Unto A Golden Dawn: The Catalyst Dossier

Chapter I – The Boy and the Mirror (excerpt)

Chapter I – The Boy and the Mirror

Before the prayers turned bitter, before the ink stained everything he loved, Aleister loved only one man:
His father.
Edward Crowley was tall, warm-voiced, and impossibly kind. A preacher with the Plymouth Brethren, he carried scripture like sunlight. Where others scolded, Edward smiled. Where others damned, he forgave.
He let Aleister sit beside him on the makeshift stages in church halls and market greens. Let him hold the hymnal. Let him help pack their cases when they traveled from one village to another, the Word echoing behind them like a caravan of second chances.
“You listen better than any man I know,” Edward would say, ruffling his son’s hair. “That’s the beginning of wisdom.”
Aleister beamed under that touch. He wrote verses in imitation of his father’s speech patterns—florid, patient, precise. He wanted to be him. Not just in name. In spirit.

The coughing started one winter and never stopped.
Edward laughed it off for months. “Just the lungs clearing themselves,” he’d say between sermons, waving a hand as if illness was beneath his notice. But the sound grew wetter. The walks shorter. The sermons more spaced apart.
Aleister noticed before Emily did. He watched his father fumble a line mid-preaching and sway slightly, catching himself with one hand on the pulpit. He watched the tremble in his fingers afterward, hidden behind the hymn book.
When they returned to Leamington Spa that spring, Edward took to bed more often than not.
He still smiled. Still read to Aleister. Still quoted scripture between fits of breath.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” he said once through cracked lips.
Aleister shook his head.
“No. You taught me better than that.”

Edward died just after sunrise on a warm day that felt like it should’ve held birdsong.
Aleister was told not to go into the room. Emily had shut the door. The doctor whispered things that felt like lies.
He waited outside the threshold for hours, watching the dust dance in the hall.
He would never forget the sound his mother made when she realized the man inside would never open his eyes again.
It wasn’t grief. It was fury.

The funeral was held three days later, under a cloudless sky so blue it felt like mockery.
Aleister wore black because he was told to. Emily wore gray because she always had.
They buried Edward Crowley beneath a cedar tree just east of the chapel—a tree he once said reminded him of patience. The wind stirred its branches like pages, though the Bible in the reverend’s hands stayed shut most of the time. He read from memory. The same verses he read for strangers. The same cadence, the same rhythm. It felt rehearsed.
“Ashes to ashes,” the man intoned. “Dust to dust.”
Aleister didn’t cry. Not out of strength. Out of distance.
The dirt looked fake. The coffin too small.
When the reverend said amen, Aleister whispered something beneath it—just loud enough for the roots to hear.
“I loved you. I listened. They’ll never speak of you like I will.”
Emily heard. She bristled beside him.
“Aleister,” she hissed. “Not here.”
But the boy didn’t move. He stared down into the hole in the earth as though it were a mirror—and somewhere in it, he saw himself beginning to vanish.
The dirt made a hollow sound as it landed. A drumbeat. A warning. A door closing.
Later, after the crowd had drifted back toward tea and murmured sympathy, Aleister stayed behind.
He waited until he was alone. Then he stepped forward and touched the rough wood of the gravemarker.
“If you’re in Heaven,” he said quietly, “I’ll try to see you again.”
“If you’re not—I’ll find a way.”
The cedar creaked overhead.
He didn’t pray.

The house smelled of lavender polish and iron. Emily preferred it that way—everything clean, bloodless, restrained.
Aleister stepped inside still in funeral clothes, boots scuffed from the graveyard path. He didn’t bother to remove them. She was waiting in the parlor, arms crossed, lips pursed like punctuation.
She didn’t speak at first. Let the silence work on him.
It didn’t.
So she began with a surgical strike.
“What you said at the grave was shameful.”
Aleister stood at the doorway, back straight. “I said goodbye.”
“You said more than that.”
She stepped toward him, heels sharp on the floorboards. “You made a scene. You spoke to your father like he was a ghost in the dirt. You made the reverend uncomfortable.”
Aleister blinked once. “Good.”
“You don’t speak to the dead, Aleister. You pray. You let them rest.”
“I don’t want him to rest,” he said quietly. “I want him to speak.”
That stopped her—for a second.
Then her face closed like a book.
“He would be ashamed of you.”
Aleister flinched. Not visibly. Internally. A small glass inside him cracked.
“You’re not special,” she said. “You’re not a prophet. You’re a child. And you will not carry this house into scandal and madness.”
“That was your job,” he said.
She slapped him. Open palm. Precise. Not rage. Precision.

Later that night, in his bedroom, Aleister sat on the floor with his knees pulled to his chest. The candle burned low. He hadn’t spoken since supper. Hadn’t touched his journal. Hadn’t blinked much.
He stared at the wardrobe mirror across from him.
It was an old piece—gilt edges, warped slightly in the middle. His father once used it to tie his cravat. Tonight, it showed the grave. Not his room.
The cedar tree, swaying slightly in a wind Aleister couldn’t feel. The mound of fresh earth, undisturbed. A figure kneeling beside it—tall, thin, obscured by shadow.
He blinked.
The room returned.
The mirror once again showed his face—pale, ink-smudged, and suddenly very, very awake.

Emily didn’t wear black. She wore control.
She boxed up Edward’s books before the smell had left his pillow. She forbade Aleister from reading the sermons aloud. She refused to answer his questions. Any time Aleister quoted his father, she corrected him with scripture—and then scolded him for twisting it.
“You do not speak like a child of God,” she said once.
“Then perhaps God should speak more clearly,” Aleister replied.
That earned him the first slap.

They sent him away before summer ended.
Not as punishment, but as prevention. Emily called it “education.” Aleister knew better. It was containment.

Aleister Crowley had once again refused to sit properly in his chair.
He straddled it backwards, chin resting on the top rail, dark curls dangling over his eyes. His textbook was open but upside-down. His ink-stained fingers traced unfamiliar runes into the wooden desk, none of which belonged to the Latin grammar they were meant to be reciting.
Miss Hargrove stood three feet away, holding the attendance register like it might protect her.
“Mr. Crowley,” she said carefully, “you’ve yet to produce a single line of translation. Are you listening?”
He blinked at her with a kind of slow curiosity. Not defiance. Not boredom. Just that distant, glassy look children sometimes wore when they were remembering something that hadn’t happened yet.
Then he smiled. It was not a kind smile.
“Of course I’m listening, Miss. I just don’t particularly care what you think I’ve heard.”

Several boys laughed nervously. One coughed. A tall boy near the window muttered something and shifted away. Crowley’s eyes didn’t move, but his tongue pressed to the inside of his cheek like he was savoring a taste.
Miss Hargrove glanced at the blackboard, at the crucifix above the door, then back to the boy.
“Sit properly,” she said, softer now. “Please.”
Crowley obeyed. Slowly. Deliberately. Not because he had to—but because it amused him to see her relieved.
He leaned forward as if offering a confession.
“Do you know what I was thinking about?” he whispered.
Miss Hargrove didn’t answer.
He tapped the desk once, hard enough for the boys around him to flinch.
“I was wondering what Latin sounds like when screamed by angels. If they do scream. Or if they sing it backwards, like birds falling from Heaven.”
Miss Hargrove had taught for nearly twenty years. She had seen boys draw devils in margins, spit on scripture, even piss behind the organ bench—but there was something different about Aleister.
He didn’t challenge God. He dissected Him.
And now he was humming.
Low, tuneless, like a memory scraped against stone.
She turned from the blackboard and caught him writing again—his ink looping across the desk like it belonged to another alphabet. It wasn’t vandalism. It was ritual.
He paused, not looking up, and said:
“Do you think God regrets making us this way?”
Miss Hargrove blinked. “What way?”
Aleister tilted his head. “Wounded. Wanting. Mortal. Human.”
The class fell silent. Even the wind outside seemed to draw back.
Then, softly—almost reverently—he added:
“I am the snake that coils in sleep. The hush of blood. The dreams you keep.”
He smiled faintly, as though he’d just confessed to something beautiful.