Why Nicolas in Immortalis Uses Humour as a Tool of Authority

In the shadowed annals of Morrigan Deep, where eternal dusk cloaks the machinations of the Immortalis, Nicolas DeSilva stands as a figure of unrelenting caprice. His authority does not derive from the measured decrees of his brother Theaten, nor from the brute primal force of Kane, but from a peculiar arsenal of absurdity and jest. Humour, in Nicolas’s hands, is no mere diversion; it is a scalpel, dissecting order, sowing chaos, and reasserting his dominion with every ill-timed quip or grotesque prank. To grasp this, one must peer into the grotesque theatre of his rule, where laughter precedes the lash.

Consider the infamous hat shipment to Khepriarth, that dawn of the Fourth Moon in 1536 P.V. Top hats, labelled gifts for gentlemen, arrived laced with plague-bearing fleas. Chaos erupted: mobs formed, the bee test was invoked in a locked town hall, and the infected buried alive before their final breath. Nicolas, ensconced in Corax Asylum, orchestrated this not for conquest, but amusement. The ensuing complaints climbed the chain to Count Tepes, then Theaten, yet no culprit emerged. Rumours swirled, but Nicolas feigned ignorance, his sardonic grin hidden behind a taller top hat. Here, humour masked lethality; the jest of gentlemanly gifts birthed mass death, reminding all that his whims could unmake a village without a trace.

This pattern recurs with metronomic precision. Sapari’s shipyard wood vanished amid a fabricated pirate armada, magnetic anchors slamming hulls together in a symphony of ruin. The harbour master, replaced for his folly, penned frantic missives upward. Again, no sender claimed the deed, only whispers of a grinning horse. Nicolas’s pocket watch ticked indifferently as he penned complaints to Behmor about floating chairs, his own absurdities paling beside these engineered farces. Each prank asserts supremacy: not through overt force, but the subtle terror of unpredictability. Subjects dare not act, lest they become the punchline.

Within Corax, this tool sharpens to a blade. Pointless assemblies in the meeting hall, speeches laced with meaningless decrees, clocks clanging discordantly through corridors of mirrors. Inmates, thesapiens and vampires alike, endure the levitating chair’s theatrics, the gramophone’s screeching violin concertos. Nicolas crawls tiger-like, demanding audience for his levitating woes, only to ignore their plight. The asylum’s filth, the rusty scalpels, the sewage washrooms, all framed as “state of the art.” His “I Declare You Insane” parchments, flung into drains when unread, mock the very concept of sanity. Authority flows not from edict, but from the erosion of reason itself; who can rebel against a lord who turns existence into farce?

Even fashion serves this sardonic rule. The orange-green silk suit yields to yellow-burgundy plaid, topped by the tallest hat, enforced by terror. Norick’s taller hat prompted the milliner’s decapitated head as Sapari’s tavern sign. Insolence dies laughing, or rather, silenced. Nicolas’s reinventions, his pocket watches tinkered to madness, proclaim: I control even absurdity.

Humour, then, is Nicolas’s sceptre. It disarms, confounds, and crushes, rendering resistance futile amid the grotesque. The Deep trembles not at his fangs, but his folly; for in a world of calculated dread, the jester reigns supreme.

Immortalis Book One August 2026