In the shadowed annals of Morrigan Deep, where the eternal dusk casts long fingers over the fractured psyches of its immortal denizens, few spectacles rival the grotesque theatre of Nicolas DeSilva. His Corax Asylum stands not merely as a bastion of torment, but as a stage upon which he performs the grand tragedy of his own invention: Poor Nicolas, the eternal victim, wielding self-pity as both script and scourge. It is a performance so meticulously rehearsed, so laced with calculated pathos, that it ensnares not only his inmates, but the very fabric of The Deep itself.
The genesis of this theatre lies in the chapel of Corax, a crumbling edifice of forgotten piety repurposed under Nicolas’s capricious decree. Boredom, that most insidious of his appetites, drove him to demand its conversion, envisioning a space where his inmates might witness “magnificent works of art” from his own dramatic community. Chives, the weary ghoul, questioned the existence of such a troupe; Nicolas dismissed him with theatrical indignation. The chapel became a theatre not for elevation, but for debasement, a mirror to Nicolas’s soul where suffering was elevated to spectacle.
Consider the plays he commissions, the grotesque ballets of betrayal and consumption. “The Thorn and His Rose” unfolds as lovers turn upon each other with chainsaws and razorwire, their mutual devouring a perfect allegory for Nicolas’s relational calculus. Valkyrie and Dyerbolique, those artist-assassins, slice and saw in a frenzy of cubist carnage, their bodies reduced to interchangeable parts. It is no coincidence that Nicolas spikes their drinks, ensuring paranoia festers into fatal frenzy. The audience, drugged and dazed, applauds the annihilation, conditioned to cheer their own impending doom. Here, self-pity weaponises the crowd: they pity the performers’ tragic end, blind to the parallel scripted for themselves.
Nicolas’s self-pity is no mere affectation; it is a blade, honed across centuries. Orphaned from his Baer mother, thrust into Irkalla’s demonic tutelage by Primus, he emerged peculiar, some whispered insane. This origin myth he recites endlessly, a litany of abandonment that justifies his cruelties. Letters to Behmor brim with exaggeration: floating chairs, escaped Immolesses, a world conspiring against Poor Nicolas. Ignored, he hangs parchments declaring inmates insane, as if the universe itself must affirm his victimhood. The asylum’s filth, the inmates’ straps and screams, all props in his grand soliloquy of suffering.
Yet the theatre reveals the pity’s true edge. When Allyra, the anomalous Immoless, disrupts his script, he responds not with raw force, but with amplified pathos. He chains her, flays her, yet whispers of protection, of love unrequited. “You belong to me,” he growls, even as she submits, her cries a chorus to his martyrdom. The Long-Faced Demon emerges not in triumph, but in torment, elongated features a mask for the boy ripped from his mother’s arms. Self-pity transmutes his sadism into sanctity; he tortures because the world has tortured him first.
In the hall of mirrors, this weapon finds its apotheosis. Reflections multiply his isolation, each shard a Poor Nicolas pleading for validation. He dances with Allyra there, whip in hand, her pain his poetry. The mirrors close, trapping them in infinite recursion, where her submission affirms his narrative: see how they wrong me, how I endure. The Deep watches, from Sapari’s taverns to Irkalla’s ledgers, pitying the jester who pities himself most of all.
Thus, Nicolas’s theatre endures, a weaponised elegy to his own fragility. Poor Nicolas, forever the victim, forever the victor, scripting the world’s applause from the blood of his captives.
Immortalis Book One August 2026