Shoruke's Log. 20th of Hematite. (early summer, year 30) (yes, it's been two years)
Gosh but it's been a while since I've posted in this journal. Okay, what all has happened...
-We've made three artifacts. One is a giant cave spider silk cape worth 109,800☼. It's our most valuable artifact by about 5,000☼. The second artifact is a rope reed bag, which would be useful if we didn't already have 500 bags and not enough stuff to put in them. The third is a war hammer made of goblin bones, with a pictures of: a goblin killing a mule, our queen, and one of our artifact cups. I gave the artifact warhammer to Atir the legendary hammerdwarf. IT'S AWESOME.
-The labyrinth. It's been the fortress' biggest focus for the last two years. We've emptied and refilled the magma farm about half a dozen times, and we've mined out the obsidian from around the volcano on four different levels. And we're still not done... but we're getting close. The first level needs flooring (because obsidian is just that much creepier than sand, even if the sand is red), and the top level needs a bunch of walls, and we need to put extra flooring on the third level to cover up the pathways in the second level, and once the walls are done on the third level we still need to cover those pathways up... but yeah it's going pretty good. Merchant wagons can use it, at any rate.
-I haven't even really started on DoomFlippySpikesThing. But it shouldn't be that hard to make.
-The arena. OH GODS THE ARENA. There's so many cages, we simply don't have a unit of time big enough to measure how long it's going to take to link all those cages up to one lever. It's going to be, like, 15 octillion years. Give or take.
-Once Dracnor finished making enough masterwork armor, I assigned the legendary militants to do some patrols outside. Apparently any one of our legendary dwarves is worth at least two squads of goblins.
Kill counts:
Rick: 1092
Monk: 59 (mostly he just watches the younger marksdwarves shoot and gives em tips)
Unas: 3 (mostly just spams the shooting range)
Void: 12
Flint: 256
Sir Geo: 319
Lilika: 9 (she's been injured a few times)
Elf Driller: 29
-The spears and levers I set up in the nobles' hallway turned out to be quite deadly. One day, the most recent Duke just went off to go pull the useless lever at the end of the hallway, and the philosopher was pulling the lever attached to the spears. Apparently that makes the spears ever so slightly dangerous, and the spears shot out of the floor and hit the Duke.
In the face.
Without hurting any other part of him.
He's missing an eye and feeling very sorry for himself right now.
So anyway, his wife the duchess consort went to take over the lever pulling. The spears got her too, right in the leg, and knocked her unconscious. Then the spears got her again in the arm. And then the leg. And then the other arm. Then she bled out. The gore was just incredible. I didn't know one dead and one injured dwarf could bleed that much.
-The Tower hasn't seen much growth lately, since we've been saving up logs and using iron to re-outfit the military. But we've recently turned most of the logs into clear glass blocks, so we'll probably get another level (or at least most of it) of The Tower up soonish.
-One of my kids finally reached adulthood. On his twelfth birthday, we gave him iron armor and a mace, and he headed out into the desert to fight off the skeletal menace with the military.
And he came back with a mangled arm and only one leg. So if he ever makes it out of bed, he's going to be a mechanic like his parents. Hopefully he can still function in fortress life with only one leg.
-The dwarven caravan is here. There was a siege recently, but we can't get any of the goblins' stuff into the fortress until we get all the trade goods into the depot.
Shoruke's Log. 26th of Hematite. (early summer)
Okay, so. Recent Siege. Traders are here. Lots of stuff needs to be taken to the depot, none of the goblin's stuff has been marked to be brought in. So what do the dwarves do? Rush through the labyrinth, slowing the traders down, and bring all the goblins' corpses to dispose of them. By leaving them in the refuse stockpile to rot. Makes... perfect... sense... okay I can't keep that lie up. Dear god, you idiot haulers, get your priorities straight. The goblin corpses are going to rot outside, it doesn't matter if they rot in the stockpile or out in the desert. Argh.