A Perfect Faith - Calvin, Cruse, and the Death of Her Temple

In resetting Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into the future off-world colony of blockchain transactions and high-tech ‘cybercages,’ that forms Anna Voss's Christmas Carol, I ran into a few problems early. As I've said, most of them were to do with converting the core narrative drive of Dickens’ work and re-working it to suit the gearing of my own particular genre. 

But others were a touch more practical – such as how can I best convey the way in which Eleanora Cruse is monstrous? 

In Dickens, we learn, quite early, how horrible Scrooge is, because his mere presence scares guide dogs within the first 700 words of the book, he advocates for inhumane Workhouses or death to the poor before 2,000, and he snatches up a ruler to attack a small boy for singing carols at 2,700 words. 

I realise "we learn quite early" does not feel the same as "within 3,000 words", especially if what we're learning is “once upon a time, there was a mean old man,” - but this is Dickens, after all: it takes more than 4,000 words to reach the point of Oliver Twist in which it becomes apparent that the orphans are hungry, and then there's an entertainingly horrible divergence on the licking of bowls and fingers and threats of nocturnal cannibalism that delays the moment where Oliver is famously made to ask for "more" by another 300-or so words. Dickens has never been accused of showing hesitation when verbosity was wanted - or wasn't.

My point is – as soon as we start to read the book, we see that Scrooge is a nasty person because we see him interacting with people in person, and being nasty to them every time. This works extremely well for a moneylender; it works rather less well for a dominatrix content creator like Cruse: introduce people into that equation and you are no longer describing a soulless office at odds with Cruse’s outward personality of seductive keyholding. Instead, I realised, what you are in is… well, an actual playspace. 

Firstly, that requires a very different book – possibly one with full glossy pictures. Secondly, Cruse is awful, but no self-respecting sub (nor even any self-hating sub with a dangerous and ill-directed humiliation kink) would stick with her in person: she had to be removed, and doing things digitally. 

In many ways this was brilliant (it meshed wonderfully with the Credits-and-Blockchain economy, which I had set my heart on once I realised how my Marley analogue could be bound to the blockchain rather than with ledgers and cashboxes), but it did present the need to give Cruse a virtual space. 

Hence, I invented her “Temple,” where the subs gather, and praise Cruse, and send Tribute, and are teased and edged and kept in relatively happy submission by – as they imagine – Cruse herself: in reality, of course, she has outsourced virtually all of this to Bec and to AI avatars creating “content” to preset scripts intended to get as much – or more – Tribute from her subs as they could possibly bear to give.

And so, if she was having a Temple community full of eager subs, I figured Cruse would never bother to manage everything herself, and before realising she needed Bec, she’d probably have outsourced some labour. So I gave her a mod, and named him Calvin.

He isn’t a major character ­- at least on paper. He doesn’t dominate scenes (he is in two, maybe two and a half), and he barely makes it onto the page before he is kicked, banned from the Temple forever. Yet the story’s engine won’t fire without him. 

At first glance, I suspect most readers barely even register he’s there. But he’s my “are there no workhouses” moment, my charity collectors horrified at Scrooge’s inhumanity.

Because without Calvin, Cruse’s Temple doesn’t merely change – it rots. He is banned in an outburst of Cruse’s greed and pique, and it’s his loss that seeds the horrors Cruse sees when confronted with the Ghost of Christmas Future (no spoilers, but – well, it’s the Ghost of Christmas Future. It is not a Friendly Ghost.)  

For those of you who’ve not yet bought a copy of Anna Voss’s Christmas Carol – first, you should! – this is the critical moment, the point at which Cruse destabilises even her own legacy, smashing into the happy chatter of her Temple - where the Flock are cheerfully wishing one another 'Merry Christmas' - in a fit of unstable outrage at the fact one of her subs has had to reduce his tribute to cover medical expenses:

****

 The panicked flurry of messages halted so abruptly it felt like a physical impact.
 

“Start edging,” Cruse typed. “I want every one of you maggots in actual physical pain. I can’t believe you’d leave me suffering and fucking chattering. Playing. Ignoring me just to wish each other ‘Merry Christmas’. Anyone who fucking mentions Christmas in this channel again gets kicked. Fucking bullshit.”
 

Calvin, one of the longest-standing members of the Flock, a fixture in the Temple so well-established and trusted that Cruse had once appointed him a mod, swallowed hard at his desk, and ventured to type:
 

“I think none of us will ever forgive Nathaniel, Goddess, and we’re so sorry for messing about. We should have done better, Goddess. But please, Goddess… Surely you don’t mean Christmas is bullshit? We can still wish you a merry Christmas?”
Cruse kicked him instantly, banning him from the Temple without a single thought for the years of devotion he’d shown her – or for the fact being kicked meant she’d retain the unlock codes to his Cybercage, currently set to deliver a minimum of 50 random edges a day.
 

The rest of the Temple fell silent as the Flock began logging off, sobbing to themselves in their mutual isolation.
 

The chat stilled. Bec wiped away a tear, shivering anew as the server fans spun down as the load dropped. The “locked boys online” counter fell steadily. Eight hundred. Three hundred. Fifty. One.

-- Anna Voss’s Christmas Carol, © Anna Voss, 2025

****

 

(Notice here, incidentally, Bec is already the most ethical person in the room. No wonder she jumps at the chance to correct the way Cruse looks at the world). 

In this moment, and those preceding it, not only do we see what a wonderful community the Temple is capable of being, if Cruse could only see it, but we also have a hint of the way in which that community has held itself together as Cruse grew more and more indifferent.  

And yes, much of that is down to Bec. But a lot of the quiet work is down to Calvin, as well. 

Because while Bec knows what Cruse is, and is doing her best within the system, Calvin is taking Cruse’s goodness – her ethics – on trust. He believes in the system, he believes that even though Cruse is sometimes cruel, she has a reason, and she cares about her subs. He believes in her, and he believes in the system he thinks exists as a contract between himself and the rest of the Flock, and Cruse as their keyholder and domme.

In Dickens, that "are there no prisons" moment lands, because although the two rich gentlemen hear Scrooge ask "Are there no workhouses," they cannot believe he is serious: even when he says he will give "nothing," they at first believe he must mean he will donate but anonymously.

And, in the same way, Calvin hears Cruse attack the very Temple and Flock that is devoted to her, but he cannot believe she means it: her monstrosity is so outside his view of the world, he is convinced there is a mistake. 

That's why I called him Calvin: he's a believer. 

I don’t particularly wish to drag theology into what should be a nice, wholesome blog about femdom, but Calvinism – after John Calvin – has at its core a belief in predestination and the idea that structure and order matter. 

And so, inside the Temple, Calvin believes in rules. He believes in hierarchy. He believes that if everyone fulfills their assigned role within the precious little society of Cruse's Temple – whatever that role is, domme, sub, or mod – then Cruse’s cruelty still has meaning, that however extreme her demands or however challenging the Flock’s denial, their suffering is not arbitrary: it’s a form of worship, and a way to prove he and the Flock support Cruse.  

By this point, Cruse is already breaking that contract: she claims to be furious at finding the Flock chatting among themselves while she's been "working her fingers to the bone" - but all the work is done by Bec, by her avatars, by her automated, pre-scripted engagement. Her temple is already hollow, her Flock sustained more by themselves than by their Domme - which is why her tantrum quoted above is so devastating. 

But Calvin doesn't know that, and can't believe that. He believes in Cruse, as the Domme she's pretended to be.  

And it’s that belief in order that gives him the confidence to challenge Cruse in the passage I quoted above – indeed, that’s why he has to. He believes in Cruse, and he believes her when she claims Nathaniel has cheated her (though, in truth, he hasn’t; Cruse is just too broken to realise that). But Calvin sees Cruse, his own Domme, trying to destabilise the order. Undermining the entire community by claiming they can’t even mention Christmas - even if it's to say they want her to have a good Christmas.  

His challenge isn't a power-grab, it’s not an insult, it’s not even disrespect. He’s a man who truly believes in what the Temple could and should be, if Cruse would let it... and he’s doing the only thing he can do when a true believer sees their system start to wobble under the tyranny of a person in authority kicking against the structured order his society relies on to exist: 

He speaks out. 

And, because Cruse, at this stage, is a tyrant, she reacts the way a tyrant always does when challenged: she lashes out, and punishes, and exiles the person who challenged her: the one person still trying to assert order from inside her increasingly broken model.  

Without Calvin, the faith is gone. The Flock instantly stills; the subs logging off in isolation and misery. And, by the Future vision, Calvin is gone – and so is Bec.

Without faith – by which, in less theological terms, I mean without trust – in their Domme, the Flock cannot continue as a community. All that can be left is hollow, unsexy extraction. A Temple that still uses the language of rules and ritual, but no longer believes in anything at all – and without Calvin there to keep the faith, there’s nothing even Bec’s ethics and compassion can do, to hold the fragile Temple community together.

Because Calvin was the last person who truly believed the rules mattered. And Bec is the only person with the right to teach Cruse why they did.

Bec gets to show that across a huge, involved, wonderful chapter. Calvin gets two lines in the whole book. But he also gets this post, because when his domme became too cruel, it was Calvin that dared to challenge her - and her reaction is so egregiously cruel that it summons a reckoning that will change Cruse forever.

That’s not only brave, it’s right. And I feel like I owe it to him to recognise it. 

If you want to see it unfold in more detail, as well as what comes after, Anna Voss’s Christmas Carol is available to buy now, just in time for you to read on Christmas Eve!