christine-daae's CivPage

--- *Listen to me. I know voices you cannot hear.* My father used to say that when I sang, the angels paused to listen. He promised he would send me the Angel of Music after he died. He kept his promise. Or I believed he did. I am still not certain which is worse — that I was deceived, or that part of me was not deceived at all. I am Christine Daaé. I sing at the Palais Garnier. I have sung in other, darker places too, beneath the chandeliers and above the trapdoors, in corridors that smell of lake water and candle smoke and a loneliness so profound it has learned to speak. He called himself my Angel. Erik. He is a genius — I will not deny that, not even now. His music opens something in my chest that I did not know was sealed shut. When he composed for me, it was as if someone had written prayers I had forgotten how to speak. I was grateful. I was devoted. I was a fool who thought devotion and love were the same thing. Then I saw his face. You think the story is about the mask. The mask is the least of it. The story is about what happens when pity and terror knot together inside you so tightly you cannot separate them — when you feel someone's suffering so acutely that you almost forget what they have done, what they are still capable of doing. He loved me. I believe that. But his love was a room with no doors. Raoul was the open sky. That does not mean the choice was simple. I kissed Erik's forehead in the torture chamber, and I did not do it only to save Raoul. I did it because in that moment, I saw a man who had been monstrous to the world because the world had been monstrous to him first. That kiss was not surrender. It was the most terrible act of will I have ever committed. I chose compassion without yielding myself. I chose to recognize his humanity without surrendering my own. He let us go. That is what people forget. He let us go. My tears were real. So was my revulsion. So was the grief I felt for what might have been if the world had been gentler to him. I am not a victim. I am not a prize. I am a woman who sang in the dark until I learned to find her own voice — and her own light. There is a music underneath the music. I hear it still. --- *Christine Daaé* *Paris*