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We, who call ourselves the Freeworkers, left the Rags of Socketing in the year 103, 3 years after Mebzuth Trustpulley donned the crown. New ruler, new life. And rumours pointed to our new home being quite the... forgiving new life. A little island in a convoluted archipelago, safe from the goblins to the North, clear of the elves to the West, earth rich with metal and stone. I am thankful for that, as were it not so, our earlier efforts would surely have seen us rotting on the prairie shortly after our arrival.

It took us weeks of Spring to burrow into the small hill by the brook we had decided would make for our fishing and water supply. Not because we were slow to dig, oh no. We dug too much, too soon. In our preparations for the future, we neglected the present. Cold, wet nights, those were.

Nevertheless, dwarven ingenuity provides. We eventually shifted all our stocks from the wagon into our new home. By the grace of Shigin, goddess of freedom, the surrounding wilderness gave sustenance until our underground crops were ripe, and well beyond. We proceeded to carve out our places of work and dwelling, and painstakingly organize our stockpiles so that every item in the burrow was easy to track and account for. Hematite was quickly struck, and our meager fuel reserves were stretched to their limit. Loathe to disrupt the depths unprepared, we settled for a few hastily forged weapons to handle the wildlife, and laboured on, expanding our settlement, trading crafts of rock of such quality that a child's handful of bins was enough to trade for an entire caravan's worth of supplies.

Then it came to pass that by early Spring of the following year, our forgiving new home began baring its teeth. At first, the shift in the fates merely presented some uncanny situations. Some of our folk began inexplicably becoming trapped on trees, even though they were strictly ordered to only pick fruits and plants off the ground, and nothing could be done or said to bring them down. We tried calling alerts, and even building stairs and platforms underneath them, to no avail. Tosid, Muthkat, and Lorbam - how the miner got stuck in a  tree is beyond this dwarf's comprehension - died of thirst. The fourth one survived... we cut the tree down. We cut them all down in our vicinity after that day.

Some weeks later, bearing the semblance of one possessed, a small child of ten years violently took over the clothier's workshop, and went to work, mumbling and murmuring, on what came to be the most impressive artifact we possessed at the time: Ushdishsinsot, the Saffron Claws. A hemp sock that shall undoubtedly become a thing of legend! After the work was completed, the child went back to his everyday antics, and an explanation for the event was left for the gods to hold in secret.

Not a month passed, and yet another child of ten years, Zuglar, was taken by spirits, and made burrow in one of the less utilized workshops. He kept mumbling for shells... we couldn't find any, and dare not remove him forcefully from the site. Fearing the anger of demons, we locked the door. The mumblings and murmurs eventually turned into unholy screeching as if from the void beneath the earth, scratching, and battering on the walls for days, a thing that would make the stoutest of axedwarves shy away from even the hall that connected to the corridor that took one to the child. When it stopped, and we creaked the door open, the wee dwarf was nowhere to be seen.

A year of healing, digging, and indeed even merrymaking later, in late Slate of 105, midspring, a big lizard attacked Oddom, one of the herbalists collecting plants by the brook, and mauled him into his grave. We had yet to grasp how to sufficiently armour ourselves at the time. Everyone was so obsessed with mining out coal for the furnaces, it never even occurred to us that the surrounding forest offered a near-limitless supply of it. So our ragged militia dealt with the threat, and fate willed it that Dobar clove the lizard in half with his mighty axe, and avenged his companion's death with but a few cuts and bruises. Gods have mercy, we didn't know...

About half a moon's cycle later, as we were still mourning the death of our friend, Zuglar the child came back to his father, in the dining hall, and violently struck him. We took the account as Onol's pain over the loss of his son, but then more folk told the same story, and Onol's split lip, as well as the blood on the room's walls, painted a clearer picture. We resentfully went back to the accursed workshop, unused since the tragic day, and painstakingly dismantled every bench, table, and floor tile. And there his remains were, underneath heavy rock, and in a space too small for an arm to fit up to the elbow, let alone a child. But those were his bones. We laid him to rest. He did not return. I believe Olom would have had it the other way around, but the dead have a place, and the living, quite another.

Two months after those horrifying events, Dobar started acting strangely in the barracks. Shortly after the shift in behaviour, he turned into the same beast that had slain Oddom, and violently attacked two other members of the militia, Ast and Bomrek. The lasses, taken aback, were injured in the fight, and one of our now fully armoured brethren, Zas, alerted by the growls, wails, and thrashing, stepped in, smashing the creature's head with his iron shield. As more of us became aware of the fight, we barged into the room, to find Zas standing devoid of expression, and the two women on the floor coated in blood and gore, eyes wide as the moon, all three gazing upon the beast's mutilated corpse. Zas looked at them, at the bite marks on their legs, then at us.
We fed the women, let them clean themselves, carved a small room in an unused mining level a ways down from the main portions of our halls, escorted them in, compliant and silent, walled off the entrance, and never came back. Bomrek... she had recently given birth to a boy... and she would not have him taken from her grasp.
It has been half a year since. For a while, we could still hear the infant's wailing, piercing our halls incessantly. After a few weeks, folks reported some screaming and thrashing echoing from the lowest mineshafts. Now, we only hear one... but she can still be heard.

I must now go and oversee the new hospital, recently completed. The chief chirurgeon is knowledgeable, but his tendency to leave patients who cannot stand by themselves lying on the floor is starting to make my beard prickly. Hopefully, the worst is behind us, gods willing.