Nicolas Character Breakdown Why He Calls It Retrieval Not Pursuit
Nicolas DeSilva, the second Immortalis, operates from a realm where ownership precedes existence. Corax Asylum stands as his fortress, a labyrinth of cells and chambers engineered not for healing but for dominion. Every inmate, tribute, or fleeting visitor enters his domain as property, subject to his whims and torments. This absolute claim shapes his language, his actions, and the very cadence of his sadism. Pursuit implies equality, a chase between hunter and hunted. Retrieval admits no such parity. What belongs to Nicolas cannot flee; it is merely misplaced, awaiting reclamation.
His origins mark the seed of this mindset. Born of Primus and Boaca Baer, a warrior of the Varjoleto forest, Nicolas spent twelve years among the Baer clan before Primus tore him from his mother’s arms. That rupture, whispered across The Deep as the forge of his peculiarities, instilled a primal aversion to loss. Irkalla’s demonic tutelage refined it into doctrine. No longer a child of the wild, he became a collector of souls, licensed by Irkalla’s bargain to declare sanity forfeit. The Thesapien Medical Board, bought with ravaged tributes, rubber-stamped his title as Doctor of Psychiatry. Cure? Absurdity. Sanity invites escape; insanity ensures retrieval.
Consider the Immoless. Lucia, the second dispatched to Corax, triggered no hunt. Nicolas tracked her weeks prior, disguised as raven, anticipating her voluntary admission. He unlocked her cell, staged her flight, and savoured the farce of recapture. No pursuit; she was his patient, his plaything, retrieved from the illusion of freedom. The first Immoless met a similar fate, torn asunder in a tug-of-war with Theaten, her body divvied like spoils. Allyra, the third, danced closest to evasion, yet Nicolas’s web ensnared her at every turn. Ghorab, the raven messenger, tethered her return. Retrieval, always retrieval.
This lexicon permeates Corax. Inmates do not escape; they are rounded up by porters or Chives’s weary hobble. Tributes do not resist; they are strapped, flayed, or fed to Kane’s forest traps. Even the asylum’s architecture enforces it: secret passages shift, builders rotate, ensuring no soul maps the full expanse. Nicolas alone holds the atlas. His Evro, Webster, designs the unseen mechanisms—nerve harps, void chairs, gurneys that crush breath from bone. Vero and Evro, true self and primal urge, converge in reclamation. Pursuit chases; retrieval repossesses.
Why this insistence? Loss haunts him. Primus’s theft of his Baer youth echoes in every unlocked cell door, every wandering inmate. Rumours paint him mad for it, but madness cloaks method. The Deep barters in blood and fealty; Nicolas trades in absolutes. Irkalla’s mirrors watch him, yet he obscures his Evro’s reflection, guarding the fracture within. Behmor, his lesser son, governs Hell’s bureaucracy, but Nicolas inscribes the ledger itself. Retrieval is no quirk; it is sovereignty’s grammar.
In Corax’s crypts, where screams harmonise with clanging clocks, Nicolas does not pursue. He reclaims. The line between lord and lunatic blurs, but one truth endures: what enters his grasp never truly leaves.
Immortalis Book One August 2026