Is Nicolas DeSilva a Tyrant or a Lonely Being?
In the shadowed annals of Morrigan Deep, few figures loom as large or as grotesque as Nicolas DeSilva. To the thesapiens of Togaduine, he is the asylum’s dread sovereign, a self-proclaimed doctor who wields his rusty scalpels and birches with the casual malice of a god toying with ants. His Corax is no sanctuary but a labyrinth of damp cells, electrified gurneys, and halls of mirrors that twist the mind until it snaps. He declares the sane insane, chains the innocent, and feasts on their terror, their blood, their very flesh. Tyrant? The word fits like a glove on his gloved hand, for what else calls a man who buries wives alive in plague pits, who trades souls for medical charters, who turns a chapel into a theatre of screams?
Yet peel back the plaid jacket, the towering top hat, the veneer of theatrical command, and another portrait emerges, one etched not in blood but in the quiet voids between his endless distractions. Nicolas has no friends, no confidants beyond a rotting head on his gramophone and the rational ghost in his mirrors. His chambers gleam with immaculate order, a stark rebellion against the asylum’s filth, as if hygiene is the last bastion he can claim. He writes volumes in red ink, binds them himself, but shares none, hoarding words like a miser with gold. Rumours whisper of his childhood, torn from his Baer mother’s arms at twelve, thrust into Irkalla’s demonic forges by Primus himself. Peculiar, they called him then. Insane, some dared. Lonely? The ledger of his life suggests it, for what drives a man to orchestrate plagues, to chase shadows with ravens, to build a world of cages if not the ache of isolation?
Consider the duality in his cruelties. The hats that poisoned Khepriarth, the magnetic anchors that crushed Sapari’s fleet, the aardvarks that pitted Neferaten’s sands, the cats that prowled Togaduine’s nights, the weebles that rolled through Threnodyl’s streets. Each chaos bears his mark, yet none he claims outright, content to watch from afar, amused by the fallout. Tyranny demands proclamation; Nicolas prefers the sly grin, the pocket watch’s tick, the complaint letter tossed to Behmor’s fire. His asylum thrives on this: inmates strapped to beds, eyes gouged for insolence, voices silenced for whispers. But why hoard the dead Demize’s head if not for company? Why argue with Webster’s reflection if not to fill the silence?
His obsession with Allyra, the third Immoless, crystallises the paradox. He stalks her for years, feeds her lies through tortured lips, drugs her blood to keep her pliant, yet when she submits, when she calls him Nic and shares his bed, he fractures. Chester prowls the cells, Nicodemus drills teeth, Bigglesworth sails phantom seas, but Nicolas sulks in his office, nailing doors shut, smashing clocks. He carves her name into his chest, declares her co-regent, yet chains her for defiance. Love, for him, is a cage gilded with scales, a merger of serpent and god where she coils about his heart even as he tightens the collar. Tyrant he is, for the power he wields crushes wills like brittle bone. Lonely he remains, for no throne seats a companion.
DeSilva endures as both scourge and spectre, a fractured soul ruling a fractured realm. The Deep whispers his name in dread, yet he whispers back to empty mirrors, chasing echoes in the dusk. Tyrant or lonely? Perhaps the truer question is whether the two can be untangled, or if Morrigan Deep itself is the cage he built to hold them both.
Immortalis Book One August 2026