Yow. The fate of my most recent fortress, Trumpetfatal, was (in pretty much every sense of the word) a tragedy. It began badly and ended badly but had a very touching and hopeful part in the middle.
It all began when the dwarves decided to embark on top of a volcano.
Apparently they weren't watching where they were going while pushing the wagon up those cliffs. Three of the team immediately plunged into the magma and died. A fourth apparently fell backwards off the cliff and broke most of his bones. So right off the bat I was down to three dwarves. Still, things weren't hopeless, right? I still had a couple of miners, and enough of the food and booze to (maybe) last until the first caravan. And the map I'd stumbled onto was really cool; there was a tall spur of land across a deep gorge just north of the volcano, and I decided I would build a bridge across to it and establish the first halls of Trumpetfatal there.
But the stress of the initial embarkstrophe proved too much for one of the remaining dwarves. He snapped, and went off into the valley to die alone. Okay, two dwarves left. More food for them. But wait! What's this?
Against overwhelming odds, in the bitterest of circumstances, love finds a way! Driven together by adversity, these two have a real chance to struggle through, to survive, to build a new chapter of dwarven history
together. So beautiful! *sniffle*
Well, we all know young love doesn't last forever. I'd just managed to carve out the food storage room and a couple of workshops when the stress became too much and Tholtig went berserk.
The young lovers died with their pickaxes embedded in each other's faces, and that was the end of Trumpetfatal.