Why Nicolas in Immortalis Treats Everything as Part of a Show
Nicolas DeSilva, the self-styled Doctor of Psychiatry and Lord of Corax Asylum, operates in a world of his own contrivance, where every interaction, every catastrophe, every fleeting glance serves as an act in the grand theatre of his existence. To him, the line between reality and performance dissolves entirely; life is a stage, and he its unrelenting director, casting inmates, tributes, and even the landscape of Morrigan Deep as unwitting players in spectacles of his design. This compulsion is no mere eccentricity, but the very mechanism by which he asserts dominion over chaos, boredom, and the creeping madness that whispers at the edges of his fractured mind.
Consider the asylum itself, that festering monument to his ingenuity. Corax is not a place of healing, but a labyrinthine playhouse engineered for perpetual disruption. Secret passages twist through its bowels, known only to Nicolas, ensuring no inmate ever knows where torment might spring from next. The corridors clang with discordant clocks, each ticking to its own discordant rhythm, while mirrors line every wall, reflecting distorted infinities that erode sanity. He rounds up the wretched for meaningless speeches in the meeting hall, blasts his screeching violin concertos through the gramophone until the shrieks of the damned harmonise with the strings, and even the washrooms spew sewage for the inmates’ ablutions, their flesh pre-sliced to invite festering wounds. Every element, from the rusty scalpels to the brazen bull, exists to provoke reaction, to elicit screams that affirm his centrality. The asylum is his canvas, smeared with blood and painted in agony, where the suffering of others becomes the applause he craves.
This theatricality extends far beyond Corax’s walls, infiltrating the kingdoms of The Deep like a malevolent fog. In Khepriarth, he dispatches hats laced with plague fleas, sparking riots and mass burials, only to watch the chaos unfold from afar. Sapari’s shipyard falls to magnetic anchors and phantom pirates, its wood vanishing into the night while the harbour master meets a swift demotion. Threnodyl’s bridge collapses under loosened bolts, and Doloros loses its milliner to a gruesome fate. No one knows the culprit, but rumours swirl, and Nicolas revels in the whispers, his pocket watch ticking as the world dances to his unseen baton. These are not random cruelties, but scripted diversions, engineered to disrupt, to entertain, to remind all that he pulls the strings.
Even his personal indulgences are performances of exquisite cruelty. Lucia, the second Immoless, is lured through the hall of mirrors, her mediumship drowned in cacophony, only to face the Long-Faced Demon in a game of run rabbit. He grants her hope with an open door, only to shatter it with pursuit, her blistered feet a testament to his delight in degradation. Tributes endure the Nerve Harp, their nerves plucked like strings, or the Void Capacitor Chair, convulsing under electrical torment. The gurney tightens until breath fails, and the iron maiden claims its slow toll. Nicolas does not merely inflict pain; he curates it, savouring the crescendo of screams as the finale to his symphony.
Why this relentless dramatisation? At its core lies Nicolas’s profound isolation, a void no blood or flesh can fill. Raised among Baer warriors before Primus tore him to Irkalla for a demonic education, he learned early that connection invites loss. Rumours call him mad, insane, peculiar, yet it is this very performance that shields him from the emptiness. The asylum’s filth, the clanging clocks, the mirrors that multiply his image, all affirm his existence. Without an audience, without the spectacle, he confronts the truth: he is alone, save for the rotting head of Demize on his gramophone and the rational ghost of Webster in his glass. Every show, every sabotage, every lash of the whip is a desperate bid to fill that silence, to prove he commands the stage of his own life.
In treating existence as theatre, Nicolas wields control as both weapon and salve. The Deep bends to his caprice, inmates perform their agonies, and even Immolesses like Allyra become unwitting stars in his endless production. Yet the curtain never falls, for in the footlights’ glare, he glimpses the abyss that waits beyond.
Immortalis Book One August 2026