“No. It’s more than that. They can create these worlds, but they can also make you believe in them. The story of Lewis Carrol and his Wonderland is only one of the most famous examples. There are some who believe that Scheherazade—Arabian Nights Scheherazade—was an Alys, and that is how she managed to survive for so long. Every night, she was able to tell stories so real that the sultan forgot to execute her. I guess it’s supposed to be like seduction or maybe suggestion? It’s creation and its hypnotic. Lewis Carrol claimed that he just wrote down the fabulous daydreams of Alice Liddell, but some believe that, being in the presence of an Alys, he was powerless to do anything else.
“The strongest believers in the Alys seem to also be some kind of Neo Feminists. They wrap the abilities of Alyses up in the feminine archetype. The ability to bare life into the world; the ability to control men with their hormones/body/femininity: they mash it all up into their concept of the Alys. Just as a woman can create life and hold it within her biologically in a way that a man can only ever dream of, the Alyses can create and hold whole worlds of life within their minds with an attention to detail that the most creative of men can never hope to achieve. These people believe that, even if it is never born into the physical world, this life is no less real than the life of a fetus. The reason the Alyses can describe this created worlds with such detail is that the characters within them live and die within their minds. Should the Alys ever stop creating and maintaining the world, the ending of the life within it is no less real than the end to life that comes with an abortion. Further, these individuals believe that, just as women have been known to control men by taking advantage of sexuality, so, too, can an Alys seduce the mind of a man by impregnating it with these fertile ideas. The man in question becomes a slave to the worlds and the ideas, and about all they can do to overcome them is to set them all down on paper.”
* * *
“Are you an Alys?”
“I don’t know what I am. I know that there are places and people who live in my mind like memories, and I know that I’ve never met them. I know that the worlds that he wrote about were my worlds, and the people who populated them were my people. I know that from an early age he had more of an understanding of what I was than I did, and I sometimes wonder if all of that homeschooling—all of that religious study—wasn’t some attempt by him to try and influence the development of the worlds within me. There was a lion, and that lion was him. I never created it; it just came to be within my world, and it spoke similar truths to the things he taught me in our lessons. It shaped the worlds by influencing the people who lived within them. By the time I was old enough to guess what was happening, the Lion had already inculcated itself so deep within the world that I couldn’t remove it. I tried, though, and it lead to a war in my mind. I tried to take back the world I created, but the people I had created fought for the Lion, and no matter what adversaries my mind could create to oppose them, they triumphed.
“Eventually, though, I found a way to end it: to end the world and all life in it. The act of it felt like a minor suicide: like ending a very vital part of my body, but my body still going on despite the death. The part of me where all of that glowed and lived and kept me company was empty from then on. No matter what I tried to create to fill it, it still stood empty. He would beg me to tell him about my dreams: to tell him how the battle ended and who was victorious. Did the forces of good triumph? Did the forces of evil? Were they forced to except The Word? And what of The Lion?
“I told him I didn’t know. I told him it was all just gone. I think he might have suspected it. He had been writing it down all along. He had been preparing it to publish, and all he needed for his grand, epic story was that last battle: to know how it ended and who came out on top. When I wouldn’t give it to him, he had to come up with it himself, and I gained my small victory in the fact that it was never the same."
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