The Demon of the Three Rivers – Chapter 06

This is the 6th Chapter of “The Demon of the Three Rivers”. To find the whole chapter list click here.

Also, do remember, this is a prequel to “The House in the Lake”, so, if you haven’t read “The House in the Lake”, there will be some spoilers.

The Demigod of Light visited his son – the fourth son of the Sun God, as most would call him – for the first time, almost three thousand years after then. And by then, Lugh was a fine young man, and a well known deity. Yes, he is not a god, but he was called one, even then.

So, the Sun God raised the baby as if he was his own son, in his divine palace. And although the boy had practically neither a mother nor a father, he never felt really either abandoned or unloved. On the contrary, the Sun God showered him with enough love to fill in for the missing parents, and even more.

He also made sure to educate him and to help him find out his divine talents. And, indeed, as a descendant of a demigod his powers, overall, were nothing special, but they were comparable to the lesser demigods.

Moreover, unlike the heroes, the boy’s growth stopped at the age of eighteen, proving true what his grandfather had guessed from the start. Lugh was a true immortal.

And I know I said his powers overall were nothing special, but he had one on which he was so powerful, he could even outdo his father. And this was his purifying power. It was as if he had added all his mother’s power of purification on top of all his father’s. The Sun God would often say that Lugh’s purification powers could even be greater than his own.

This, of course, is not true. But it isn’t like the Sun God was lying. It was the words of a proud grandfather for his grandson. But immortals can’t lie, and the deities and demigods who know that considered the bragging of the Sun God an accurate fact. And that’s how Lugh became known amongst them as the God of Purification.

And then, the God of Purification, met his father. And his father told him, when Lugh asked him, what the Sun God had refused to reveal. How he was born and why he had never met his mother and why it was the first time he was seeing his father. And that’s how Lugh started being interested in the world the mortals and the elementals live in.

For some reason, though, his father couldn’t remember where the land of the three rivers, where he had met Alina, was. No matter how hard he tried, although he could remember the place’s appearance, he couldn’t remember where it was.

So, Lugh asked his grandfather about it, but his grandfather, too, couldn’t remember where the place was.

“Don’t worry. The sun and the moon are my eyes to the material world. I’ll find it in less than a day.”

But a month passed, and the Sun God hadn’t found the place. And although Lugh said that this was peculiar, neither the Sun God, nor any other god or demigod who heard it, gave it a second thought.

“Probably it doesn’t exist anymore.”

But Lugh couldn’t believe the land didn’t exist. Of course, in three thousand years many things can change. The forests might have been burned down. The village might have been abandoned, or have grown into a big city. But would the mountains and the plateau have disappeared just like that? Would the three rivers have done so? He couldn’t believe that.

And it wasn’t the first time the gods had acted oddly. Even from the palace of the Sun God, Lugh could feel a strong impurity somewhere in the east, but when he said that to his grandfather, the Sun God told him that there was nothing out of the ordinary and he shouldn’t worry about it.

Then, Lugh had thought that, maybe, such impurities were normal for the earth and trusted his grandfather’s word. But now, when a second oddity came to his attention, he had second thoughts about the first one, too.

How was it possible that he, who wasn’t a god, or even a demigod, could feel something that those of stronger divinity couldn’t feel? He couldn’t understand it.

But it was exactly this very fact that let him feel the impurity and recognise the oddities. He was neither a god, nor a demigod, and therefore, his father’s oath wasn’t affecting him. Because, of course, it was Velek’s impurity what he had been feeling. And it was Velek’s dominance over the land of the three rivers that had erased the location of the place from the minds of the gods and demigods and kept it hidden from the eyes of the Sun God.

And Lugh decided to purify the impurity and find the land of the three rivers.