Nicolas DeSilva Loves Allyra. That Love Is the Real Threat.
A common misreading of Immortalis claims that Nicolas DeSilva cannot love Allyra Cavidini because he is vicious, controlling, and has no concept of consent. The assumption is that genuine feeling would soften him.
It does not. Nicolas loves her completely and without limit.
Love is not a force that automatically civilises the one who feels it. For fifteen hundred years Nicolas has lived almost solely among copies of himself. The two hundred and sixteen Nicolai occupy the same consciousness, arguing and competing endlessly, yet he has remained fundamentally alone. Allyra changes that.
Her arrival charges him with purpose. He becomes eager to win her attention. He commissions fresh clothes, concerns himself with how he looks, fixates on marriage, and invents spectacles meant to captivate her. He wants her to admire Corax, to accept it as home, and above all to accept him exactly as he is. The problem is that he is, and remains, a grotesque, self-absorbed sadist.
He sees no reason his demands should frighten her. Commanding her to kneel, to address him as Master, and to become his wife strikes him as natural proof of affection. Webster keeps trying to pull him back, aware that the pressure is pushing her away. Nicolas cannot recognise the conflict inside his own want. He craves her free choice while refusing to accept any outcome other than yes.
The affection is authentic. The brutality is authentic. Neither erases the other.
What he desires most is constant proximity, to be pressed against her and inside her so thoroughly that departure becomes impossible. For him this is not a failing. It is the purest form of his love, the guarantee that she will stay. Whether she despises him for it is irrelevant. Her permanent presence is enough.
This is the true danger Nicolas poses. He is not performing affection or using her for convenience. He loves her, and the love itself is the instrument of harm. It will not reform him. Immortalis does not depict a monster redeemed by a woman’s devotion. It shows what occurs when a monster loves with absolute sincerity and stays a monster.
Nicolas DeSilva loves Allyra Cavidini. That fact is the reason she should fear him.
