TCGP (part 2): My journey in the Grand grotto

Part 2

As soon as we set foot on the shores of the mainland, we sent a fast traveler to announce our arrival to Dokeb so he could accommodate several hundred soldiers for a few nights. They came back two days later and said that everything about our quest had been revealed to him and that he was ready to receive us. Of course no one could know that this many of our troops left our lands but he had apparently been the one defending our people every time my parents left and this time was no exception.

I was very happy that as planned, we got to his capital five days later without any trouble... As soon as we arrived, he invited mother and I to join him to his private quarters for a long awaited discussion and as soon as we got there. They hugged for what seemed at least five minutes, all I could hear (because I had turned around) was them both breathing and it was almost awkward for me to even be there. Then we sat down as if nothing happened, them side to side and me across the room as he talked about random things, some interesting matters and facts of lesser importance. He had become king of the Marulas when I was really young because of his own unique talents. Unlike my father, he was very sociable and had trouble sleeping. This is how they had completely different life stories: Dad, a total loner, loved books and his warm bed. Dokeb, loved the people around him, vocal exchanges, fashion and psychology. In a distant past to me, they where the closest friends and both where explorers since their earliest age... They had got lost countless times as kids, "Exploring" the city by themselves. Later in life, they, as I explained in my first book, where part of a team of elite adventurers. A group of people that would draw the maps of different unknown regions and get allies within communities of races no one had ever heard of at that time, nations from far away, in order to push the boundaries, dig deeper, explore further...

This is way before father hand crafted the diamond Cashmyrs. They had this bet where the winner was the one who became the ruler of a land first. He would give the opportunity to the other person to also rule from behind the scenes.

As we all know, father created the diamond Cashmyr race and wanted to call out he had won the bet. Dokeb said they both owned Diamond island and that this did not count. They all went onto their adventure but when Edega died, Dokeb felt like it was partially his fault. The day mother came back to Diamond island, she was proclaimed goddess of the region officially even if she admitted to me that she did not feel ready. (Dokeb decided not to interfere with her claiming the land as he blamed himself for not having stayed in the Plains of bliss to help save the life his best friend).

But for now, going back to the story of Edega and his best friend Dokeb, going back almost 2000 years ago. Our heroes had found the remains of an old temple deep underground. The tunnel had recently become the hive of a race of parasitic larvae. In order to reach the lower levels where normally all the relics and unique heirlooms where hidden, they had to go through thousand of creatures, or at least this is how my mother tells the story to anyone who she values enough to talk to.

The "legend" here is that the Red lords brought these insects over from their home world totally not on purpose and that as much as they had been raiding every hive they found as fast as possible right after landing (crashing) with their "top of the line" spaceship. The red lords got rid of most of the infestation themselves as they probably knew how dangerous the larvae would become once they hatched if left alone inside such a feeble moon.

Turns out they did not need to go through all this trouble as these insects needed an unknown alien nutrient in the plant side of the diet they ate to be able to have children and they could not find anything similar here on Genova. Lucky for us, because if they could reproduce at their normal rate without natural predators, they would have invaded and eliminated everything alive onto and inside our moon unpleasantly quickly.

We had took the mission like many other heroes to cleanse our lands of these insects, but after a painful 60 years, these insects unexpectedly all died by themselves because they could not produce eggs of their own. The irony, what a shame.

Basically, after father and Dokeb annihilated every single mucus membrane containing an invader in that endless tunnel, the most valuable thing to my father found in the temple was a collection of ancestral books crafted in a very uncommon material. It looked like it was written in dried saliva that had been reduced just like it was done for cooking, or maybe some type of thick fluid that had crystallized.