On a bright Granite day Melbil Åbleleman and six other dwarves arrived at a mountain's edge to found the Konosistam fortress. Little planning went into this move, and in retrospect, this may have been considered a bad idea, but that's what happened.
The group was poorly versed on what exactly was needed to set up a fortress, but they decided just jumping in and making up for what they lacked in knowledge with heart and determination was the best strategy. As we now say, “The road to Konosistam is paved with good intentions... and corpses.”
Melbil loved to dig. Sure, all dwarves love to dig, but Melbil really loved to dig. While others set to farming plump helmets and brewing beer, Melbil dug. He lit into the sandy clay and the orthoclase flew. It was copper and iron he was really hoping for. He dug furiously and uncovered opals and zircon and even gold nuggets. It wasn't long before Melbil was a legendary miner.
Things went great for a while in Konosistam. They were never short of food or drink and everyone enjoyed good, simple meals in the well furnished dining hall. Migrants arrived and set to work. We all know of the three wonderful artifacts made in Konosistam in its brief heyday, aside from its many, some would say kitschy, rock crafts. All this while Melbil dug. He dug around, he dug deep.
Still no metal.
Summers past, the population burgeoned to over 70 and everyone seemed happy. It was about that time the wereass Kon Sathrelkuppo showed up. The hideous beast sent everyone into a panic and claimed the life of dear Inod Unibasmel.
It was about then the group decided it was about time Konosistam had some defenses.
Melbil set about digging a ditch around the fortress and a wonderful drawbridge was set up across it. There were a few problems. As the first floor for the fort was directly below ground level, the ditch did intersect some of the tunnels, but this didn't seem like much of a flaw. The ditch worked fine. No one could get in with the bridge up.
A military seemed like a good idea too. Again, they had no metal for weapons, but, ah, a well trained band of wrestlers should do fine. No one would get past the bridge anyway. So like most armies, the fort scraped together the least useful, newly arrived dwarves and made two crack squads of wrestlers. After demonstrating their prowess taking down a goose, they knew they were ready.
All this time Melbil dug deeper and deeper. Finally he hit a glorious cavern! Having heard horrible stories about caverns, they were very cautious to explore them. But it was a bit of a disappointment, nothing but some woody mushrooms and spider silk. The ore must be deeper. Melbil dug on. A few naked mole dogs showed up in the tunnels and caused a little distress. They must have come from the cavern, but no big deal. A few even showed up on the menu.
Earlier, a few goblin snatchers had shown up and left without much incident. They took a few kids, but aside maybe a few upset parents, that can't be much of a bad thing.
So, just a few goblins had accosted Konosistam, until that cloudy morning in late Slate. A caravan of elves showed up. Great, maybe they had some copper.
But no! Right behind was a goblin ambush!
This was what they trained for, they were prepared their crack squads at the ready. They had time to let everyone get across the bridge from the fields and beehives before we pulled it up.
Or so it seemed. People just preferred to run willy nilly through the fields rather than into the fortress.
Fine, they wrote them off. Dwarves were already starting to die.
About this time the goblins started shooting arrows. Arrows were killing dwarves. Huh. Definitely time to pull the bridge up.
The lever worked beautifully. Up went the bridge. Time to sent the troops after any goblins who made it inside. With command and conquer-like precision the squad of three wrestlers was set after a goblin swordsman.
It was about this time they found a slight flaw in their defenses. Actually the credit for finding the flaw goes to the goblins. And trolls that seemed to show up with them. You see to get water in the winter Melbil had cleverly tunneled to a lake outside the ditch, and drained it into a pool, which they ended up draining over the course of a year.
This tuned out to make a wonderful tunnel under the ditch, that he goblins expertly exploited.
Not good. As you can imaging a lot of red smiley faces started to show up all over and the nicely smoothed floors of the hall was stained red.
So a new plan was needed. Haul off the dead bodies. They had built a coffin for the clothier they had lost to the wereass, but never managed to get the corpse from the stockpile into the casket. They finally figured it out and so they decided during the attack it was best to let the goblins wear themselves out killing dwarves, while they at least put the bodies away. Melbil set about digging the giant tomb and soon they were turning out caskets.
Except, well, the goblins didn't seem to be wearing out. They went to assign our military to take out the worst offenders, but oddly they seemed to only have a commander left. Huh, not good.
Naturally, it was time to draft people into the squads and provide a unified front. In retrospect, I think this only served to hasten the decline of their population, but that's for history to decide.
When they were down to about sixteen dwarves, someone had the great idea that we should figure out what a burrow was.
Burrows are a great idea! Or in the case of Konosistam, *would* have been a great idea. They made a burrow in the main stockpile/workbench area and called the remaining thirteen dwarves in. It worked like a charm. Eight smiling dwarves with red blinking exclamation points made it in. After many attempts they were able to wall in the burrow and stop the bloodshed. Well, stop the new bloodshed at least. You can imagine that a few dwarves were coming unhinged about now, probably because of the bloodshed, although to tell you the truth I don't think anyone bothered to make any new clothes.
So as Melbil sat at he carpentry bench, bleeding and slowly making a coffin for the decaying body, I mean two, wait three bodies in the burrow, he though back to when someone mentioned the idea of having some sort of hospital system. Perhaps he shouldn't have dismissed it at the time.
Soon it was just him and some new face he didn't know, that he occasionally saw through the purple miasma, the only people alive in the fort, of course, not counting the ghosts.
Just when it looked he bleakest, what ho! New migrants! The goblins had gone. They were saved!
The bridge was gone, somehow, but the migrants found their way through the errant tunnel and quickly started hauling corpses and cleaning blood. Melbil, now mayor, the last survivor (what's-his-face must have bled out), set them about making coffins and it wasn't long before they had entombed about half the corpses and a few ghosts, which had quite a fondness for Melbil, left.
Melbil felt a little woozy, and didn't move much. Someone took over as mayor and Melbil felt growing pride that he had saved the fortress. He thought of how great it would have been to find even copper, and he knew these intrepid youngsters would do just that, and a smile crept across as he slumped for the last time against a pot of plump helmets. Some say a tear rolled down the mayor's eye right then, but I'm petty sure he thought, “Well, no need to assign that chief medical dwarf position now.”
It turns out, as you well know, Melbil's predictions could not have been more wrong. I'll spare you the details of Konosistam's first and last goblin seige that came two days after Melbil's death. The corpses from the ambush never got put away. No one made it to the burrow. The red goblins came down like proverbial wolves on the fold. In 253, Konosistam's strength was broken.
What lesson can we take from this? “Life is fleeting, enjoy it while you can.”
No, that's stupid.
How about, “If, as Melbil dreamt of finding copper, if you have a dream and you want it bad enough, and you work hard enough, it probably still won't come true.”
Apt, but wordy.
How about, “Don't just pres “e” after world generation.”
What, and spoil all the fun?
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Topic: The Short History of Melbil Åbleleman (Read 812 times)