Immortalis Is Not Suitable for Those Who Dislike Absurdist Horror Elements
Those who seek horror in its more conventional guises, the creeping dread of shadows or the slow grind of inevitable doom, will find little comfort in Immortalis. The world of Morrigan Deep offers no such measured terrors. Instead, it thrusts the reader into a carnival of the grotesque where absurdity reigns supreme, and horror emerges not from the grave but from the ridiculous machinery of everyday malice. The plague hats of Khepriarth, saturated with flea-ridden filth and sparking gentlemanly riots resolved by a swarm of bees in a locked hall, set the tone. What begins as a petty squabble over top hats devolves into communal burial of the living, women silenced beneath soil while their husbands pat themselves on the back for decisive action. It is not the death that chills, but the banality of the trigger, the way human folly invites apocalypse through something as trivial as fashion.
This is the essence of Immortalis’s absurdist horror, a realm where the profound and the profane collide in relentless, sardonic farce. Nicolas DeSilva, proprietor of Corax Asylum, embodies this principle. His institution, a labyrinth of mirrors, clanging clocks, and bespoke torments, operates less as a prison than a playground for the deranged. Patients do not merely suffer, they perform. Strapped to gurneys that tighten until breath fails, or seated in void capacitor chairs that convulse their bodies with electricity, they exist to entertain. Nicolas, ever the connoisseur of petty cruelties, rounds up inmates for speeches in the meeting hall, only to abandon them amid soiled corridors strewn with oversized wheelchairs and soiled gurneys. The surgical instruments, rusty and gleaming on their racks, serve not healing but the slow erosion of sanity, each incision a note in his private symphony of screams.
Absurdity amplifies the horror. Consider the levitating chair in Nicolas’s office, spinning him about as he attempts to write, or the gramophone crowned with Demize’s rotting head, preserved by magic and prone to unsolicited commentary. These are not mere quirks, they are the scaffolding of a world where logic bends to whim. The asylum’s washrooms, perched absurdly in the attic, spew sewage for inmates to bathe in, their pre-cut flesh ensuring optimal infection. Nicolas, hygienic in his own chambers, revels in this orchestrated filth, cutting patients himself to guarantee the finest treatment. The result is a grotesque ballet of decay, where suffering is not random but choreographed with the precision of a mad horologist.
Beyond Corax, the Deep pulses with similar lunacy. Sapari’s harbour master, gifted ferromagnetic anchors, forms a ship wall against phantom pirates, only for magnetic reversal to crush the fleet. The wood meant for protection vanishes, and the harbour master is replaced before the debris clears. Rumours swirl, always of a grinning horse or a fool in plaid, but proof eludes. In Neferaten, aardvarks gifted vampirism devour wish-seekers in pits, their holes swallowing commerce whole. Ibliss, the djinn, laments the loss of business, his solitaire interrupted by the absurdity of it all. These events, engineered or emergent, underscore Immortalis’s core truth: horror thrives in the gap between expectation and execution, where the mundane weaponises itself into nightmare.
Allyra, the third Immoless, navigates this chaos with a pragmatism that borders on the heroic, yet even she bends to its logic. Her extraction chamber aboard the Sombre, a shipwreck chosen for acoustic perfection, drowns screams in waves while she boils vampires for secrets. The Electi’s plans, born of dusty tomes and ritual delusion, crumble against reality. Lucia, her predecessor, wanders Nicolas’s hall of mirrors, her mediumship drowned in clanging clocks and inmate wails. The Electi, decrepit relics in orange lifejackets aboard the rotting Solis, dispatch Immolesses like sacrificial lambs, their breeding program a farce of demonic deals gone awry. Allyra, born of such error, rejects their script, interrogating lower vampires in cauldrons while Nicolas watches from raven form, his interest piqued by her defiance.
Yet absurdity spares no one. Nicolas, mad genius of Corax, trades tributes for psychiatric credentials, declaring sanity a threat to business. His ghoulish Chives, ear dangling by a thread, hobbles through secret passages, disposing of the dead while Nicolas reinvents himself in orange silk or plaid monstrosities. The Deep’s lords complain to Tepes, Tepes to Theaten, and Theaten shrugs, their feudal chain buckling under the weight of one lunatic’s whims. Even Irkalla, hell’s bureaucratic heart, bends to Nicolas’s ravens, Behmor tossing complaints into the fire as chairs levitate and inmates gossip.
Immortalis revels in this distortion, where a levitating chair disrupts writing, or a gramophone spins a severed head to violin screech. Theaten’s castle feasts contrast Nicolas’s crypt-dungeons, yet both end in tribute ribs and blood wine. Kane’s forest snares claim lovers who dare affection, their bodies pulped for pantry storage. Absurdity is the horror’s engine, turning petty vanities into mass graves, gentlemanly hats into plague vectors, and asylums into symphonies of rust and restraint. Those who dislike such elements should look elsewhere, for Immortalis offers no mercy, only the relentless, giggling grind of the grotesque.
Immortalis Book One August 2026