Chapter 34: Chapter 33: A cold reception for those who lack the warmth of faith

When I was lowered into the water by my father’s hands, I was just a boy.

The water was so calm and so serene. I wasn’t expecting it to happen. We were just walking like we would have on any other day. He grabbed me by the collar and just pushed me down beneath the surface of the lake.

I wasn’t really afraid. I was just… I was just calm. I was like the water.

I laid down there, beneath the surface, staring up towards what lied on the other side of it.

Past the sight of my father’s arms, pressed against my chest and shoulder, I saw the shimmering of the emerald-green trees become distorted by the ripples that I had made. I saw blobby silhouettes of birds flying by in the distant sky. I saw rays of the sun, hanging above us, shining down through the clear lake with a kind glow that reached all the way down towards me, to the cold silt that I lay against.

I was drowning. My lungs burnt and my body ached from the pain of my father’s hands crushing me.

— But I felt calm.

I have never been that calm in my life, not before, not after. I was calm as I stared at all of life, passing us by. I was calm, as I stared into the possessed eyes of my father, distorted by the water. I was calm, as the world began to grow dark.

And the reason I was calm was because I knew that I was safe.

I closed my eyes.

When I reopened them the next time, returning to wakefulness, I was on the shore, by myself.

— My father was found floating in the water, having drowned himself next to me.

It wasn’t that I was saved by a god or by divinity or by some hero, coming to me at the right place and the right time to stop the thing that had taken over my father.

Rather, I was saved by the light in my father’s eyes that had overpowered the demon who took possession of his body.

And in this moment, after realizing what darkness my father must have overcome to free himself from the binds on his soul, I saw that the gods too, must be real. If the demon-king and his devilry, here upon our world, are tangible, present things. Then so must be the opposite, the good, the light of the sun reaching me below the water, the last shine in my father’s eyes.

These are the places where the gods hide. They are not hiding up in the heavens. They’re down here, with us. They’re hidden in plain sight.