Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Russian village stood always between two sovereigns it had not elected. Behind it, the forest, with its bark-clad lord whose whistles bent the paths. Before it, the river or the millpond—and in the millpond lived the other one: the Vodyanoy , the Water One, old man of the deep pools. Bilibin drew him as the tradition described him: a bloated ancient with a beard of green weed and slime, fish-belly pale, sometimes scaled, sometimes finned, crowned with water-plants, riding an outsized catfish as a lord rides a stallion—for the catfish, the whiskered giant of the Russian rivers, was the Vodyanoy's own steed and messenger, and prudent fishermen threw the first of the catch back to him as a courtesy. He dwelt in the deepest hole of the river, under the mill-wheel by preference, in a drowned palace lit by a light that was not the sun; herds of drowned cattle grazed his underwater meadows; and in his crystal halls, said the strangest and most persistent of the traditions, he kept ro...