What Is Nicolas DeSilva in Immortalis?
Nicolas DeSilva is the second Immortalis, son of Primus and Boaca Baer, a warrior of the half-vampire, half-thesapien Baer clan. Raised among the Baers for twelve years in the wilds of the Varjoleto forest, he was torn from his mother’s arms by Primus and consigned to Irkalla for a demonic education. Rumour persists across the Deep that this rupture warped him, rendering him peculiar, perhaps even mad.
As Immortalis, Nicolas embodies the dual nature of his kind, fractured into Vero and Evro. His Vero self, the refined yet theatrical proprietor of Corax Asylum, contrasts with the primal Webster, his Evro counterpart glimpsed in mirrors and pocket watches. Both are him, sharing appetites for blood, flesh, and dominion, though Webster tempers the chaos with cold logic and invention. Nicolas denies the Long-Faced Demon that elongates his features in moments of lust, hunger, or rage, dismissing it as fairy tales spun by the severed head of Demize the First, perched eternally on his gramophone.
Corax Asylum, his fortress of torment masquerading as psychiatric care, stands as monument to his sadism. Acquired through a trade of ravaged tributes with Irkalla, it grants him licence to declare any soul insane and subject them to corrective horrors: nerve harps, void capacitor chairs, gurneys that crush breath from lungs. He wields rusty scalpels, birches, and whips with petty relish, driving inmates to madness to validate their confinement. Cleanliness offends him; filth is the asylum’s perfume, sewage its bath. Secret passages twist through its bowels, known only to him, ensuring no corner offers sanctuary.
No empathy stirs in him. Patients, tributes, even his ghoul Chives exist for amusement or utility. He collects pocket watches, pens lurid tomes in red ink he never shares, and designs suits of clashing silks and plaid, his top hat the tallest in the Deep. Theatrical to excess, he levitates chairs, spins records of his own screeching violin, and stages pointless speeches in the chapel. Boredom is his enemy; chaos, his balm.
His kin intrigue and repel him. Brother Theaten, refined sovereign of Castle D’Aten, shares feasts of basted tribute with Anne and Tepes, yet Nicolas disrupts their civility with Kane’s feral presence. Behmor, his lesser Immortalis son by Kyrie, rules Irkalla with Tanis, his Evro, while Lilith’s cult festers in Neferaten sands. The Electi, those thesapien priests, breed futile Immolesses to unseat the Immortalis, but Nicolas intercepts them, turning their champions to sport.
Yet beneath the cruelty lies fracture. Webster urges restraint for some inscrutable plan, Demize mocks from his rotting perch, and mirrors reflect truths he evades. Nicolas DeSilva is Immortalis incarnate: god of torment, architect of absurdity, prisoner of his own design.
Immortalis Book One August 2026