Nicodemus in Immortalis Writes a Daily Nicolas Reflection on Professional Curiosity

Another dawn bleeds into the sky, though I scarcely note it. The light means nothing to me, only the quiet hours before the world stirs. My quill scratches across the page, as it does each day, capturing these reflections for no one but myself. Or perhaps for Nicolas, that ghost of a name I invoke in solitude. Today, professional curiosity draws my thoughts like a scalpel to flesh.

Curiosity, that most essential vice of my trade. It began in the shadowed halls of academies long crumbled to dust, where men in starched collars dissected cadavers under gaslight, their hands trembling not from revulsion but from the thrill of revelation. I was among them then, a young physician with ambitions that outstripped the era’s crude tools. What drives a man to peel back the skin of the dead? Not mercy, nor piety. No, it is the hunger to know, to map the hidden rivers of blood and nerve, to comprehend why the body betrays itself so exquisitely in death.

In those days, I chased anomalies: hearts that beat on after the brain surrendered, limbs that twitched under the knife as if clinging to some profane animation. Professional curiosity, they called it, a polite veil for obsession. I pushed further, injecting preservatives into the still-warm veins, watching colours bloom unnaturally in pallid cheeks. Colleagues whispered of ethics, but ethics are for the living who fear judgement. The dead demand no such courtesies.

Immortalis has refined this curiosity to a blade’s edge. Here, where eternity mocks mortality, the questions multiply. Why does flesh regenerate in patterns so predictably grotesque? What alchemy binds soul to sinew when both should fray? I have prodded the boundaries of my own kind, flaying immortals who heal too swiftly for the blade to linger. Their screams are symphonies of data, each note charting resilience, each silence a lesson in limits. Nicolas would understand; he always did, with that crooked smile before the hunger took him.

Today, I pondered a subject in the chamber below: a hybrid thing, half-mortal, half-something fouler. Its curiosity mirrored mine, eyes wide as I traced incisions along the abdomen. “Why?” it gasped, blood bubbling on lips. Why indeed. Because the professional demands it. Because to cease questioning is to stagnate, and stagnation is death’s true embrace. I closed the wounds with silk thread, watched them seal without scar. Another entry for the annals.

The sun climbs higher. I cap the ink, fold the page. Tomorrow, another reflection. Professional curiosity endures, as eternal as the night.

Immortalis Book One August 2026