Allyra Cavidini loves Nicolas DeSilva because he supplies things she has never received from anyone else, even though he remains an irredeemable monster who is violent, manipulative, narcissistic, sexually insatiable, possessive, and irritating. Readers of Immortalis often ask whether Nicolas truly loves her, yet the more interesting question is why she returns that attachment. She does not love him because she expects to reform him, because she fails to notice his cruelty, or because some hidden gentleness waits beneath the surface. The attraction is not a mistake about his nature.
Physical desire forms one clear part of the bond. Nicolas exists across 216 bodies, and Allyra has a straightforward appreciation for male anatomy. The presence of an entire group of Nicolai gives her no shortage of partners. The erotic pull is mutual. She is not only the object of his appetite; she holds her own wants, which include a taste for certain of his less conventional practices. She enjoys being whipped by him. Acts that would repel an outsider can, under the right conditions, be something she actively seeks. Their sexual relationship is unconventional by design.
He also makes her laugh, though rarely when his arrogance, insults, and ridiculous demands are aimed at her. When he turns the same traits on someone else, she frequently finds the result funny. His inflated self-importance, his absurd logic, and his complete inability to notice his own stupidity can be entertaining. At times she does not want him to behave. She simply wants him to direct the irritation elsewhere.
His presence supplies another element she has lacked. Allyra has spent much of her life among people who hold plans for her, expectations of her, or an interest in what she represents. Nicolas differs in that he wants her specifically. He does not want only the Immoless, the anomaly, or the instrument of someone else’s ambition. He wants the person who is defiant, sarcastic, and independent. The attention is often overwhelming and suffocating, yet it is also constant. When she needs him, one of his bodies is usually nearby. That reliability becomes important to her.
The pattern matches the dark romance she already knew from fiction. She reads Fanu’s Molluscs and Boners, a collection of trashy novels in the genre. Nicolas behaves as though he has treated the entire form as an instruction manual. The primary Nicolai each occupy a different role drawn from those stories: the pirate, the scientist, the obsessive lover, the dangerous aristocrat, the adventurer, the protector, and further variations of the same man. He does not merely resemble the fictional figures she once read. He supplies an entire cast of them and surrounds her with versions of himself.
The Nicolai also treat her as someone capable of learning. The Electi raised her, controlled her, and prepared her for a fixed purpose; they never regarded her as an individual with potential of her own. The Nicolai do. They teach her seamanship, survival, combat, and other practical skills. Each contributes knowledge she would not otherwise acquire. They also insult her, mock her mistakes, and make the process more unpleasant than it needs to be, yet they continue the instruction. They challenge her because they consider her able to meet the challenge. Where the Electi saw a function to fill, the Nicolai see someone worth training. Their methods are monstrous, but the confidence in her capacity is genuine.
Nicolas further gives her a family, however distorted. Corax Asylum is not a wholesome household. Still, the arrangement supplies relationships she has not had before. Behmor is her stepson and the King of Irkalla. Vlad and Absolem are her sons, raised inside the Chronocell; she meets them only as adults, and the maternal response is immediate. Absolem later makes her a grandmother. Her granddaughter Bebhuna is a monstrous infant whom Allyra first struggles to understand or accept. With the help of Nicolas’s serum she comes to do so. None of it resembles ordinary family life, yet the connections carry emotional weight for her.
Even rest becomes something he can provide. Nicolas is relentlessly active. His mind moves constantly and stillness is nearly contrary to his nature. When Allyra is exhausted she asks him to mesmerise her into deep sleep so she can recover. He does so, and he allows the sleep to last longer than she requested. For a man who is restless, demanding, and obsessively possessive, the concession is notable. He wants her attention without interruption, yet in that instance he grants the peace she needs. It is a quieter form of the attachment.
Protection appears in a more violent register. When Theaten tries to drain Allyra’s blood, Nicolas becomes genuinely furious. The anger is not performed. He will not accept threats from others against the person he considers his beloved. The contradiction is plain: he is capable of extreme cruelty toward her himself, yet he is also fiercely protective. Both the protection and the cruelty are real; neither erases the other. Allyra comes to feel safer under that protection, not because Nicolas is harmless, but because the surrounding world can be more dangerous in his absence.
The 216 Nicolai are not interchangeable copies. They are distinct expressions of the same man, each carrying particular interests, abilities, temperaments, and ways of relating to her. One teaches, another entertains, another protects, another challenges, and others supply companionship, intellectual exchange, or physical affection. Together they create a wide range of experiences. Allyra does not attach herself to a single aspect of Nicolas. She attaches herself to the contradictory whole, and that attachment is both the strength of the connection and its greatest vulnerability.
The cost of that attachment becomes clearest when she leaves. After Nicolas tries to paralyse her with the spine cracker, she turns to the Nicolai for support. She does not realise that this step also belongs to his plan. He withdraws everything: his own presence, the Nicolai, the family, and the network of relationships he has built around her. The woman who had been nearly suffocated by him suddenly faces an existence in which nobody wants her company. The loneliness is unbearable. She retreats to the Lost Tower, drugs herself, and begins to hallucinate the Nicolai she has lost. Months pass. Nicolas eventually returns disguised as a beggar. Allyra does not recognise him. She tells the apparent stranger that she wants Nicolas back at any cost. He has spent so long making himself indispensable that his removal is devastating. Because he arranged the circumstances, her confession is both an expression of genuine feeling and the result of deliberate manipulation. The feelings are real. So is the trap.
Love and monstrosity are not mutually exclusive. Nicolas wants to marry her, protect her, entertain her, possess her, and keep her beside him indefinitely. Allyra enjoys his company, desires him, laughs at his absurdities, values what the Nicolai teach her, and becomes attached to the family they form. At the same time he manipulates her, frightens her, hurts her, and systematically arranges conditions that make life without him harder to bear. Her love does not make his behaviour acceptable, and his cruelty does not make the love imaginary. Both exist together, which is what makes the relationship disturbing.
When the possibility of losing her remains, Nicolas’s response is to rebuild her from himself. After fifteen centuries spent among versions of his own mind, he finds someone separate from him whom he loves. He then incorporates her into that mind so she cannot leave. The act is an extreme form of devotion, possession, and obsession. It is also monstrous.
He gets on her nerves. She drives him to distraction. They make each other laugh, furious, jealous, excited, and at times miserable. Neither can picture an existence without the other. In Immortalis that fact is not presented as a happy ending. It is a horror story.
Extreme Horror | Extreme Dark Romance | Fuck Funny Fantasy
