Why Nicolas in Immortalis Builds Events That Collapse Into Chaos
Nicolas DeSilva does not merely observe chaos. He engineers it, with the precision of a horologist setting a pocket watch to chime at the worst possible moment. From the flea-ridden hats that turned Khepriarth into a graveyard to the grinning horse that lured Sapari’s ships into magnetic ruin, his interventions follow a pattern as relentless as the ticking corridors of Corax Asylum. One might mistake these acts for whimsy, or the tantrums of a bored immortal. They are neither. They are deliberate constructions, designed to unravel order and expose the fragility beneath.
Consider the hats. A shipment arrives at dawn, labelled a gift for the gentlemen of Khepriarth. Not enough to go around, naturally, sparking immediate discord. Gentlemen bicker, a bee test is decreed, doors are locked, and the swarm descends. Fleas emerge from the fabric, plague follows, and the men, ever pragmatic, bury the infected alive, wives and all. The Lord complains to Tepes, Tepes to Theaten. Rumours swirl, but no one claims responsibility. Chaos blooms from a simple parcel, and Nicolas, miles away in Corax, need only smile.
Or the Sapari armada that never was. A messenger on a foolish horse warns of pirates. Wood is relocated to Ashurrel, ships form a defensive wall, and magnetic anchors from Ferromagnetic bind them. Polarity reverses, hulls crunch, and the wood vanishes. The harbour master is replaced. Again, complaints ascend the chain, and again, rumours point to shadows. Nicolas crafts absence into catastrophe, absence of pirates into wrecked fleets, absence of accountability into his own legend.
This is no random malice. Nicolas builds these events as a watchmaker assembles gears: each piece calibrated to slip, to grind, to seize. The hats expose the savagery of thesapien self-preservation. The anchors reveal the folly of authority under pressure. He does not strike directly; he tilts the board so the pieces topple of their own weight. The joy lies in the collapse, the revelation of how little holds society together when prodded.
Corax Asylum embodies this philosophy. Its corridors of clanging clocks and staring mirrors disorient the inmates, stripping privacy and sanity layer by layer. Secret passages shift, torture chambers multiply, and the washrooms spew sewage from the attic. Nicolas rotates builders so none know the full layout, ensuring perpetual vulnerability. He declares sanity or madness at whim, trading tributes for Irkallan sanction, proving his diagnoses through inflicted torment. The asylum is chaos incarnate, a living testament to his creed: build the cage, then watch the prisoners claw at the bars.
Even his personal indulgences follow suit. The levitating chair that spins when he writes, the gramophone hosting Demize’s rotting head, the pocket watches telling every time but none correctly. Boredom drives him to reinvent himself daily: fashionista, detective, physician, lamplighter. Each role collapses into farce, hats causing plague, dynamite illuminating mines, leeches demanding legs. He protests the very disruptions he authors, letters to Behmor piling up like unanswered summons.
Why? Control through entropy. Nicolas thrives where others falter. The Deep’s feudal lords scramble to restore order; he profits from the scramble. The Electi breed Immolesses to unbalance Immortalis; he turns their champions into allies or corpses. Lilith builds cults; he starves her lands with locusts and blight. Chaos is his forge, events his hammer, and the resulting disorder his anvil. In the wreckage, he stands unchallenged, the architect of collapse.
Yet chaos serves a deeper purpose. Nicolas fears stillness, the void where no one reacts, no one performs. His Evro, Chester, chases fleeting pleasures across villages, leaving betrayal and decay. Webster designs horrors from marrow and serum. The Long-Faced Demon emerges in moments of raw need. Each facet demands motion, reaction, consequence. Stability bores him; it implies equality, predictability, loss of supremacy. By building events that collapse, he ensures perpetual imbalance, perpetual need for his intervention.
The irony escapes no one but him. The man who drowns villages in absurdity complains of damp corridors. The doctor who harvests eyes decries poor hygiene. He is the chaos he condemns, the jester whose jests devour worlds. In Immortalis, Nicolas does not build chaos for destruction’s sake. He builds it because without it, he ceases to exist.
Immortalis Book One August 2026