The city of Lake Point takes its name from the summit of the little mountain on which pioneer Stanley Wright, the nominal founder of your city, stood when he spied Spirit Lake for the first time in 1736, glistening cold under the clear spring sun. I really should recommend you hike up there, to the actual Lake Point, at least once during that time of year, Jon; the sight truly is breathtaking. That's the time of year when the snows of the mountains in whose valley Spirit Lake sits nestled have begun but not yet finished melting, and the crystal clear waters from the melt set the Lake burgeoning over its banks and reflecting the blue sky as clearly as a mirror from that summit vantage, setting the waters brilliantly against the lush woodland evergreens that in Stanley Wright's day dominated the valley below. In your own time, the sight is of a lake several times larger than the humble town on its banks, on which relatively miniscule boaters enjoy waters so tranquil and clear they can see straight down to the fishes darting in and out of the forest of red and yellow algaes that thickets the bottom and recedes gently into the overwhelming blues of incredibly deep waters, and out of view. Legend has it that at the very moment Stanley Wright ascended to Lake Point and saw such a scene laid out before him, he decided right there and then that he and his family would settle on the shores of Spirit Lake, and from that moment on set about building the little hamlet that would grow into the city you know over the nearly 300 intervening years.
Of course, the reality of things is rarely so simple. There's a significant revisionist streak among the historically-inclined of Lake Point, for instance, that would argue the town is much, much older than that. These are, of course, the same people that might insist on calling Spirit Lake Adanevdodalv, meaning "Soul of the Mountain Range", the name given to it by the indigenous peoples who lived on these lands for millennia before Stanley Wright ever came around. Not that the Quattico tribe really exists anymore except within the bloodlines of the Wright family and a few others, but of course that won't stop certain parties from taking offense on their behalf. The tribe, after all, essentially disintegrated after fighting with white settlers around the turn of the 18th century, in what some might almost embarrassingly call the "usual fashion": outsiders wanting direct control over their lands try forcing them out; the tribe, having a deep religious connection to Adanevdodalv, obstinately and violently refuses; things get bloody; people die; the whites win, outgunning and out-resourcing them by a wide margin. The only serious, well-known twist on that story is the stance of the Wright family, who had by then assimilated rather well with the Quatticans and even married in. Predicting defeat, the family reluctantly abandoned the Quattico tribe to its fate, but refused to directly fight against them in said struggles. Thus, when the dust settled after the fighting, all that was really left of Old Lake Point was just the Wright Family and the outsiders that'd thrust themselves in.
Cholera hit Lake Point like a train the very next year; after that, it was just the Wright Family living in that ghost town.
Now, that's all well and good, but by this book's standards it's not really "interesting", isn't much about living people, and is all public knowledge besides. What's not so public are the Quattico secrets that now the Wright family alone knows about Spirit Lake: why the Quattican People never, ever fished from the sacred lake that was their ancestral home, or why they buried their dead by tying stones to their feet and sinking the bodies to the deepest part of Adanevdodalv, or just what it is that comes out to play when the Lake freezes over in winter. Not even they know just how unfathomably deep the Lake really is, having only half-remembered secondhand tales of vast subterranean caverns hidden under the impenetrable forests of algae, winding their way down into the Earth and under the mountains, carrying to their roots waters that dissolve even the living rock over the unimaginable eons that pass in that blackness. To everyone but them, "Spirit Lake" is just a name.
Adanevdodalv was absolutely central to a religion the Quattico tribe had held exclusively. Theirs were gods shunned and despised by the neighboring tribes, and even the Quattico people themselves, being visibly distinct in ethinicity, culture, and even language, were turned away and warred against as a rule until the settlers finally wiped them out. The cult would have died out with them, had the Wright family not adopted their worship, and kept their beliefs as one of the family's great secrets through the ages.
The Quattico believed Adanevdodalv to be the gateway from this life, and this world, to the next. Its waters were not simply baptismal: they were resurrective, transformative in a very literal sense, and home to their most major god, Ulasigvi. This god is a huge, inky black amoeboid creature, out of whose gelatinous body mass will gurgle up its tremendous opalescent eyes, that see everything clearly which is in darkness and are blinded by even dim light. To look into those eyes is to lose oneself, and most Quattico will only ever see them once: in death. Ulasigvi is the Quattico's gatekeeper between this world and life, and the next, and only for this reason will he ever emerge from the cavernous primordial depths far beneath Adanevdodalv: on those moonless winter nights when the lake has frozen over, he will take those dead Quattican bodies sunk by the faithful to the depths of Spirit Lake, and opening his myriad huge eyes, will look into their character and their sins, to determine himself if they are worthy of new life. Those who are not, he will eat, as tribute to himself. But those whom he does deem worthy are restored their mortal lives, and transformed into the Atsadyvwi: the Quattican version of merfolk, these are spirit-creatures with great, bulging fish-eyes as blinded by light as Ulasigvi's, webbed, fanlike clawed hands, no noses or ears, and a long, serpentine eel's body below the shoulders.
The Atsadyvwi do not age, and can live as long as they wish in the underworld of aquatic caverns beneath Spirit Lake, but they are not deathless: deeper and deeper still than Adanevdodalv, the Soul of the Mountains, lies Adanevdelohi, the Soul of the World, and I'm warning you, this place, the world after the next, is not meant for living surface dwellers like you to imagine. The Atsadyvwi dare not go there, just as you dare not venture to the depths of Adanevdodalv; but nevertheless, it is there. Or so the Quattico tribe claims.
Look, don't ask me to verify whether the Quattican Theologies are "true" or not. In a way, they stand as reasonable a chance at being truth as any other mythology or religious doctrine, which depending on one's perspective could be very good, or none at all. This story is not about the beliefs themselves, anyway; it's about the believers. Specifically, the Wright family. Nowadays, after all manner of gold rushes and immigrating industry have passed through Lake Point in the intervening centuries, the Wight family can no longer claim to be the wealthiest or (more debatably) the most influential family in Lake Point anymore, but they are still certainly the largest, with a nice chunk of the town population able to claim direct descent from Stanley Wright, and almost all of those able to claim some fraction of Quattico blood in them. You yourself know two with the last name at your own school, Jon: Allison Wright, Sarah's black, haughty cheerleader friend, and Stephanie Wright, one of the goth girls that humors Athena's crazy occult beliefs for reasons that should now be somewhat clearer to you. These two are related so distantly they hardly bother to claim as much unless asked directly about it. There are many more of the bloodline around town that don't have the last name per se, not being of purely patrilineal descent from the first pioneers.
Not that they don't share a handful of telling, shared similarities between them, as a result of their Quattican blood. Larger-than-normal eyes, for one; a very slight greyish tinge to their skin tone for another. By far the most uniting feature of the Wright family, though, is something you're never going to see unless you catch them going out for a swim: little narrow slits on either side of their neck that open when they're submerged, revealing a few red, frilly pairs of fish gills.
