Splathouse Cosmology: The Lady
Good day everyone.
At the suggestion of patrons, realization of the sheer size of the Splathouse narrative, being asked numerous times for “jumping in” points and an overall need to return to writing in any form, I am proud to bring you a series focused exclusively on explaining the more esoteric set dressing of the lore as it stands at this point.
Splathouse has been one continuous narrative for eight years, and while I will offer absolutely no timelines, deadlines or expectations as to how frequently these will appear (it will be entirely at my whims), I can’t deny that quite a few of you both enjoy this setting and want to know more. Before we go any further, thank you. I have suffered my entire creative career from imposter syndrome and earnestly believing my works weren’t engaging. That changed because of all of you. Your feedback has directly made a difference in how I perceive my craft, and wanting to diversify my skill set. Splathouse, as ever, wouldn’t happen without you.
I offer this series with only a very rough outline of where to begin . I think explaining the basic cosmology would be a great start. The Lady, the original wizard council and their purpose could easily fill the first few entries. Beyond that, there’s a few things I think are worth talking about (how exactly does the Vorpal blade work?! What the hell is chaos magic anyways?!). As such, I am openly taking your questions for anything you’d like me to explain or discuss.
I also feel it’s pertinent to state that Splathouse has no established “canon”. No matter if it’s acted out in a scene, written here or elsewhere-there is no firm “lore”. Things will contradict things you’ve heard on air or read elsewhere sometimes. While there’s absolutely a “real” reason for this (I have never kept notes on stories!), we’re going to pretend it’s because the SH cast are their own unreliable narrators ;). Or perhaps the multiverse shifted. Whichever feels more fun.
Lastly, these will be patron exclusive-for a month. They’ll then be posted up on the website and my tumblr as both of those need some form of content as well. I like keeping my works accessible to the general public.
So.
Preamble over.
Let’s talk about The Lady.
In the Beginning, There Was The Lady…
A most unfortunate part of how I handle my craft is that I tend to create an adjacent-reality to my own life, drawing primarily from lived experiences. Plenty of authors, artists, performers and more do this-in my case, it’s entirely by design as well. Having a low-fantasy environment where magic, incredible technology and more rarely happen (or do with spectacular failures or hilarious results) feels more akin to life as I have experienced it growing up both relatively poor. Poverty doesn’t deny the incredible things before your eyes. It places them eternally out of reach as lack of finances cuts your access to resources at the tendon. You get to experience these wonderful things eventually, albeit at a far later time than your peers or neighbors.
The exceptions to this are two things-spirituality, and drugs.
If you’re poor, you’re likely to hear a lot of people say they’ll pray for you. You’re likely to experience a church outreach of some kind, which turns into attending, which turns into niche benefits that feel like a miracle when you get them. As of this writing, I still have an opportunity to be buried at a church I haven’t been to since I was 16. During COVID lockdowns, this same church provided boxes of food to its membership every week, a rare act of kindness they haven’t repeated since. Spirituality in poverty is at best a social behavior, and at worst places the concept of God in a box accessible only if you’re tithing. It, like the rest of poverty, is a scam that turns even the most idealistic of us cynical.
Drugs however deliver the promise of love, variance of experience, and real, palpable concept of divine grace and retribution right to your brain. Drugs cost money, but not nearly as much as access to a better education, a better neighborhood, a better life. When you’re poor, you do drugs because what else are you going to do on a friday night? Go out to a movie, to dinner? Geez, gas alone is like, $20 bucks, man. Drugs, when taken safely and in a safe environment, are one of the last refuges of mental, spiritual and physical freedom accessible to literally everyone. Drugs are rad actually, but without those informed precautions can indeed ruin your life.
Or, you know, kill you. But hey, at least then you don’t have to worry about your bills right?
I know, I know. That’s a hell of an introduction to who is the most important character in the entirety of Splathouse, but there’s a reason for it-The Lady as a character wouldn’t exist without both of these aspects of my life meeting on a collision course one night before I started any of this.
I have mentioned before how I met the lady on air and in writing, but to bring the rest of you up to speed-
Once upon a time I was really into hallucinogens. I realized in retrospect I did LSD and acid specifically to fight feelings of dysphoria, but that didn’t change that at the time, in the moment, I wanted to leave my body. This flesh, this existence felt wholly constricting to my person in a way I didn’t have words for yet. So one night, I got really, really drunk off cheap whiskey. I did some LSD I picked up from an old connection. When the effects didn’t take, I cursed and stomped and decided to sleep off my drunken stupor on the couch.
That was an incredibly dangerous, stupid and fortunate idea. The moment I was unconscious, I fell through a blackened aether into a dream world I’ve yet to see repeated. Believe me. I’ve tried. I’ve looked everywhere for absolutely anything that could have come close to mimicking this space, and I’ve come up empty every time.
Because its details weren’t frozen or static; rather, they were golden and kinetic. An endless walkway flanked by pantheons massive as the oldest redwoods, glimmering in an endless twinkling starlight above me. Have you ever seen gold melted down and poured? Imagine that, but it’s everywhere on the coldest, cleanest night of your childhood. Your very breath feels like razors as it curls out from you like sins confessed to a priest. You stand there and you suffer through it though, if only to see the vastness of the universe, if only to feel sm-
Shit, okay. Let me get back to what I was saying.
I wasn’t afraid. Not yet. I walked this endless corridor, and began to call out. I don’t remember what I said (probably some variation of that shaky “hello?” I give on air sometimes), but I do remember the very distinct impression I was being watched.
And I was! By these giant flowing golden robes with spears in gnarled, hideous hands! I decided running was a good idea.
It wasn’t! It was a horrible idea, what the hell!
They eventually caught me, and threw me to the ground. My face hit the bricks loud enough for my teeth to clack together. I remember in the dream(? Hallucination? Vision?) that I soiled myself at this point. I was genuinely fucking afraid I was going to die and absolutely nothing has even came close to the real fear I felt in this moment. I remember thinking if this was it, if this was my last moment, and least I could hope for an afterlife that had been kinder to me than the waking world.
That’s when the sky began to drip down like rain. A ways ahead of me, I watched as the sky itself sluiced down to the floor, like a liquid fabric. It was the void, ethereal and beautiful in front of me. I couldn’t look away, even as I struggled against the insurmountable strength of my captors. I sat there, rolling in my own piss and crying as it took a vaguely femme shape.
She was huge.
Massive.
I hate using those words, because it goes right back to what I said about spirituality and god. It places the concept of her in a box-and she never could be contained by such a thing. She was far too large, too-
When she opened her eyes and looked down at me, I saw within them the beauty of everything. Of life, of love, of even all the things I told myself I despised. I saw freedom and boundless joy and real, genuine happiness I hadn’t known since I was a kid. I started crying, and she tenderly reached a massive finger down and lifted my chin.
“What is it you desire most?”
I wish I had something to compare her voice to. I wish I could mimic it on air, but I never will. It sounded like birds singing how much they love you in your mothers voice. Like the genuine relief of your partner when you call them and say you made it home. Like an elderly man seeing the boy that he was and clutching him in his arms, assuring that kid he was going to be fine. Like the breathless embrace of someone telling you post-coitus not to pull away, that they needed you.
It sounded like love. Boundless, endless. Even attempting to quantify it would be a fool’s errand.
A thousand things came to my mind then. Asking if she was god. If this was real. If I was in heaven or hell. But instead, the truth is what parted my lips.
“I just want to be happy. Please, I just…I just want to be happy…”
She pulled her finger away. She closed her hands, and when she opened it once more there was a flaming orb. Bright as the sun, just as golden as all that surrounded us. She took her other hand, and with another massive finger lifted my chin once more.
“Then never waste your potential,” she said, “and know that you are loved,”
She tipped the star forward, and it poured into my throat.
Again.
Words fail me here to explain the level of pain I felt. Attempting to explain is going to get graphic, so maybe ignore the following paragraph-
I remember the heat most of all. The instant way it seared my esophagus, bringing forth blisters that popped and formed anew within seconds. The searing pain it brought right behind my eyes, the way it gripped my brain in total and perfect oblivion. Nothing, absolutely nothing I had experienced had felt even close to this. It was like swallowing hell, the elephant’s foot. I think actually eating the sun would have been less nauseating, mind bendingly breaking.
As the last drop hit my throat, I was pulled from the dream. Coughing, spasming. I ran to my toilet and vomited immediately for what felt like hours. I slumped over beside the toilet after, shivering and delirious from dehydration. I kept thinking to myself never again, holy shit I almost died.
That was the last night I did hallucinogens.
In time, I forgot the horrors my addictions caused me. I healed from them. But The Lady.
The lady was never, ever far from my mind. I tried lucid dreaming. I delved deeper into my occult studies, something that had been an arm-chair historian hobby at best. I tried, in vain, to look for her for years, or (in my more logical moments) perhaps what inspired her in my brain.
I found nothing.
Nothing at all.
And I have never given up my search, even now.
I’ve still found absolutely nothing.
So I kept the secret of The Lady to myself. An isolated shame, I’d think in my depressive episodes. But also a reminder that, despite everything, I still had a chance. I had a life. I had felt love in that moment, and I would chase it eternally, giving it to as many people as I could before I actually, factually died. Years passed-and I started SH. I knew, innately, The Lady would make an appearance. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know when. But I knew in my heart I had to pay tribute somehow to the entity that had given me a second chance, a better path, a life I never would have got to experience were it not for her.
It was the least I could do.
I talked about her with friends. With colleagues in the field of occultism, and my craft. A funny thing happened, too.
A few people told me they had a similar experience. A cosmic entity presenting itself in this vague, beautiful, alluring and omni-compassionate way. It would offer advice. It would give them assurance. Then it would disappear, never to be heard from again. I felt a shiver go down my spine during these conversations, a fearful realization that I hadn’t been hallucinating and that my own assumed fiction had bled over into reality. I’d ask questions of course, check to see if it was good-old confirmation bias on their end. Seeing something that wasn’t there based on a suggestion from my own story, all that.
Then they started mentioning things from my experience that I hadn’t told them. The kinetic gold, the columns, all of it. Things they couldn’t have possibly mentioned unless I had told them.
It’s been over a decade since that night.
And, if nothing else in my stories is true, if it’s all made up, if it’s just something I smack together and create for entertainment for a few people that vaguely resembles my life, I want to say something I couldn’t admit before, something I was afraid to say out loud for fear of judgment or that same sneering cynicism I mentioned earlier.
The Lady is very, very real. And she is so very, very beautiful.
Fiction, Reality and Melding The Two
I’m going to say something here your humanities teachers failed to tell you. It’s not a hard and fast rule, more of an observation drawn from having done this for so long.
Fiction is reality, but obfuscated through a looking glass. Sometimes that glass is filthy, sometimes smudged, sometimes shattered. But regardless of how jagged, nasty or gnarly the image is that greets you-It’s still real. Somewhere, right below the surface, is a bridge between your worlds.
That bridge is you. You, observing the glass, and deciding to do something with it. To tell the world what you see on your terms, in your medium, in your way. Nothing in the entire universe will ever come close to the magic of your reality being brought before us. No one, not one person, will ever see what’s on the other side of that glass the exact same way you do.
In my case.
I saw a place I was happy. A world crafted by a being composed of love, but mindful enough to let us choose to be loved without denying us the opportunity to find it later. I saw a place where a few bumbling numbskulls (who somehow, some way managed to be very skilled in some niche things) came together and made each other stronger. Their first order of business wasn’t to use this strength to exploit other people-but to exponentially expand this bond, this compassion and empathy to others. To a found family, to the world if they could.
Over the years, I’ve often thought I fucked up by drawing from my own experiences. But then I think back to that night, to what I’ve accomplished with this Dumb Little Internet Show (™) since, to the people I’ve met and had the good fortune to help. I think back to The Lady, and how without her none of this would be possible.
I like to think she’s proud.
So, bringing her into SH was inevitable. But I wanted to do so by placing her at the forefront of my cosmology, as the being that started literally everything, someone who filled an empty void with beauty and people and demons and angels and more that lived in harmony (at least for a while). Someone that gave the world magic and strength, and the capacity to do good with both.
I made her the biggest god I could, the most important, because.
Well.
Again.
It was the least I could do.
I hope this explains a few things behind the reason she’s important, and why she showed up at all. If you’ve any more questions, I’m happy to answer them in the comments below! Annnnd well, I suppose we’ll see how regularly we can make this.
I love you all.
Be well.
-j