Never forgotten about this Fort, if I'm not posting it usually just means that time's being spent on boring details that don't make for too good a story, things like stockpile management, wall designations and general Fortress maintenance. After every heroic battle, those same heroes have to drop their spears and axes in exchange for mops and wheelbarrows. Fighting corpses is a messy business, and when the bolts stop flying someone has to pick up the broken bones. The Dwarves were busy setting up around 400 cage traps in two lines vertical lines running north to south in the hopes of catching some humans when the elves attacked. Amazingly the Dwarves did catch a human whilst building the traps, a very naked one called Doge Pesli.
It's unsure how long Doge Pesli has been wandering around outside in the Spidery Forest but I fear this lends credence to the notion that Necro Commander Sazir Razorbelts is also lurking about somewhere unseen.
Doge Pesli is a human who spends the full moon as a were-sloth. So now I have three were-creatures and shouldn't feel guilty about losing any as I won't have to worry about losing Shastol or Thudu, the Fort's other two resident human beasts.
As for the elf assault itself, no extraordinary measures were taken. Most of the work continued in spite of the attack, with some occasional suspensions when some elves broke through the frontier defences. The Dwarves picked off the stragglers and wanderers with relative ease, with axe and bolt. A single dwarf has been admitted to the hospital since the siege, a 10 year old boy called Urvad Bookoracle Roofcolours. From what I gather he was playing in one of the secret tunnels with his Cavebridles and Bookoracle brothers and sisters when one of them accidentally opened a hatch from right under him, sending him tumbling down two flights of stairs.
In spite of all that, the little guy is still happy.
And I guess that's all so far. Mosus Onlsaughtchanneled was promoted to Brew Captain at the age of 12, the first Captain to be in charge of overseeing the Fort's alcohol stocks. The giant corpse Spider is still at large. A single shrew demon has shut down all operations in hell.
Oh! And the third platform in the Quarry Rampway has been entirely overrun, it is now controlled by the undead. A scaly crab, an eyeless pterosaur and another damned pangolin are just wallowing around there. As long as they stay there the Fort's military can't fight them without sustaining heavy casualties, and I really don't mind the FB horde growing since they're at the very least getting rid of living, breathing forgotten beasts. They just mill around in their giant spiderweb at the foot of the magma sea, weaving webs big enough to catch other forgotten beasts. First cavern layer is derelict, second overrun by firebeasts and other ancient things whilst the third has turned into a corpse lair. I hate the caverns very much.
On a happier note I have created a new corpse bomb, this one contains 130 corpses, a mix of rutherers, ravens, elves and boars. They're either all very old corpses or just not plentiful enough in supply. In my experience lots of small corpse bits chip away at demons better than big corpses (with one notable exception, large corpses like snakes or worms that turn into juggernauts of destruction), and the weresloth and some humans should help with that. That said, corpse stocks are at an all time high with the new pile extensions almost already full. The Necromancers in the corpse piles are being given a new release lever to celebrate, admittedly more because I lost the earlier lever. They were the Fort's last resort to goblins or other living enemies, a lever to utterly flood the Fort with vast amounts of undead from inside out. The lever will still be useful against Forgotten Beasts and demons. There are some really weird things in those corpse piles.
Four sets of doors at varying intervals and angles separate the grand stockpiles from the corpsepiles. This is to stop the hamster infestation inside the corpsepile from spreading into the Fortress; it is unsure how the hamsters grew to infest the corpsepiles, but there they remain, forever nourished on the endless supply of fresh meat in a carnivorous frenzy of fuzzy digestion. Within the corpsepiles are the skeletons of creatures unseen of for decades. Gremlins lie beneath yak bones, naked mole dogs with teeth marks and dents from bladed tools sunk into the smooth limestone floor. Somewhere there's an eyeless elk bird skull just staring off into a pile of piglet hooves and elf bodies. Other bigger things - the skull of Atho, or massive skeletons comprised of salt or cold flame stand testament to what once was. My favourite find has to be the scorpionfly's stinger, still larger and heavier than a full grown dwarf despite so much of the stinger having decomposed/been eaten by hamsters. Some of these things are utterly unrecognizable, all I can tell is that they were massive when they lived. What the hell was an Eknarnethgon Gulgunzikath Zotir and why was its tail 12 times larger than a grizzly bear?!
There used to be a Giant War Scorpion on guard outside the corpse piles at all times, but sadly Kubuk the war scorpion died - Kubuk's corpse was given an honourable burial at magma sea. Since then it's been quite open, although some traps still remain to catch any sneaky Necromancers. It remains a nasty place, at least as far as superstitions go. And there are some big superstitions in the Fort. In the west of the Fort underground for example, there lies an old abandoned graveyard.
Generally children in Silentthunders stay with their parents, then run off to their own rooms, work on the farms or run around playing with their friends. They're allowed to go just about anywhere as long as it's within the walls of the Fortress, but even some places within the Fortress are off limits. The gladiator pits, the human accommodations, the were-civet training rooms, the subterranean Fortress complex, the spires and the gatehouses.
One area of the Fortress however, is off limits to every single Dwarf in the Fortress. Most don't even know it exists, only the first migrants will have any knowledge of it whatsoever.
You'll find the entrance to this section of the Fortress in the bedroom of Kogan Kortinan, her husband Fath having been killed in the year 423. Two doors lead into a small, perfectly symmetrical room - though chances are you'll never see it, as the doors are kept locked tightly shut and Kogan will kill you if she sees you in her room. If you make it past those doors you'll see the room is bare except for the thumping of marksdwarf feet above and a hatch exactly in the centre of the room, covering a staircase leading into the darkness below. Two flights of stairs down is a corridor, with a branch on the right, on the left and one going straight forward. Go down the branch on the right and through the darkness you'll see one straight corridor down the bend with a few dozen rooms locked shut. Some of the rooms are unlocked, and if you look inside you can see there's not much room at all. There's only enough space to lie down.
Some of the rooms are sealed shut from above, but others have an open space above which leads into some other room.
If you go down the branch on the left you see much of the same as what you saw before, only mirrored. The only thing different is the presence of a locked schist door halting further progress, and a broken lever someone began destroying but gave up on before finishing the job.
Go straight down ignoring either diverging branches and you enter the first catacomb. The tombs are empty. Some contain stone graves, but no one lies beneath. Some of the tombs contain rows of memorials, memorials to fallen Dwarves. In one tomb stands a statue of a fearsome forgotten beast. In another stands a statue of Metob Clashwill, Goddess of War and Fortresses striking a triumphant pose in the centre of this dark room. She stands watch over Captain Rimtar's memorials, who bled to death after a werecivet ripped his neck open. The memorials are incomplete. Three of the statues are missing. The statues are of a crude quality quite unlike any other statue displayed elsewhere in the Fortress or on its walls. It's very dark, and empty. It is not a good place.
The first thing I remember about it was that it was dug to house Captain Cerol's remains back when the Fort was still in its infancy. It happened in a routine patrol of the spidery forest, back when it hadn't all been cut down. Cerol got into quite the scuffle with an undead moose, and although he killed it he was terribly wounded. He might have recovered but the brook froze over and there was no source of water, the wells had not yet been constructed. Captain Cerol died of thirst. The survivors had to bury his body or else suffer his wrath from beyond the grave.
Stuck between immediately digging and burying a graveyard in the evil biome or spending more time doing the same in the neutral one, it was decided that the quick option should be the right course of action. This was back before we knew much about anything in regards to the new evil undead. I didn't really know what I was doing.
Cerol was interred beneath and his tomb floored over, memorials given aplenty to appease his soul because his body was certainly restless. His wife Lor, she went insane with grief and died of dehydration too. She spent the last of her moments, days and days just spent in the darkness in her husband's tomb listening to his corpse shifting beneath. She soon joined the tomb. Others joined the tomb too, and one particular tomb became a dumping ground for corpses - no ceremonial purpose, just practical containment.
After a massive undead breakout resulted in ravens infesting the hallways, the dead of the Fortress had to be buried elsewhere. A new tomb was dug out and the Memorial Broke built, between these two structures the fallen of the Fortress were honoured in a much more deserving way. When the soldiers had to clear the old catacombs and see their dead friends lurching for them one last time... The catacombs were closed, a lot destroyed but some things like the memorials left untouched for fear of disturbing the already disturbed. The dead were reburied east, beneath the holy walls and in highly defended tombs where no necromancer, evil forest nor adventurous archaeologist could disturb their bodies.
The only remnant of this place in any Dwarf's memory is that whilst digging out a limestone layer for construction material, amongst some water pipes a strange structure was unearthed by some of the miners. It was quickly walled over and filled in with obsidian before any curious Dwarves poked a hole into the first catacombs.
The corpsepiles carry some of this superstition well, vicious hamsters aside.
None of the children like playing in the corpsepiles. I've seen them run around playing everywhere in the Fortress at least once - even in the 2nd cavern layer back in the frontier days, even in hell during the reinforced expedition (even if they no longer do so now) and even on the wallspikes (some of the children must have death wishes). The corpsepile however... The last and only time a child was found in the corpsepiles was during the mysterious death of Asmel Trammeloars, the same Dwarf who had her severed arm reanimated and placed in her bedroom. I still have no rational explanation of what happened to Asmel to this day, and I think it's for the best that only soldiers have access to it and only to throw corpses in and leave them in there, locked in with two necromancers and a handful of hamsters for company. Asmel was found in the corpsepiles dehydrated, so she had been there for a long time.
I should hope Dwarven parents everywhere tell bedtime tales on why not to trust the hamster, for it is an evil vermin.
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Topic: Ravens are murder. [SPOILERS] (Read 169607 times)