but discord defines them.
This temporal anarchy mirrors the broader Immortalis paradox. Theaten and his Evro Kane represent refinement against feral instinct, yet even they fracture under pressure. Behmor governs Irkalla’s circles while Tanis rampages in glacial wastes. Primus, the progenitor, watches from the void, his own creation a testament to imbalance. The Ledger, inscribed in the Anubium, records these schisms, binding them into law. Clocks that never agree are the asylum’s confession: Immortalis are not unified gods but assemblies of contradiction, their immortality a cage of clashing wills.
Nicolas revels in this. He crawls cell to cell complaining of levitating chairs, drops parchments into drains, and dances to his own screeching violin concerto. Time bends to his caprice; he resets clocks, delays ravens, and stretches moments into eternities of suffering. Yet the disagreement persists, a reminder that even he cannot synchronise the chaos within. The Immoless, those bred challengers, arrive expecting conquest, only to find themselves ensnared in this temporal trap. Lucia hears muffled thoughts drowned by chimes; Allyra navigates mirrors where reality fractures. The clocks mock their efforts, ticking out the inevitability of submission.
In Corax, time is not linear but punitive, a weapon wielded against sanity. Inmates strapped to gurneys count discordant beats as blisters form; tributes chained in cells lose hours to the void capacitor’s shocks. Nicolas, ever the conductor, amplifies the discord, his pocket watch a talisman against oblivion. The rooms filled with clocks that never agree are his grand design: a monument to Immortalis disunity, where every second reinforces the primacy of control over coherence. Here, in the asylum’s relentless rhythm, the true horror of immortality reveals itself not in death’s absence, but in the eternal failure to align.
Immortalis Book One August 2026