"The Siren Spire of Adamant Awe"
Year after year, the dwarves of [CIVILIZATION] send an expedition out into the world in order to ascertain the fate of last year's expedition. It has long-since been forgotten exactly when this series of fruitless expeditions started, but the dwarves are a sort that demand an answer.
It happens year after year, when they head northeast to the ominous shrubland that has been known only in name: "The Hill of Spit." The hill lies beyond a ruined elven settlement, a stone's throw away from a brook that has come to be known as "Troublemysteries." By the time they arrive, it is already to late.
They embark year after year, and there they stand, awe-struck with their implements of dwarven duty left undisturbed at their feet. All about them are the decrepit wagons and bleached bones of those who heralded their grim arrival -- barrels filled with rot and worm, picks covered in rust and dust. There they stand with their eyes open wide and jaws agape, and they stare upward into the dome of the heavens. What they see is beyond the ken of mortal beard. It reaches from the ground higher than any bird has flown; higher than any cloud has drifted; higher than any man, dwarf, best or monster has ever or will ever ascend, twisting and writhing upward in ways that can only transfix the gaze of unwary observers in their fundamentally impossible geometries -- a spiraling needle of pure adamantine, ascending beyond the vanishing-point into the sky.
They stand there, motionless and breathless, and wait only for time to wear them down into the dust of the earth from whence they came, leaving that siren spire standing amidst a graveyard of wagons and barrels to call more of their bearded kind to an emaciated doom.
Another year, another expedition unheard of, another question unanswered, another expedition prepared.
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Topic: 2212 z-level above-ground Adamantine Spire (Read 333477 times)