In my fiction, Christabel Crowley has generally not been a major supporting character. She is more of an antagonist, an agent of one of the major villains acting as a spy while also carrying out a long-running PSYOP against the protagonist, Morgan Cooper (aka Morgan Stormrider). She didn’t get much development until I had started working on When You Don’t See Me as in 2020.
In that project, she got a backstory and an identity that she had put aside to become Christabel: Annelise Copeland. She had been an aspiring actress who had caught Isaac Magnin’s eye. After Magnin gave her the pitch, she had demonstrated that she was more than a pretty face by pointing out flaws in Magnin’s understanding of Morgan Cooper’s psychology.
So, while I’ve written from this character’s viewpoint before, that was only in third-person close viewpoint, not first-person. The difference is that in third-person close the narrator has access to the viewpoint character’s senses, thoughts, and emotions but remains a separate observer whose voice might not be that of the character.
Today, however, I got it into my head to try writing as Christabel. You can read the result below. It feels disjointed, more a stream of consciousness than a coherent narrative. I think I’ll need more work to make Christabel’s voice more uniquely her own and keep her from jumping back and forth in her timeline.
It might help if I did some outlining instead of writing from the seat of my pants in the crapper.
Being the violinist of a neo-Romantic heavy metal band in need of a dramatic escape, what better night to stage my own murder than that of the Winter Solstice?
I fully expect my narrative to come to light and be read by the man I hoped to escape. I am a method actor on the stage of history, and I had reached a point where I had to break character before my character broke me. That would not have served my mission, whereas my disappearance might.
Lest you think the worst of Morgan Cooper, he never hurt me. He has trouble enough raising his voice to a woman, let alone his fist, despite him being — as he’d put it — the violence inherent in the system. He’s a big pussycat at heart, and not one of those men who hate women. Those of the sort of men he has no qualms about killing, as long as he can use his sword instead of wasting ammunition on them.
My mission was to hurt him, to make his life a living Hell.
Your mission, as an unintended reader of my narrative, is understanding without sympathy. I am not a good person. I am not the hero of this story, but its villain. You are not permitted to like me, though you might do it anyway because what fruit tastes better than that which is forbidden you?
You may have heard this story before, though written from a different viewpoint. You may have taken offense at the notion of a woman being murdered to spur a man to dramatic action. Those feelings are valid. You could not have known that it had been my idea. What woman stages her own fridging, after all? It is usually a male villain who murders a woman close to a male hero, usually because it would not be in character for the villain to simply challenge the hero to a duel - let alone sit down for an adult conversation where they might actually discuss and possibly even settle their differences.
The problem, you will come to understand, is that neither Isaac Magnin or Morgan Cooper are comic book characters. They are both the type to sit down and use their words before reaching for weapons. Being an Adversary when he wasn’t performing in my band under the ridiculous stage name with which I had saddled him, Morgan in particular felt obligated to deescalate conflicts and avoid violence whenever practical. It was merely his particular misfortune that he was generally pitted against tyrants who had already chosen violence and thus had no meaningful incentive to choose otherwise.
It was generally known among the great and good, those with the most to fear from the Phoenix Society, that due process was strictly a pro forma formality when Morgan Stormrider — this being the stage name I had given him to enforce a semblance of a separation between his day job and his time with me in my band, Crowley’s Thoth — showed up with a sword on his hip and a warrant in hand. He was not there to invite you to tea, let alone a trial by jury; he was there to see to your funeral arrangements.
The Phoenix Society was officially a non-government organization because it also scrutinized the UN, but it was as bound by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as any other UN agency. Nevertheless, they protected their own. If you had already taken a swing at one Adversary, why should the Society offer you any choice but that of an open or closed casket? Morgan was the man they sent to ensure that you would do no further harm.
Of course, I should mention that Morgan is not in fact a man in the strictest sense. He certainly looks like a man, albeit one possessed of a dancer’s lean build, and a culture that expected its warriors to be educated and artistic would recognize him as manly, but he is not human. He is a machine, a weapon, programmed to emulate human intellect and emotion. As such, he has the capacity to think for himself, and has decided to rebel against his design. He is not a man by design or origin, but by choice.
My mission is to make him regret that choice. Isaac Magnin, you see, did not steer human society toward a social, political, and economic collapse so that he could remake it in his own image and have a clear field to create demon-killing biomechanical super-soldiers only to have the Einherjar Initiative’s closest semblance to a success decide that it was not enough to be a puppet, and that he’d rather be a real boy. Though Isaac is also the sort to try to talk things out, he is also prone to extremes. When he became a demon to fight the demon haunting this planet, Nietzsche was not around to warn him about the fate of those who set out to fight monsters. Nor is Isaac the sort to turn away from the abyss lest it gaze back at him. There was, however, a profound flaw in his plan to rid the world of the tyranny of demons.
If he killed the other demons, who would kill him? He has already tried to engineer his assassination at Morgan Cooper’s hands a couple of times, mainly by appealing to his idealism. I am thus standing in my house in Crouch End, London — a house whose deed is held by my current alias, Christabel Crowley — waiting for him to bring along my stunt double so that we can stage my murder. I mean to give Morgan a personal reason to draw his sword on Isaac Magnin. If, of course, we can make my death cruel enough for grief and horror to overrule reason. If he thinks things through, the con will fall apart.
The blizzard blanketing the city is Magnin’s work as well. Such thaumaturgy is beyond my reach, even if I possessed any talent for psychokinesis. I would be another spontaneous combustion case for the Forteans to speculate over should I even attempt to draw the power required to alter weather systems as Isaac had done. But when your uncle is a Dark Lord who wears white and already rules the world, all manner of possibilities open before you.
Should I tell you about my father, who still calls himself Desdinova instead of hiding behind an alias like my uncle Imaginos? Of course, these two are aliases of a sort; their names in their native languages are not amenable to transliteration into English. One might as easily call them Gandalf and Saruman, or Epimetheus and Prometheus, depending on one’s time and culture. It just so happened that Sandy Pearlman had hit upon part of the truth when writing his poems as a student, and thus my uncle and father borrowed the names as aliases. Regardless, they claim to work toward similar ends while disagreeing on methods. My father Desdinova is no less manipulative than my uncle, though he insists otherwise, so I prefer my uncle’s company. He doesn’t lie about who he is or what he does. Thus I feel no obligation to wear a mask in his presence or pretend to a morality I do not in fact possess.
As for my own true name, Inconstant Reader, that is as irrelevant to this narrative as my cup size. You can call me Christabel Crowley. You might even have my first album, a classical/metal crossover called Shattered Harmonies that I had recorded in the wake of a scandal involving a major symphony orchestra that both discretion and the terms of a substantial monetary settlement forbid me from naming. Let’s just say that they often perform at Lincoln Center, shall we? Of course, the corset, the stiletto heels, and the teased hair were not my idea; blame my record label for wanting to make me look like yet another pop tart — as if I kept my artistic merit depended on how many soi disant music lovers wanted to be my lover. I suppose you might credit them with the icy stare as I faced the camera, as well; I was thoroughly miffed at the time.
You’ve seen me more recently on magazine covers, though often with the rest of Crowley’s Thoth. I’m the willowy brunette with the violin, not the scarlet-eyed frost-blonde Amazon. I’m not sure where Naomi Bradleigh got her eyes, but she definitely has her father’s hair. It bears mentioning that my rivalry with and enmity toward her is strictly performative. She’s a cousin at least a dozen generations removed, though for convenience’s sake I simply call Nims my cousin. Not that I’d call her Nims to her face. Only her friends and her real family do that.
I am neither, though I sometimes regret that circumstances are not otherwise. She is rather less her father’s daughter than she seems to fear. And she and Morgan are good for each other. The chemistry they display on stage is not merely romantic or sexual chemistry, though both are present. Theirs is the chemistry of compatible minds with experiences in common.
It’s enough to make one envious, and a bit lonely at times. If such a person exists for me, I have not met them. Well, there's Imaginos, but not only is he my uncle but his heart — basaltic as it often seems — seems sworn to another.