I've been playing around with "Fortress Defense" mod, which basically makes it so that you get bum-rushed about a year into embarking by siege after siege of everything from goblins to hellfire imps to tigers riding polar bears.
So I recently started a new fort, Silverstone, sitting on a hilltop, overlooking a small brook, with heaps of flux stone. My objective: Survive. I quickly got an underground farm system going, started training axedwarves, and began the steel industry. Among the first of these axedwarves was a young recruit, barely sixty years old, who had arrived in the first migration wave. His real name has been forgotten - in its place, he is known only as Stubbs.
Stubbs was the first Centurion of Silverstone. He was the most skilled of the eight recruits, and the first to don a full set of Steel armor. Stubbs spearheaded the defense against a siege of Stranglers in the tail end of the first year, slaying five by his own hand. As the months went on, the attacks on Silverstone became more fierce, from goblin ambushes to a full siege force of tigermen. Stubbs held the line. As his comrades fought and died, Stubbs stood, at the dusk of every evening, atop piles of the fallen, clutching his +steel battle axe+ and lowering his head in tribute to the fallen.
Finally, in the second year, the tigermen attempted a flank maneuver. A contingent of tigermen troops, lead by an axe lord, marched on Silverstone from the east. As they drew near, a company of war polar bears descended from the north. Stubbs stood before the unfinished fortifications as his companions fled underground. The flimsy jet hatch covers that protected his entire civiliation would not hold against the invaders. Stubbs and his five remaining soldiers were the only ones holding the line. Protected only by the cover fire of a few militia crossbowmen, Stubbs and the Mechanical Permanences met the assault head on. Axes and spears clashed as warriors on both side fell in an instant. Stubbs waded through the carnage to the tigerman axe lord, mounted on a war polar bear. In the single combat that ensued, Stubbs was pinned by the enormous creature, which ripped both of his arms from their sockets. A doomed dwarf, the centurion did not fall. Not only did he retain consciousness, he kept fighting. His axe arm hopelessly mangled and tossed aside, Stubbs KICKED the axe lord and BIT him to the ground, where a fellow legionnaire stabbed the dumbfounded leader through the head with a steel spear. The remaining forces fled to the edge of the map, leaving their fallen. Stubbs had saved Silverstone. Because of this stand, the fortifications were completed, and the dwarves have never since found themselves facing such overwhelming odds, but the centurion, who lived for carnage, had suffered a fate worse than death. Doomed to live, he could not feed himself or wield his precious weapon. Stubbs was carried home a victorious hero, but he always considered it a defeat.
Naturally, the dwarves were moved by watching this entire saga unfold before their eyes. Rather than condemn Stubbs to a lifetime of helplessness in a hospital bed, they were determined to find another way. They allowed Stubbs to remain on active duty, hoping that perhaps he would be able to return to the battlefield as a brilliant wrestler. However, Stubbs still faced hardships. He could still fight - sort of - but he could not pick up or store his own armor, and he was unable to fetch his own provisions for patrol duty. It was then that Armok intervened.
As Stubbs lay in his bed one night, haunted by the dreams of those who had fallen at his side, the Blood God crept into the chamber, and as he walked, candles flickered and died in his wake. When at last, the avatar reached the side of the bed, he gazed upon Stubbs, his champion. Stubbs had prayed for days to the Blood God, begging for him to end his life as he could no longer serve his master's wishes. Armok listened. He spoke to Stubbs in his dreams, giving him a spark of divine inspiration. Armok showed him a machine - a maniacal, beautiful machine, its gears greased with the blood of the vanquished. And from this machine came, on a spiked conveyor belt, his axe. He would recognize the blade anywhere, but the handle was different. Instead of the grip, there was a complex system of buckles and fasteners. Then, Armok withdrew into the shadows, without a sign of his visit left behind in the dark, and as soon as he had come, the Blood God was gone.
Stubbs awoke the next day and talked to his friend, an engineer who had helped to design Silverstone's running water system. He told the friend of his dream, and described the contraption that he had seen. The engineer was skeptical, but went to work anyway. As Armok guided his hand, skepticism turned to belief as the contraption came together like clockwork - a mechanical arm, brilliant in it beautiful complexity that far surpassed the technology of the dwarves. With the movements of a harmonica-like device in his mouth, Stubbs could swing it to and fro, and his axe was fused to his new metal hand, never to be separated from him again. No one in Silverstone understood how it worked, but they dared not try to decipher its secrets, as it was the will of Armok to give this to his chosen champion, so that rivers of the blood of the enemy might flow from the hilltop of Silverstone for generations to come.
Behold, "Stubbs" Monangerith Gebgim, who shall be forever known as the armless axe lord.
http://img593.imageshack.us/i/stubbs.png/TL;DR
I had an axe dwarf. He lost both arms in combat. Now he fights with his axe in his mouth.
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Topic: The Story of Stubbs (Read 3259 times)