- "I just don't know how to look at the world anymore. I don't see street and traffic lights and cars. I see demons and angels. Everything's different. But, heroes aren't always the ones who win.They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up. That's what makes them heroes."
Clarissa Adele "Clary" Fairchild, also known as Clary Fray, is the beautiful, fiery red-headed, creative, intelligent, and promising Shadowhunter daughter of Jocelyn Fray and notorious Circle leader Valentine Morgenstern.
For years, Clary lived a mundane life with Jocelyn, until the return of her father and abduction of her mother, threatened her new world, throwing their lives out of balance as Clary found herself in a journey with fellow Shadowhunters to stop them.
On her 18th birthday, she finds out that she is not who she thinks she is, but rather comes from a long line of Shadowhunters — human-angel hybrids who hunt down demons.
Subject to her father's experiments, Clary was unwittingly given extra angel blood and, through this, the ability to recall powerful, ancient runes not written in the Gray Book.
When her mother is kidnapped, Clary begins a journey of self-discovery as she learns more about her past and what her future may hold. As she is forced into action, she embraces her newfound powers and realizes that she will play the central role in this new world.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
Clarissa Adele "Clary" Morgenstern was born the child of Jocelyn Fairchild and Valentine Morgenstern, two Shadowhunters who were members of the Circle., on January 12, 1998. Before she was born, however, her mother had gone into hiding, so Valentine never knew about her.
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, only to find it burned to the ground, but knew that Valentine was really alive.
After the Uprising, Jocelyn then ran from the Shadowhunter world and culture and fled/moved to New York, where she gave birth to and raise Clary away from her past, hoping to keep her away from the life of Shadowhunters, where Jocelyn's best friend, Luke Garroway, followed and later found them and integrated himself into Clary's life.
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 Jocelyn to decide to approach the warlock 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. Magnus Bane then placed a block on her mind that removed her memories of the Shadow World and made her somewhat blind to it. The spell had to be recast every two years, though the frequency increased as she aged. Magnus had built into her mind a mechanism wherein Clary would begin drawing the Angelic rune once her memories began resurfacing, notifying Jocelyn that it would be time to bring her back to Magnus.
When she was young, Clary was almost attacked by a demon. After the incident, Jocelyn rushed her to warlockand had him wipe the memories of the Shadow World from her mind.
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.
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).
Personality[]
Clary is incredibly stubborn and sarcastic, traits born out of her mother's over-protectiveness, but she is also a very caring and compassionate person. For her friends and family, Clary is willing to go to extreme lengths, often recklessly, putting herself in danger, thus usually leaving the people who care for her extremely worried and exasperated. Jace has even stated that her stubbornness matches his, which he figures was the reason they could not stand each other when they had first met.
She is also an artist like her mother, Jocelyn. She keeps a notepad of paper where she often draws out her emotions and feelings through pictures, her version of a diary, just using pictures instead of words.
Physical Appearance[]
Clary is often said to look almost exactly like Jocelyn—with their green eyes, curly red hair, slender figure, small chest and narrow hips—though she does not see it, nor does she see the beauty others often see in her. There was a time when Clary felt herself to be a smaller, less beautiful, and more childlike version of her mother, although most people disagree. She is quite short, just a little over between 5'2'' to 5'5'', has hair she considers carrot-colored.
It is mentioned a few times that she dresses in a boyish and unfashionable ensemble, wearing T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, which sometimes annoys Isabelle, who then picks out nicer clothes for her to wear. Through Isabelle's influence, she slowly shed her usually boyish fashion and began to put an effort into fixing herself up more often. She is told by a few guys to be cute or beautiful, despite what she personally thinks of herself. Jace (as seen in bonus material from his view) is also shown to find her beautiful as well as fierce and says that Clary, unlike other girls, just doesn't know it.
Powers and Abilities[]
- Nephilim physiology: Being Nephilim, Clary naturally possesses a myriad variety of enhanced physical and mental abilities granted to her by the blood of Raziel in her veins and also by the angelic Marks of the Gray Book. This includes enhanced strength, speed, agility, stamina, and coordination, which would improve over time and practice.
- The Sight: As a Shadowhunter, Clary is able to easily see through most magical illusions and layers of glamour over reality. However, due to her general ignorance to the Shadow World because of her years worth of missing memories, she still needs some prompting to see through glamour.
- Use of heavenly weapons: As a Nephilim, Clary is also able to handle heavenly weapons, such as angel blades, with effect that would normally not work for other species.
- Runic magic: Due to the angel Raziel's blood in their veins, all Shadowhunters are all able to apply runes on their skin without any real danger. These Marks, in turn, give varied effects that serve to benefit the wearer.
- Angelic blood empowerment: While all Shadowhunters have the angel Raziel's blood in them, Clary has more; particularly, she was given the blood of Ithuriel in her mother's womb due to Valentine's experiments. Because of this, she became partially linked to Ithuriel, who, when the need arose, sent her prophetic dreams and visions of the future, as well as images of long-forgotten runes, or runes not in the Gray Book and known only to angels, which she is able to recreate and use. She can also enhance the potency of common runes to make them more powerful than usual.
- Skilled swordswoman: Clary has some skill in swordsmanship, which she is still currently trying to improve under Jace's tutelage.