Why Nicolas in Immortalis Enjoys the Absurdity of His Own Events
Nicolas DeSilva, the second Immortalis, presides over Corax Asylum as a sovereign of chaos, where every disruption serves his peculiar appetites. His existence unfolds in a perpetual carnival of the grotesque, a realm where levitating chairs spin without reason, clocks chime discordant symphonies, and tributes meet fates both inventive and inevitable. One might ask why a being of such dominion revels in this absurdity, but the answer lies embedded in the very texture of his being: boredom is the true enemy, and absurdity its perfect antidote.
Consider the man himself, tall and stoic in his plaid jacket and towering top hat, a figure who crafts spectacles from the mundane. The hats of Khepriarth, laced with plague fleas, plunge a village into frenzy, only for Nicolas to watch from afar, amused by the communal grave that follows. Sapari’s pirate armada, a fabrication born of his raven’s whisper, crushes ships against magnetic anchors, all while wood vanishes unnoticed. These are not mere pranks; they are symphonies of disorder, conducted to drown the silence of eternity. Nicolas, gorged on blood and flesh, finds no thrill in simple sustenance. His urges demand novelty, escalation, the exquisite tension of the unexpected.
Corax Asylum embodies this philosophy. Its corridors bristle with mirrors that twist reality, clocks that mock time’s passage, and cells where beds await nocturnal diversions. Straps and handcuffs ensure compliance, yet Nicolas thrives on the pretence of escape, the fleeting hope that ignites true despair. He trades tributes for a medical licence from Irkalla, declares sanity a myth, and drives the sane to madness, proving his diagnosis retroactively. Cure? Absurdity. Business demands the perpetual inmate, and Nicolas delivers with rusty scalpels and birches, his surgical rack gleaming amid the damp.
His personas amplify this delight. Webster, the rational shadow in the glass, designs horrors like the nerve harp and void capacitor, tools for suffering’s symphony. Demize, the rotting head on the gramophone, cackles commentary, spinning records of off-key violins. Chester, the Evro unbound, roams Neferaten leaving villages in bacterial ruin, his flirtations ending in acid baths. Each facet savours the farce: the levitating chair that spins Nicolas mid-lecture, the gramophone that warps the dead into company, the pocket watches that tick divergent times. Absurdity is not accident; it is architecture, built to stave off the void’s whisper.
Even his conquests revel in the ridiculous. The Immoless, dispatched to unmake him, become playthings in his hall of mirrors. Lucia, the medium, hears muffled screams amid the cacophony of clocks and violins. Allyra, the defiant third, boils vampires and resists his mesmerism, yet yields to the hunt’s rhythm. Nicolas lets them run, offers false doors, and savours the recapture. Sovereignty? A trifling game. The true joy lies in the chase, the feigned escape, the inevitable return to his chains.
Why embrace absurdity? Because in a world of eternal dusk, where Primus’s suns hang low and souls barter in Irkalla’s circles, predictability breeds oblivion. Nicolas, fractured son of the first, dances on the edge of madness not despite his dominion, but because of it. His events, grotesque and grand, affirm his existence against the encroaching silence. The asylum echoes with his laughter, a bulwark against the nothing that waits beyond the mirrors.
Immortalis Book One August 2026