MESMOLOTH

In the last few weeks, I’ve outlined and even started a couple drafts of a piece that will likely remain unfinished. Inspired generally by existential fiction, mostly from the parts of the SCP Foundation canon that explore the relationship between the people of that universe and the authors that wrote them. Some of my favorites are among them, including ones about people escaping the fiction to interact briefly with the wiki’s forums.

So, the idea was ringing in my head, and I started outlining. It was a challenge, but I greeted it enthusiastically. My premise was, at the synopsis level, very simple. A main character, through an oneiric trance, explores the xaeic realm of lies– and through their journey and existential debate, reaches cosmic revelations about their reality and the one that lay above it.

Mesmoloth, the realm of lies, was an easy pick for the setting of the piece. People joke about fiction simply being someone lying to the reader, and I figured that was a worthy enough reason on its own. But as I thought more about it, and pored over the outline, I started to debate with myself. Lying to the reader is one thing, but perhaps too I was lying to the characters.

But, that was only a shower thought. The character was ambiguous and in some iterations I kept them entirely anonymous but for drafting purposes I was just using Bac Sang. She was a character I had used to explore a lot of mental health and insecurity issues: body dysmorphia, loneliness, imposter syndrome, and the like. In many ways, she represented the person I am at my most confused and desperate– when things get so bad they border on madness.

In hindsight, Bac Sang was the perfect character. Her issues and flaws reflect my own, and it is through her I explore a lot of my vulnerabilities. Part of the mental journey she takes comes from reckoning with issues of belonging and being misunderstood, but finding a kinship with her theoretical creator in the universe atop hers. When she doubts herself, or feels distant from those she’s closest to, or interrogates her own relation to reality, she isn’t alone. If she reflects a creator, a grand liar who constructed this world and her, then she couldn’t suffer alone, after all.

The culmination of this logickal cascade, over agonizing hours fighting the very web of reason, the vertigo of arguing against her own existence, was that she, her family, her world– even the very khiic lattice that defined all she thought she knew– were fictions. A great lie. And that the god of lies itself was the act of that fiction, a thing whose greatest trick was convincing the universe that it existed. And if she could witness the act, the face of the Un-Goddess, perhaps witness the lie being told, then maybe she could break free of it.

Coming up with her map of reasoning was a challenge, but I was broadly satisfied. Often when writing cosmic horror, the presentation is more important than what is being described. Lyricism, perspective bending, defamiliarization, the like, and particularly the metatext itself, often go far more into describing a horror than the definites of its existence. I was generally able, though it was a task-and-a-half, to elaborate on Bac Sang’s descent into terrifying lucidity using those techniques. Her assumption at the cliffs of maybe, the desolation in the non-prison, and the final tragic climax when she unshackles herself from her memories fond and foul, and denies their existence, and therefore her own.

What had ended up stumping me was not something I originally thought. Like I said, I’m generally adept at revelating visions of metaphysical horror. It’s my favorite thing to do. But here– with Bac Sang upon the highest logickal mountain of Mesmoloth, where no one still fooled may climb, prepared to open her eyes to the true face of the great lie she has been inhabiting, and see the Un-Goddess for whom she has searched what felt to her like the waning years of her life– I was at a loss.

How do you describe something that is a falsehood? I could use any number of phrases– a gulping void, an unseeable star, a wound channel in someone’s very psyche– but all of these would be positive statements about something that isn’t. It would be a lie at the end of a story that needed to end with the truth.

But what was more, I needed to show the ur-lie. I needed to describe the trick that convinced an entire reality of its realness. It’s relatively easy to write someone realizing they’re fictional. It’s not so easy to write someone seeing out of the page.

The more I tried, the more frustrated I became. I tried silly things like describing me breaking through reality to speak to Bac Sang. I tried being clever by redacting the passage, or hiding text in HTML comments, but none of these were actually going to do the trick. I tried drugs, alcohol, even going off my meds. I tried to incite psychosis just to see if I could part myself from my own reality. I spent weeks awake at night, huddled in my bed or drying my eyes against a computer screen, in search of a way to end Bac Sang’s tale.

Nothing could name the true face of a hallucination. Nothing, in the end could describe the act of my lie. Nothing I could do could write Bac Sang out of her own narrative.

And so, that’s where I left it, and that’s where it will lie. I wasn’t good enough. I suppose, in the end, I couldn’t give a name to Bac Sang’s torment, nor welcome her at the final step of her odyssey, nor touch the fingers pressing hopefully against the boundaries of the text. I couldn’t give her story the ending it needed.

This is what I wrote instead. Hopeless, unsure, troubled by doubt, twinged with guilt, made an imposter once again. I’m a liar, indeed– who abandoned my character in a universe of my own created horrors, unable to find the words to confess to what I’ve done.

What does that mean– that I left her there, at the end of her tale? Where is she now? Was I completely incapable of delivering on my promise? Did I shy away because I wasn’t brave like she was? Was I just not ready, perhaps, to try and see out of the page of my own reality? Was I wrong to try at all?

And what is it that I deserve?

I don't think she can forgive me. I don't think I can.