The Mortal Instruments-Facts Quotes Quizzes Jokes and more! (Book 1) [completed]➰

Biography-Clary Fray

Clarissa Adele Morgenstern was born to Valentine and Jocelyn Morgenstern, roughly a year after her older brother, Jonathan. If her father had known about her and had his way, she would have been named Seraphina, after Valentine's mother.

Jocelyn had turned against her father's ideals months before her conception. During the time after her mother's first child was born, she was suffering depression because of her strange feelings of rejection towards her son. Hoping to help Jocelyn, Valentine secretly gave her doses of the angel Ithuriel's blood, hoping to "cure" her depression, unaware that she was pregnant with Clary, therefore making his daughter an "accidental" experiment.

Eventually, Jocelyn plotted the Uprising with Lucian Graymark against Valentine. She would have just left him, but realized that he would come after them, so she hoped to kill Valentine to protect her unborn child. During the Uprising, Valentine told Jocelyn that she would pay for what she had done. Jocelyn raced to her house, with Lucian, only to find it burned to the ground, with her parents', son's, and Valentine's bones. Jocelyn cried and mourned her lost son, but knew that Valentine was really alive. She then ran from the Shadowhunter world and culture, claiming that Valentine had turned her first child into a monster and wouldn't let him do the same to her other, and fled to New York to raise Clary away from her past, where Luke later followed them.

Jocelyn hoped that Clary would have a blind Inner Eye since some Shadowhunters need to be trained to see the Shadow World. However, Clary saw the Shadow World perfectly fine, and when she was three, Clary even played with faeries in the park. This prompted her mother to approach Magnus Bane and ask him to remove her Inner Eye. Unable to do so without putting Clary at risk, Magnus instead created a glamour in her mind that would make Clary forget what she saw of the Shadow World even as she saw it, with a complicated spell that needed to be recast every two years.

Along with Magnus on the day Jocelyn approached him was Tessa Gray, who volunteered to perform the ritual that would place the necessary protection spells on her, typically performed on Shadowhunter children by an Iron Sister and a Silent Brother-Brother Zachariah in her case. Clary and Jocelyn then took the surname "Fray". Jocelyn claims to have chosen that particular surname because of Tessa - it was a portmanteau of Fairchild and Gray.[1]

Clary was five when Luke finally found her and Jocelyn. Seeing how well Clary got along with him, Jocelyn allowed Luke to stay and become a staple part of their lives. In fact, he became so intermixed with Clary's life that they began to share an almost paternal relationship, with Clary admitting that she has always seen Luke as her father. When Clary was six years old, she met Simon Lewis and the two grew to be inseparable. Simon was so much a part of her life that he went to Luke's farmhouse with her in the summers on vacation. He regularly spent the night at her house and her at his where they'd stay up all night talking. However, Simon eventually fell in love with Clary, and he hid it poorly from everyone except her, who was rather oblivious to his feelings for her. Clary never knew of his feelings and simply thought of him as her best friend, and confidante. The brother that she never had.

Growing up, she was led to believe that her father was a deceased soldier named Jonathan Clark, and that the box in her mother's room with the initials J.C. were his, when it was really her brother's (Jonathan Christopher).