A seven or eight year old
fortress just died. It survived five goblin sieges in its time. On the last siege, the human caravan happened to arrive at the same time and an epic battle ensued between the caravan's guards and goblin force's pack of trolls.
The humans managed to cross the outdoor river bridge with their wagons and mules and into the relative safety of the dwarven tunnels while their soldiers trailed behind to defend the bridge. The troll pack rushed into the line of soldiers and carnage exploded onto the rough diorite stones below. At the cost of all the soldier's deaths the trolls had been destroyed. However, three brigades of mixed goblins remained.
The remaining archers, swordgoblins, macegoblins, and speargoblins swarmed over the corpses on the bridge and began slaughtering the human caravan from the rear. Panicked and confused, the human merchants turned about in the tunnel and attempted to flee for the border of the map. Sadly, this lead them straight into the goblin horde and every last human was annihilated. Thanks to their sacrifice though, the entire goblin horde had conviently assembled in the runoff channel for the fortress's doomsday weapon. The Hyper Lava Nuclear Cannon laid in wait..
Indoors, the dwarven overseer blearily got up out of a mound of dwarven wine kegs and glanced down the outer tunnel. Another stinking mess of corpses and hostile goblins to take care of but that was all in a day's work. With a sigh, he lumbered off into the caverns and flipped a switch, activating the Doomsday Weapon. Gears groaned and creaked into action and in the distance, a gneiss floodgate could be heard opening. With a roar, a wall of lava surged out into the tunnel and bore down on the goblin hordes.
Oblivious to the fiery death lurking in the dwarven tunnels, the goblins rushed inside. Strangely, as they ventured inwards the ambient heat was rising dramatically. Then the lava deluge poured down the hallway and began to incinerate the goblin ranks by dozens. The fires raged on and spilled out the mouth of the tunnel, leaving a charred wake of goblin corpses in its path.
With a shrug, the dwarven overseer trumbled off to get the fortress into action. There were corpses to be tossed in the refuse pile, food and alcohol to somehow be scavenged from the wagons, weapons and armor to salvage, and cleanup to be done. The dwarves got up from their lazy winter and set off to work. That was when the mystery deaths began..
For some reason, random dwarves in the fortress began to burst into flames! Oblivious to the fact that they were burning alive, these dwarves continued about their tasks and filled the caverns with greasy burning dwarf smoke. After mere steps, they would then keel over and somehow bleed to death. It was all very mysterious but however, these were not thoughts for a dwarven mind. The dwarves continued their work and continued to mysteriously burst into flame. Soon, the fortress was filled with the charred corpses of the lucky dead.
Those of us that survived our spontaneous combustion are confined to our beds due the crippling agony of the single yellow wound on our chests(wtf?). Unable to get up to feed or care for ourselves, we're all starving to a slow death. Some of the guys I can hear down the hallway have already snapped and descended into madness or into fits of hysteria. At the time of this writing, only eight of us remain before the fortress fills with dark empty silence. Now that I've recorded this story for posterity, all there is left to do is wait for the impending madness and the death that follows. With any luck, I'll be too insane to care anymore.
Dastot Fikodzuden, Trapper
(Seriously, idk wtf made all my dwarves randomly die like this. They just randomly burst into flames and walk around generating smoke and dying. :p)
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Topic: All dwarves caught on fire and fortress died (story!) (Read 999 times)