Why Immortalis Feels Too Unfiltered for Some Audiences
Immortalis arrives without apology, a relentless assault on the senses that strips away the comforting veils most tales drape over their horrors. Readers expecting the measured cruelties of gothic romance or the tidy moral arcs of horror find themselves instead plunged into a world where depravity operates without restraint, where the line between predator and prey blurs into irrelevance, and where the intimate mechanics of power reveal themselves in excruciating detail. This unyielding rawness, the absence of any softening lens, leaves some audiences recoiling, not from the acts themselves, but from the unflinching gaze that demands they confront them as they are.
The Deep, that perpetual dusk-shrouded realm of Morrigan Deep, pulses with a brutality that feels almost biological, as if the very soil breeds sadism. Vampires and thesapiens clash in endless cycles of hunt and retaliation, their blood and flesh sustaining the Immortalis, beings of such voracious appetites they transcend mere predation. Primus, the Darkness, forged this order from chaos, splitting his own son Theaten into Vero and Evro to contain primal urges that threatened all. Yet containment breeds fracture, and fracture invites excess. Nicolas DeSilva, son of Primus and Baer warrior Boaca, embodies this rupture most vividly, his Corax Asylum a labyrinth of calculated torments where inmates exist not as patients but as raw material for his whims.
Consider the hall of mirrors, that disorienting warren where reality fractures into infinite distortions. Lucia, the second Immoless, wanders its angles, her mediumship rendered useless amid the cacophony of clanging clocks and inmate shrieks. Nicolas emerges not as a man but as the Long-Faced Demon, skull elongating, eyes narrowing, a manifestation of lust, hunger, and rage. He does not merely hunt; he choreographs despair, granting false hopes of escape only to shatter them with gleeful precision. Physical torture pales beside this psychological vivisection, where victims beg for death that arrives only after prolonged erosion of self.
Such scenes resist sanitisation. No redemptive glimmers pierce the gloom, no heroic interventions redeem the fallen. The Electi, those seven thesapien priests clinging to outdated tomes, breed Immolesses every century in futile bids to unbalance Immortalis power, only for their champions to meet sticky ends. Stacia torn asunder in a tug-of-war between Theaten and Nicolas, Lucia reduced to a simmering platter, Allyra herself boiling vampires and thesapiens in cauldrons aboard the shipwreck Sombre. These are not metaphors for struggle; they are the struggle, laid bare in flesh and bone.
Nicolas’s dominion over Corax exemplifies this unfiltered lens. Straps and handcuffs adorn beds in crypt-level dungeons, rusty scalpels line surgical racks beside whips and birches. The ground floor banqueting suite and library remain his private sanctums, while east wing cells cram inmates for discomfort. Washrooms spew sewage, inmates cut beforehand to ensure infection. Nicolas trades ravaged tributes to Irkalla for his psychiatric license, declaring the sane insane to perpetuate his enterprise. Cure? He scoffs at it, for cure ruins business.
The Ledger, inscribed in Irkalla’s Anubium, records these truths without flinching. Primus created Irkalla to govern the chaos of The Deep, its six circles enforcing contracts amid torture. The Ad Sex Speculum, six mirrors watching each Immortalis half, confirms no escape from the system. Yet Immortalis like Nicolas exploit it masterfully, splitting selves into Vero and Evro, merging at will to unleash appetites that gorge on blood, flesh, and violation. Theaten’s Evro, Kane, embodies raw savagery in Varjoleto’s wilds, machete and traps claiming lives in prolonged hunts.
For some, this rawness overwhelms. Immortalis offers no heroes to root for, no villains to neatly despise. Nicolas dances through Corax’s corridors, levitating chairs spinning, gramophone screeching his off-key violin concertos, while inmates shriek under electrical surges. He writes in red ink, bound parchments his private masterpieces, never shared lest they dilute his genius. His suits clash in orange silk and green, top hats towering defiantly. Sadism is his art, boredom his enemy, and control his creed.
The unfiltered quality stems from this refusal to moralise. No lectures on the sanctity of life interrupt the feast; no tearful confessions redeem the torturer. The Deep’s eternal dusk mirrors its inhabitants’ shadowed souls, where Primus’s creations feast without remorse. Lilith’s cult in Neferaten’s sands, the Electi’s futile Immolesses, the Darkbadb’s watchful eyes, all orbit the Immortalis core, drawn inexorably to their gravity. Readers seeking catharsis or upliftment falter here, confronted by a tapestry of unrelenting hunger.
Yet this very unfiltering captivates others, immersing them in a world where power’s machinery grinds openly. Immortalis lays bare the human condition’s underbelly, stripped of civilisation’s pretensions. Nicolas’s asylum, with its mirrors reflecting infinite grotesqueries, forces confrontation with the self’s potential for monstrosity. For those audiences, the rawness is not excess but revelation, a mirror unflinching as the Speculum itself.
Immortalis Book One August 2026