Why Nicolas in Immortalis Requires an Audience to Exist
Nicolas DeSilva, the self-styled Doctor of Psychiatry at Corax Asylum, thrives in a realm where every scream, every flinch, every futile plea feeds the machinery of his existence. He is not merely a sadist; he is a performer whose stage demands witnesses, whose cruelties lose their lustre without eyes to widen in horror. To understand Nicolas is to grasp this fundamental truth: without an audience, he unravels.
Consider the asylum itself, that labyrinth of damp stone and clanging clocks, where inmates shuffle through corridors lined with mirrors that reflect not just their torment but Nicolas’s insatiable gaze. He rounds them up for speeches in the meeting hall, pointless announcements delivered to the deaf or the deranged, not because he expects comprehension but because the act of proclamation requires ears, however unwilling. The chapel, repurposed into a theatre, stands empty of productions yet pulses with his vision of future spectacles. He insists on it, demands its construction, even as Chives hobbles through the chaos of builders deemed insane and locked away. Why? The potential for eyes upon him, the echo of applause in a void otherwise filled only by his own discordant violin screeching.
This compulsion traces back to his fractured nature, the Immortalis split into Vero and Evro, true self and primal shadow. Nicolas, Vero refined yet rotten, converses ceaselessly with Webster in the glass, that spectral rationalist who cleans spectacles and dispenses logic like bitter physic. Demize, the severed head perched on the gramophone, mocks and cackles, a captive chorus. Even the Long-Faced Demon, that elongated lustful fury, emerges only when hunger or rage demands a mirror’s judgement. Each persona craves validation, a gaze to affirm its grotesquery. Nicolas writes volumes in red ink, binds them meticulously, yet shares none; the act suffices, the imagined reader his silent throng.
His pursuits underscore the void: horology, with its ticking multitudes marking time he bends at will; fashion, where taller hats provoke execution and replacement; the pocket watches he fiddles obsessively, each a tiny stage for his mastery. Boredom strikes swiftly without spectacle. He infiltrates villages as detective or doctor, sowing chaos for the thrill of reaction, only to abandon the farce when eyes glaze. The tributes, chained and pleading, exist as props in his endless play, their suffering the footlights illuminating his centrality.
Allyra’s arrival disrupted this solipsism, offering a worthy foil, yet even she became audience. He watched her trials with Kane, orchestrated her feedings, staged her submission. Her gaze, sharp and unyielding, sustained him like no inmate’s terror. When she fled, chaining him in Neferaten, the silence devoured him. Corax crumbled, alters splintered, and he sat amid shards, bereft of reflection. Without her eyes upon him, the asylum echoed hollow.
Nicolas requires an audience because, stripped of it, he confronts the abyss within: a ledger of cruelties inscribed by no hand but his own, read by none but ghosts. The performer without witnesses is merely mad, his fractured selves collapsing into one unendurable truth. In Immortalis, Nicolas exists only as observed, his being a perpetual demand for eyes to affirm the monster he cannot bear alone.
Immortalis Book One August 2026