Story synopsis
MTB Synopsis
At a glance: “Martyr the Bride is a thrilling epic that follows the life of a young woman named Chase (Chasity) Grayson as she descends into madness, after dispelling the truth about her marriage and about what she really is - not just a wife, or a clerk, or a woman, but a poet whose heart is filled with rage and music. It’s music that ultimately ignites and sets her free, leading her to become the frontman for heavy-metal rock band Martyr the Bride. Filled with gritty and surrealist imagery and drenched in lovelorn melancholia, this drama illustrates how pain is one of life’s most sacred gifts, because of the ways it shows us exactly who we are and what we’re made of.” - Kai Briscoe, Writer and Illustrator, 11/11/22 (edited 2/2/26)
The story is set in the early 1990’s and opens with Chase on her first day as the Ezra Mental Health Clinic’s new front desk clerk - a job she doesn’t want, and isn’t very good at. The Ezra Clinic is the largest employer in town, and also where her husband Arthur, or Art for short, is lead researcher in patient medicine. The couple live in the sleepy small town of Ezra - which the facility is named after, after marrying right out of high school.
Art is a cynical and dry personality who appears too serious next to Chase’s flippant humor and childlike playfulness, and the couple have a strained relationship, in part due to personality differences, and also financial strain as the country slips further into economic recession. The latter causes Chase to give up her life as a stay at home wife to help put food on the table, something she doesn’t mind but Art does. He expresses concerns about household work falling behind and his dinner not being ready in time.
Shortly after starting her job, Chase meets the Head Charge Nurse, River Wade Jameson, and the two strike up a lighthearted friendship. Chase begins to enjoy her job and coworkers like River, and other characters observe chemistry developing between the young clerk and the handsome and charismatic nurse.
At Ezra Clinic, Chase finds archived medical records of when her estranged father was a patient, noting that he was described as having mental health symptoms that are similar to ones that have recently started appearing within her. In addition to River, she makes friends with several people at Ezra including another clerk named Shyla, her boss Trey, and mischievous juvenile patient Laura “Pickett” Colts.
Pickett seems to have an unhealthy fixation with her - often sneaking around town and showing up randomly while Chase is out running errands. Pickett is a thorn in the side of all staff members, often pranking them by stealing items off their desks or setting boobie-traps. Chase gets her back and is often sharing a laugh with the teen, and this fondness leads to Chase letting her shadow her at work instead of sit in the “ultra boring and stupidly lame rehab courses”. Her respect and closeness to Chase is what leads her to being the first to notice the chemistry developing between her and River, and the first to call her out.
Something happens and Chase is faced with a question: do I keep this to myself, or embrace what happened?
Her decisions lead to a dizzying cascade of events. The plot and Chase’s character unravel in chaotic waves of emotions, lyrics, hallucinations,
Chapter 1: Some Kind of Genesis - Synopsis
Chapter one opens with Chasity getting ready for her first day as the front desk clerk at the Ezra Clinic for the Criminal and Clinically Insane. The TV is on in the background as she preps coffee and breakfast, playing a religious sermon, with the scripture “How lonely sits the city That was full of people! How like a widow is she, who was great among the nations! The princess among the provinces Has become a slave!” (NKJV)” read aloud.
(For context, Lamentations 1:1 depicts a haunting image of Jerusalem in ruins following the Babylonian conquest. The verse laments that the city, once bustling and influential as a "princess among the provinces," now sits "solitary," "like a widow," and has been reduced to a "slave". This signifies a total reversal of fortune from prosperity to desolate captivity.) For the story’s purposes, this is meant to allude to Chase’s struggle of identity within her marriage.
Chase (Chasity) talks to her best friend Felix on the phone as she drives into the Ezra parking lot. In this chapter, she meets some of the folks at Ezra: Trey Ricks (her supervisor), Clide (handyman and ID photographer), Teesa (daytime Ezra nurse), River Jameson Wade (Head Charge nurse, eventual lover), Pickett (teen patient) and her roommate Paige, Shyla (Ezra clerk), Elijah (her husband Arthur’s lab assistant) and Foal Fowl (one of the patients housed in the criminal wing, a famous painter who lost his mind attacking friends and lovers).
There are clues to the plot sprinkled within chapter one, including her unhappiness with her marriage, her father’s admittance to Ezra in the past and diagnoses, visual anomalies that hide in the corner of her field of sight and direct visual and audio hallucinations that seem to worsen when Chase is under stress. There’s also Pickett’s surrender to Ezra by her parents tied to her late older brother’s suicide, chemistry between Chase and River blooming, hints of River’s tendency to play with the hearts of young women, the secret that Ezra is not doing well financially and that its core function isn’t healing people, as well as continued religious themes all throughout that set the tone for the world Chase inhabits. Most notably to the central theme and plot are the moments where Chasity displays her passion for music: sitting writing poetry and lyrics, or her lyrics sprawl across the page in a dream-like narration. Readers see her as her happiest self, singing and dancing in the car, kitchen, or out in nature, gaining the impression that her highest calling is related to music.
The arc of the story starts with the hint Elijah gives to Chase to investigate a letter from the state her husband receives, about the continuation of Ezra’s operation. She solicits the help of Clide to photograph the letter during his nightly rounds cleaning the lab, in exchange for cigarettes. Clide snaps and develops the photos and tapes a note to a milk carton for Pickett to visit him in the photo lab the next morning. There he gives her one copy of the letter photo to give to Chase, which she does. Chase reads the letter and is shocked to learn that her husband has kept such a huge secret from her: that Ezra isn’t a hospital, it’s a testing ground where the government tests experimental drugs on patients and sells the rights to those drugs to large pharmaceutical companies, and not only that, but it has received more than one notice of potential closure. This is how she figures out the real reason Art wanted her to get a job—to build a nest egg and prepare for the worst. She is angry about the truth of the place she works for, and angrier that her husband hid the truth about the threat to their livelihoods. This lie exacerbates her contempt for her spouse.
During the monthly ‘Family Visitation Day’ for patients, Chase is busy checking in all the family guests at the front and sending them to their waiting areas, when River approaches and chats her up.
An older male—patient’s family member, requests her phone number when she offers him hotline information related to his loved one. She handwaves his remarks with a laugh and sends him on his way. River leans in and says to her “So, do you only discriminate giving your number out to men over 40?” and in a comedic Freudian slip Chase blurts out “you’re only 34!”. The nurse and her stare at each other intensely, as both realize the implications of what she said. Chase turns beat red. River smiles and leaves, and the Family Visitation Day events proceed.
At the end of the day, Chase is seen undressing and getting ready for a shower when she hallucinates a female humanoid monster named Nightshade in the bathroom with her. Nightshade taunts her in a mocking tone, directly calling out Chase’s subconscious desire to be with River and her sinful nature. Nightshade stands in the reflection of the bathroom mirror as blood drips down the glass spelling out the words “how much longer?” and “you can’t walk this back.” The sight terrifies Chase and her mind flashes back to the notes in her estranged father’s file and she grabs a bottle of wine binge drinks herself to sleep—something she notes as being uncharacteristic.
The chapter concludes with Nightshade appearing in her dreams, quoting the bible verse Psalms 6:6 “every night I soak my bed with my tears” a hint at emotional turmoil starting to bubble in the young bride’s heart—she doesn’t want to be married to Arthur, when men like River make her feel alive, and she doesn’t want to be a desk clerk when she has music in her heart.
In the final scene of chapter one, Chase startles awake, screaming, and finds herself alone once again—both physically (lying there in the dark in the moment) and symbolically (in her emotional life).