Nicolas DeSilva has always been a creature of possession. From the moment he first laid eyes on Allyra, the third Immoless, he saw not a woman but a prize, a vessel to be claimed and controlled. He calls her mine, whispers it in the heat of their tangled encounters, brands it into her flesh with ink and needle, declares it to the world in garish headlines and public spectacles. Yet for all his rituals of ownership, Allyra slips through his grasp like smoke from a dying fire. She is never fully his, and that truth gnaws at him, a splinter under the skin of his fractured soul.
In the shadowed halls of Corax Asylum, where the air hangs thick with the tang of blood and rust, Nicolas orchestrates his dominion. He chains her to beds and walls, feeds her from his own veins, merges with his Evro Chester to overwhelm her senses in nights of relentless passion. Each act is a bid for eternity, a desperate etching of his name upon her being. He mesmerises her to forget betrayals, drugs her to dull her will, yet she endures, her spirit unbowed. Even when he drags her to the brink of oblivion, carving sigils of possession into her chest, she whispers love into his ear, a love that binds him more surely than any contract with Irkalla.
Consider the siege of Neferaten, that grand theatre of his making. Nicolas deploys armies of mutants, headless horrors, and vampiric swarms, all to crush Lilith and secure sovereignty. Allyra flies above his flagship, a scaled vision of power, swallowing the goddess whole in Orochi’s form. Victory is his, yet it is she who claims the final blow. He cheers her triumph, but his eyes betray the hunger beneath: not for power, but for her absolute submission. She cuffs him in Elyas’s chains, leaves him raging in the throne room, and rides for freedom. Mine, he roars to the empty palace, but the word echoes hollow.
His alters—Chester the seducer, Webster the schemer, Elyas the necromancer—each vies for her, fragments of one insatiable will. Chester plays his flute in the cells, Nicodemus drills teeth with gleeful abandon, yet none hold her fully. She navigates their chaos, submits when it suits, defies when it must. In the mirror world of Webster’s laboratory, she reads the truths he buried: five years of manipulation, memories rewritten, a love forged in deception. Still, she returns, drawn to the monster who both breaks and completes her.
Nicolas builds Corax as a cage of wonders, a labyrinth where time ticks in discordant clocks and mirrors reflect his endless selves. He offers her half the asylum, co-regency, eternal protection, but always with the unspoken clause: mine. The contract he pens, sealed by Behmor, binds her body and soul, yet she wields it like a weapon, demanding tribute, equality, autonomy. He yields, grudgingly, for her presence soothes the fractures within him. But possession lingers, a shadow in his green eyes, waiting for the moment she tests its limits.
She never fully is his, because she chooses him, not the chains. In the quiet hours, when the asylum hums with restrained madness, Nicolas holds her and whispers the words he cannot fully believe: I love you. Allyra, the Immoless who outwitted gods, smiles into the dark, knowing the truth he fears. Ownership is illusion; love, however twisted, is the only true binding.
Immortalis Book One August 2026