Why Nicolas in Immortalis Cannot Stop Watching Himself
Nicolas DeSilva, proprietor of Corax Asylum, stands before the full-length mirror in his chambers, his tall frame clad in the yellow and burgundy plaid jacket he designed himself. He shakes his sleeves, adjusts the burgundy cufflinks, and tilts his head. His eyes flash from brown to green, canines lengthening into fangs. “Too damn handsome,” he declares to the reflection, which smirks back, refined, spectacled, short-haired. “Good dusk, Webster,” Nicolas says. “It is always dusk, Nicolas,” the reflection replies.
This exchange, repeated with ritualistic precision, reveals the compulsion at the heart of Nicolas’s existence. Mirrors do not merely adorn Corax; they define it. Corridors gleam with them, torture chambers multiply their horrors, and every clock ticks in discordant symphony. Nicolas watches himself ceaselessly, not out of vanity alone, but necessity. The asylum’s master cannot cease surveillance of his own fractured self.
Consider the hall of mirrors, Nicolas’s favoured corrective facility. Debris of angled glass forms a twisting labyrinth, lighting arcs rendering reality indistinguishable from reflection. Inmates flayed, carved, stretched beyond possibility scream from the voids. Nicolas steps through a mirror, emerging behind Lucia, the second Immoless. “Is there an issue with the service, Dear Lucia?” he growls. Mirrors close in, filling with his elongating skull, narrowed eyes, lengthened cheekbones. The Long-Faced Demon grins. Psychological torment excites him more than physical; repetition dulls the body, but the mind fractures endlessly.
Yet the compulsion extends inward. Nicolas’s pocket watch opens to Webster, his rational counterpart, spectacles perched, advising restraint. “Nicolas, you are treading the boards of creepiness again,” Webster warns as Nicolas spies on Allyra. The gramophone bears Demize’s rotting head, cackling commentary on his jester’s garb. Chambers, corridors, even cells reflect this obsession. No privacy exists; Nicolas insists patients know not whence his tortures spring. Builders rotate, secret passages multiply, only he knows the full atlas.
This vigilance stems from fracture. Primus split Theaten into Vero and Evro to contain primal urges, yet Nicolas embodies multiplicity. Webster, the refined intellect, tempers his chaos; Demize mocks from decay; alters like Nicodemus drill teeth, Bigglesworth commands seas. The Long-Faced Demon emerges in lust, hunger, anger. Nicolas watches to unify these shards, lest they consume him. “There are three of us,” he tells Chives, gesturing to mirror and head. The asylum mirrors his psyche: contained madness, observed eternally.
His narcissism conceals terror. Rumours whisper insanity from maternal separation, Primus ripping him from Boaca Baer at twelve for Irkalla’s demonic tutelage. Peculiarity, some say madness, follows. He hoards watches, clocks chime discordantly, time fractures as his self does. Fashion obsession stems from control; taller hats tolerated not, lest challenge his supremacy. Corax, state-of-the-art in filth, dungeons pristine for nocturnal urges, reflects this: beauty in horror, order in entropy.
Allyra disrupts this vigil. She spies his spying, hears Demize, enters Webster’s realm. “I see you,” she declares, piercing his multiplicity. He entrusts her his master key, yet jealousy festers. Tributes flogged for his infidelity, her male tributes demanded for parity. He carves her name into his chest, she his. Yet doubt lingers; dreams plague him, her leaving, chaining him. Possession wars with love, mirrors reflect the impasse.
Nicolas watches himself because cessation invites dissolution. Without surveillance, the Evro overwhelms, alters splinter, the Ledger fractures. Allyra, glimpsing the whole, threatens this brittle unity. He cannot stop, for in the glass he holds the shards together, lest they cut him deepest.
Immortalis Book One August 2026