Immortalis does not flatter its readers. It does not offer the comfort of redeemable souls or characters who might, in some quiet moment, reveal a flicker of humanity. The beings who populate Morrigan Deep are not misunderstood; they are deliberate monstrosities, engineered for appetite and dominion, their every act a testament to the void where empathy should reside. Nicolas DeSilva, with his rotting gramophone head and penchant for petty vivisections, is no tragic anti-hero nursing a hidden wound. He is the wound itself, festering and gleeful. Theaten, cloaked in noble finery, carves tribute thighs with the precision of a sommelier selecting a vintage, his civility a thin veneer over the same primal rot. To demand likeability from such figures is to misunderstand the contract this world demands of its audience: stare into the abyss, and expect no hand to pull you back.
The Immortalis revel in their depravity, and the narrative refuses to apologise for it. Where lesser tales might redeem their villains through a contrived epiphany or a sacrificial turn, here the cruelty compounds. Nicolas does not pause his scalpel-work to ponder the sanctity of life; he escalates, trading tributes for medical charters, declaring sanity a curable delusion. His brother Theaten hosts banquets where guests dine on living flesh, their silverware piercing still-twitching limbs, and the conversation flows as if discussing vintages rather than viscera. Lilith, stripped of her sovereignty yet unbowed, builds cults on the sands of Neferaten, her ambitions as relentless as the scorpions she once loosed upon a priestess. These are not figures to root for; they are forces to witness, to recoil from, to comprehend as the unvarnished machinery of a world built on predation.
Consider the asylum of Corax, Nicolas’s domain, a labyrinth of rusting scalpels and sewage sluices where inmates wash in their own filth, strapped to gurneys that crush breath from lungs. Chives, the ghoul servant whose flesh sloughs in immortal decay, shuffles through corridors lined with mirrors that reflect not truth but Nicolas’s whims—elongated skulls, narrowed eyes, the Long-Faced Demon grinning from every pane. Here, love is no salve; it is the lash. Emilia and Edward, daring a spark of affection amid the mire, earn not mercy but relocation to Kane’s forest, where barbed wire pulleys and machetes await. Their “freedom” is a hunt scripted for slaughter, observed by Nicolas from the branches, applauding the finale.
Even the Immolesses, bred as futile counters to Immortalis might, embody this rejection of sympathy. Stacia, the first, torn asunder in a tug-of-war between brothers. Lucia, the second, boiled alive on a skillet and served as supper. Allyra, the third and most defiant, survives not through virtue but cunning, her extraction chambers on the wreck Sombre a testament to calculated savagery. She boils vampires for secrets, her shuriken claiming heads when tongues prove too stubborn. These women are not victims pleading for salvation; they are predators in their own right, their failures not pitiable but inevitable in a ledger that tallies souls like debts.
The genius of Immortalis lies in this unflinching gaze. Readers seeking likeable rogues or brooding lords will founder here, adrift in a sea of gleeful tyrants. Primus, the progenitor, crafts a world of eternal dusk not for poetry but to redress imbalances he himself engineered. Behmor, king of Irkalla, trades souls for silk suits, his Evro Tanis a stitched abomination of battlefield scraps. No one redeems; they revel. The narrative does not plead their case—it dissects them, layer by rancid layer, inviting you to confront the allure of the irredeemable. To turn away is to admit defeat. To persist is to understand: in Morrigan Deep, likeability is the true delusion.
Immortalis Book One August 2026