Fifth Entry: Spring's end
The fort has changed again. Since my last entry, the central stairwell has been capped. We had thought the idea of having a hole going from the top of the fortress to the bottom would be an interesting defensive feature, as well as letting some light into our home. The wildlife here has made me change my views.
We woke up one night to hear otherworldly shrieking aboveground. We rushed upstairs to spy some glowing abomination streaking through the sky to the east of our fort. Luckily, it did not see us, but come morning, the fort was sealed off. Rough conglomerate was hastily fixed over the shaft, and a matching hatch over the stairs. By the morning light, I inspected it, and found it to look almost exactly like the rest of this flat rocky plain where our mountain should have been. We had not moved our carpenter's workshop underground at the time, but it apparently was not enough to draw the nightmare the following weeks.
Underground, we dug channels from the flooded pit to the very walls of the abyss, and prepared to breach them to hopefully drain some of the water from our flooded magnetite deposit. Before we made the breach, we floored over every area of our channeling, and built a hatch over the staircase down into the magnetite. I had shown the others the things that lived in the abyss, and all caution was taken to prevent their entry into our home. As the walls were breached into the abyss, up from the depths of the abyss rose a horror I can barely describe and wish I could forget. It looked akin to one of the imps common to magma, but was far larger and obviously more dangerous. Unlike the imps, which scarcely seem intelligent, this thing knew exactly what was happening, and had chosen its time to strike.
We survived, of course, but only just. The last of the floors were finished mere moments before it slammed into them, screeching demonic curses. After it decided our floors were indeed stable, it flew to our grate and has since not moved. It just floats there, and occasionally attempts to break through whenever a dwarf passes by. I am afraid we will not gain entry to the ledges of the bottomless pit any time soon, with this demon waiting for us out there.
Other than the demon waiting for us, there is little of interest to report. We cannot mine the magnetite just yet, and the demon is not fully to blame. Our channeling attempt to drain the water from the aquifer failed. Water pours out of the walls faster than it is drained. We are now hoping the seemingly infinite waterfall we made will at least drown a few of the land-based monsters. That damn mole is still kicking, so I have my doubts as to the chances of that.
We've begun construction of a defensive series of towers that will one day ring our for entrance. Somewhere in the excitement, we also built a farm.
Unless some new horror presents itself in a week, this is my last log of spring. With the demons above and below, I feel like I've been here an age. Fall can not come fast enough to suit me.
OOC:
This one sucked. My first try at breaching the pit, I had floors up five deep over my channel. The damn Imp Lord swims up my waterfall through 10~ squares of 7/7 water, into my fort, screams out the main shaft and into the sky and proceeds to kill every dwarf, dog, cow, nothing was spared. So I savescummed. Forgive me. Now I get to have a recurring villain.
Author
Topic: Mistywhiskers (Read 1960 times)