Their parents were in hand to console those who fell and scraped their knees and came running for comfort. The mothers especially were the ones they would run to, otherwise the fathers would consider it a nuisance and tell them off for running in the first place.
However, Grandpa Kaku was always on hand without reprove whenever the kids ran to him. No one could tell whose grandpa he really was as all the kids called him grandpa from every household.
He was a grey-haired wrinkled face old man, who was the king’s hired help many years ago and was now too old to work. He had travelled through many villages in search for work and ended up settling in Goza. No one knew his family and neither did he.
Because of this, he always overcompensated with the children as he had none of his own and treated them as though they really were his grandchildren. He wouldn’t hide a smile regardless of the fact that he had no teeth left in his mouth, which was a fascination for the kids.
He also spoke with a lisp, and each time a child was naughty, he would threaten them that he could turn into a python and swallow them whole. They nicknamed him Grandpa Kakupython.
The Goza people lived their lives from day to day with seemingly regular routines, which by now they had become so accustomed to, as though they could perform blindfolded. They had very little contact with the outside world as they thought there wasn’t much out there. They had very little knowledge of the world around them.
The last time they had anything to do with the outside world was during the summer festival and soon after that, they fell back into their old routine. Until one day, out of nowhere in the nearby Baminga Mountains, arose an army of evil spirits which had hibernated for hundreds of years before the Goza people settled in their compound.
The evil spirits had been banished and condemned to death for the second time as they had wiped out the entire human race which lived in the area for many years previously.
Unfortunately, no one managed to kill the spirits for a second time as they escaped and migrated to the Baminga Mountains where they went in hiding for about a thousand years. The reason why the spirits were awakened was because they heard movement and noises coming from the direction of the Paka Village in the north and they could also smell human blood from the whiff of wind blowing in their direction.
The Goza village was far down the southern part of the country, but still within reach. The leading evil spirit was excited that there would be something to eat after so long, but did not want to alert the other spirits which were still sleeping, in case they would ruin his plan of getting some blood before any of the others. The evil spirit wondered whether humans were still dangerous as before and he quietly went back into the cave, without alerting the other spirits.
What the spirits didn’t know was that all the people in this generation were oblivious to their existence, apart from a faint history which they heard of and quickly dismissed as a fairy tale with no grounding, seeing the entire country was ever so peaceful.
This put the entire humankind in the region at high risk and somewhat like sitting ducks. To make matters worse, there was no history of the events that took place all those hundreds of years earlier and no one could verify truth from fairy tales. The evil spirit which was out and about to check the area for movement happened to be very curious and cautious about his surroundings and treaded carefully.
He winced with pain as the bright light of the sun hit him in the face, which he had not seen for many moons ago. He growled quietly and kept looking around for things and most of all for people, as they were equally dangerous to him as he was to them.
He remembered the day that he nearly got put out for good by humans when they trapped him in a dungeon and tried to make him drink a garlic, lime and chili powder concoction.
This could kill the spirits forever as soon as they took a sip of it. Well, so the people back then believed. He was saved in the nick of time by his legion who heard his painful growls from a distance. They came in a rush like a whirlwind tornado and devoured the humans and consumed them all. He shuddered to think he could have been long gone into the depths of Hades where he knew he was destined to spend eternity in hell fire, with the rest of his colleagues.
That is the prospect he had been working hard to avoid as much as possible. He had previously had nightmares about it when he once woke up from a nightmarish dream where he was burning and no one could hear his screams for help and there was no way out nor anyone in sight to rescue him.
He was trying to hold on to life for many years to come yet. He slowly went back into the cave after thoroughly looking around the place and found that all was at peace. He crawled back into his place under the crevice of a rock within the cave buried very deep in the heart of the mountain, which had a very deep ravine caused by a volcanic eruption some thousand years earlier.
He left a trail of smoky dust behind with every movement, as he literally was just dust with a skeletal human form. There he knew no human interference would take place as the place was uninhabitable and far away from people.
The people or animals living in the wild could not go near there due to the awkwardness of the landscape, which was
