Those who seek the gentle consolations of soft romance, where lovers clasp hands beneath moonlit skies and whisper promises of forever, would do well to steer clear of Immortalis. This is not a tale for the tender-hearted, nor for readers who crave the slow burn of mutual affection or the quiet thrill of stolen glances. Immortalis plunges into depths where tenderness is a fleeting illusion, shattered by the crude machinery of possession, torment, and unyielding dominance. Its world is one of calculated cruelties, where blood and flesh serve as currency, and intimacy twists into something far more savage.
The Immortalis themselves, Nicolas and Theaten, embody this unrelenting darkness. Nicolas, the fractured lord of Corax Asylum, presides over a realm of rusting scalpels, sewage-flooded washrooms, and cells where inmates beg for death. His pursuits are not those of a brooding hero but of a gleeful architect of agony. He trades tributes for medical sanction, declares sanity a myth, and revels in the symphony of screams amplified through his gramophone. Romance? There is none. His encounters with women end in flaying, decapitation, or eternal torment in iron maidens. Even his rare affections curdle into obsession, as seen with the unfortunate Mary, whose return to claim her mother’s asylum ends in methodical degradation: suspension, chemical inhibition, and violation that strips away identity until she whispers submission.
Theaten offers no respite. His castle feasts are tableaux of refined barbarity, where tributes are basted and carved like delicacies, their longevity preserved only for prolonged suffering. Ducissa Anne, his consort, shares this palate, prizing meat from living flesh with silverware. Their union is not one of passion but of mutual predation, wagers placed on stolen prey like Allyra herself. Soft romance finds no foothold here; desire manifests as bets on breaking points, lovers reduced to assets in games of conquest.
Allyra, the third Immoless, arrives as a flicker of potential rebellion, her extraction chamber on The Sombre a grim counterpoint to Corax’s excesses. Yet even she succumbs to the cycle. Her ascent through bloodlines—Immortalis, noble, possessed, Lilith’s own—promises sovereignty, but delivers only entanglement. Nicolas’s web ensnares her: mesmerism erodes memory, inhibitors dull strength, and Chester’s primal urges blur into Chester’s calculated cruelties. Their intimacies, raw and ritualistic, bind rather than liberate, a merger of bodies that fractures souls. She declares love amid the lash, submits under the gaze of fractured personas, her agency a fragile illusion in a world where possession reigns supreme.
The Deep itself rejects softness. Eternal dusk cloaks a landscape of sabotage and decay: plague hats in Khepriarth, magnetic anchors wrecking Sapari’s fleet, aardvarks pitting Neferaten’s sands. Tributes bred for slaughter, Immolesses dispatched to futile ends, vampires herded into asylums—the machinery grinds without mercy. Even the Baers, half-wolf warriors loyal to Allyra, meet their end devoured by mutants, their loyalty no shield against the system’s hunger.
Soft romance thrives on vulnerability yielding to trust, on hearts aligning without chains. Immortalis offers chains alone: iron maidens, razorwire, contracts etched in blood. Lovers do not cherish; they claim, flay, and consume. Nicolas’s grin amid the screams, Theaten’s wagers on prey, Allyra’s reluctant surrender—these are not tales of hearts entwined but of wills broken and remade. For those seeking solace in whispered vows and tender embraces, Immortalis is a realm too shadowed, too merciless, where romance dies screaming in the dark.
Immortalis Book One August 2026