“She laughed. Or rather she started to laugh, and she stopped as if she
weren’t allowed to laugh. What a gay and interesting little get-together
this was going to be!…
The dark-eyed female
was enthralled. I winked at her. She would have been gorgeous if
someone had thrown her into a waterfall and held her there for half an
hour and I told her so silently.” – Lestat re: Eleni, The Vampire Lestat
This is a painting of Jacek Malczewski called simply ‘Death’ and it’s my favourite personification of death in any medium.
She’s not creepy or scary, or sexy, or abstract. She is this thick woman with worn hands, dressed as normal, with a non-stylised scythe and pins in her hair: like a farmer’s wife that just came form the field and rests against the wall, catching some sun. She is not creeping about the dying one holding her scythe over their head, she is just there, calmly waiting her turn.
This painting always fills me with peace and optimism when I think about death. She is just there, outside the window, in no hurry at all, sensible and down to earth. I can live with that.
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.
@devilsviolinistwrote 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
I-want-my-IWTV 