Very briefly, there opened a window of opportunity; the opportunity to make for the surface and start cleaning up this abysmal mess we're in. And I took it.
It worked out great! I got a small portion of the corpses out on the surface down into the bowels of the fortress where no necromancer could ever aspire to reach, as well as a bit of the junk around my entrance area. Sadly, it was cut short by the reappearance (well, technically they were in ambush, but it was totally obvious that they were there!) of one of the necromancers, the human hunter Ago. He raised about thirty corpses in a sweeping arc from the western edge of the map, up to our entrance, and to southern edge of the map, where he seemingly vanished. The period lasted from the 15th malachite to the 21st. Slow as hell that one is. Some day, though, I will capture him. Until then, the marksdwarves will be spending a lot of time out on the balconies overlooking the landscape, shooting down at the undead.
At least nobody managed to get themselves killed!
[edit]
The situation has returned to its' usual grim self.
After the last necromancer incursion's mess was cleaned up, I let the dwarves out again to get a little more cleaning done. I sent the soldiers out to mop up the last of the undead, which they did quite valiantly, and no sooner was that complete than a goblin siege showed up. I ordered everyone back inside once more, and there they remain. Some of the soldiers came REALLY close to being shredded by the goblins because they were late to the undead-slaying party, and wouldn't turn around and go to their new station until they'd arrived at their previous objective. No casualties, though, as engagements were avoided.
Well, that is until everyone made it back inside and the gates were locked again. All three goblin squads are mounted on giant olms, you see, and one of the squad leaders' olms pathed to a door accessible through a channeled moat. I'd used that door to prevent flooding after miners opened a drain from the moat into an interior well cistern, because we needed water access underground, and then forgot about it. So I stopped everything and order walls to be built to seal off the well room in case the olm breached it, which was successful. The goblin commander drowned, of course, but the olm is still sitting there, presumably taking its' frustration out on the door, while I work on getting a mason in there to build a wall behind the door to prevent it being flooded.
The dwarf is in there about to build that wall when I notice that one of the soldiers is tantrumming. It's a raw recruit, who had never seen combat before. In fact, he was a child, recently grown into adulthood who had never seen blood in his life as far as I know. So understandably, his eagerness to prove himself to his commanding officer, a healer-mage, ensured that he was the first through the door to attack the severed and reanimated goblin head that was laying in the bottom of my trap bridge's pit scaring workers up on the bridge. He got a big, fat negative thought for being attacked by the undead and, on top of already being pissed for having been drafted and not getting to finish his breakfast and whatnot, he became rather miserable.
So he took it out on the mayor, a seven-year-old girl (desperate times call for desperate measures, so I changed the dwarf raws for this save so that my 40-odd children, half the population, will start working by the age of 4, and the game decided that noble positions can be filled by these children.) He at first just wanted to talk to her about it, or at least yell at her, but she decided it was nap time and went to take a nap. That sent him over the edge, and he went to her bedside, and brutally killed her with his axe, then fists. I watched the whole thing, but nobody could save her. My first residential death in this fortress: only merchants have died up to this point.
So now he's even more pissed off because he witnessed death. On top of that, another 7-year-old child was appointed mayor. Hmm... To lock him in the mayoral bedrooms or not...