Immortalis offers no respite for those who demand heroes or even anti-heroes with a flicker of redemption. Its inhabitants are not misunderstood souls yearning for light; they are predators, architects of suffering, creatures who revel in the machinery of cruelty. To expect likeability from them is to misunderstand the brutal elegance of the world Morrigan Deep. The Immortalis, those fractured gods born of Primus and Lilith, embody a lineage where dominance is the only inheritance, and empathy a forgotten relic. Nicolas DeSilva, for instance, does not merely torment; he curates torment as symphony, his asylum a gallery of bespoke agonies where inmates are strapped to beds or gurneys, their screams harmonised with clanging clocks and screeching violins. He trades tributes for medical sanction, declares sanity a myth, and drives the already fragile into true madness, all while priding himself on his ‘state of the art’ institution. There is no tragic backstory to soften this; Nicolas is sadism incarnate, his Evro Webster a rational accomplice devising iron maidens and nerve harps, his chambers a shrine to rotting heads and levitating chairs.
Theaten fares no better, his castle a veneer of nobility over primal excess. He dines with Ducissa Anne and Count Tepes on basted thesapiens, their rituals a grotesque parody of civility where wrists are bled into crystal glasses and thighs carved with silver. His Evro, Kane, lurks in the Varjoleto forest, a masked beast who hunts with machetes and barbed wire, preserving heads as trophies in his bone-shackled cabin. Theaten merges with Kane only when necessity demands, their union a reminder that even refinement bows to savagery. Lilith, stripped of sovereignty yet scheming from her Neferaten palace, builds cults on sacrifice and whispers of dominion, her son Theaten a pawn in her eternal grudge against Primus. Behmor, lesser Immortalis and king of Irkalla, governs hell’s circles with bureaucratic indifference, trading souls for silk suits while his Evro Tanis rampages across glaciers.
These figures repel sympathy by design. Nicolas’s horological obsessions and fashionista pretensions clash with his gleeful vivisections; he writes red-inked tomes no one reads, collects pocket watches while his victims bleed out on soiled gurneys. Theaten adjusts candlelight for aesthetic perfection even as he rips Immolesses apart. Their unlikability immerses us in a world where power corrupts absolutely, and corruption is the only constant. Allyra, the third Immoless, navigates this abyss not as saviour but survivor, her extraction chambers on The Sombre a mirror to their depravity. She boils vampires for secrets, yet her defiance hints at something human amid the grotesque.
Immortalis rejects the comfort of redeemable monsters. Its characters are unfiltered horrors, their flaws not flaws but features. Nicolas’s theatrical madness, Theaten’s polished brutality, Lilith’s cultish ambition, they demand we confront the void without handholds. Likeable? No. Essential? Utterly. In their unrelenting vileness lies the series’ dark pulse, a reminder that true horror blooms where sympathy withers.
Immortalis Book One August 2026