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Tom Hiddleston quotes Josephine Hart, gifs from here X]

Well yeah, there have been trapdoors in theatres for ages. A trapdoor wasn’t necessary for this since Lestat got the info of Nicolas’ death from a letter. If you mean that even Eleni was fooled, then, yes, that’s possible. But I think Eleni was close to Nicolas and would be in on the scheme.

So who knows, maybe Eleni wrote the letter at Nicolas’ request, or Armand’s request… maybe Nicolas himself asked her to do it. We don’t know his reasons for suicide just as we don’t know why he’d fake his death. If he faked his death, we can probably assume he didn’t want Lestat to know he was alive or try to search for him, EVER. Eleni and Armand are both still in canon as far as Prince Lestat, so only they can answer these questions.

@devilsviolinist wrote a good post on Nicki survival theories here. Check it out.

Did AR intend that death to have been faked or real? We have unreliable narrators *shrug* She hasn’t made any hints as to Nicolas resurfacing in the next book, but at this point IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME. In fact, I would love for us to have our very own Civil War