After Doñas body was put to rest, I took a brief pause from my tasks as a funeral manager.
Sigun and I stopped by in Treatyseed. The old capital was even more chaotic than usual. In fact, the whole temple collapsed on itself just as I walked into the fortress. This did not seem to bother the locals.
In addition, another battle was being fought in the lower levels. Nobody had cleaned up any of the mess from earlier battles either.
I came to Treatyseed to file an official complaint. Apparently I have been stripped of my title as a baron. I can understand they needed a replacement during the time I was actually dead, but now that I am back I would like the position back.
The nobles were too busy strangling goblins and I did not achieve much during my visit.
We decided to move on, and luck had it that there was a cave only a short walk away from Treatyseed where another unfortunate adventurer had met his end. According to my notes, Thon Scarone had travelled to the Shadow of Finching to fight an Ettin, and had his head bitten off.
Sigun and I made it to the cave and searched it from top to bottom, which took me a very long time. Items were scattered everywhere. I did find the morion crown that had belonged to Scarone, but there was no trace of the corpse. We also spend a lot of time searching the extensive caverns below the cave, and it is here that we ran into two humans, an old mother and her daughter. The cave was probably a hundred urist deep, and this was the last place where I had expected to find humans. I however quickly found out why they were hiding in this place.
They had been poisoned with vampire blood by an adventurer that had recently visited the site.
This is terrible news, it means that the vampire curse, which we thought was eradicated, was now spreading again. I however am not the person to fix this. These women carry no blame, like Sigun and I do not carry blame for the curse we carry. If the living think it would be acceptable to eradicate us then that would only be because emotions are clouding their proper judgement.
We stayed for a while, and I was shocked to learn that the older woman, Sekur Handgoals, had been a traveling companion of Scarone. She told me many things about their travels, and in addition she could help me find Scarone’s corpse, it was somewhere out in the wilderness, outside of the cave.
The skeleton was incomplete, but that was to be expected after all this time. On the positive side, I could easily wrap the remaining bones in a piece of cloth and fit them in my backpack, it would not encumber me too much.
Scarone, in better times:
Sigun and I were about halfway our journey back to Boltspumpkin when disaster struck. We were ambushed by about 30 goblins. Our only chance was to run, but Sigun did not, he fought back. Had it been full moon, he would have easily dispatched all of them, now he fell quickly.
Others might have paused to grieve, I just continued alone.
I was already close to home when I saw the familiar shape of the Iron Deep on the horizon. Countless times had I passed by this site, but never had I entered. Now you should known that the historical journals about the site are a bit lacking in detail, which is something that has bothered me for a long time. I decided to do a bit of research myself.
Right away I noted an important difference between the descriptions of the site and the current situation. Yes, the mighty towers were there, the site was enormous. There was however no extensive flooding, and there were no cascading waterfalls. Everything had frozen solid.
I carefully climbed down, and found out right away that it might be difficult to get back out. Climbing is difficult with just one arm, and I lost my footing several times.
In the end I made it to the lower levels. There was far less water here than I expected, it presented no problem for exploration. The reports by earlier adventurers were accurate about the corpses though. A terrible thing had happened here. Dwarven corpses littered the halls and surface. Galka had been thorough in searching the site for artifacts, I found little else of note, but I was able to take many important notes that would no doubt result in a fine article on the history of the Iron Deep.
When I got back to the stairs on my way to the surface something had changed for the worse. The ice above had melted. Both stairwells had changed into thundering waterfalls. I tried to climb the stairs, but was washed down time and time again. What was worse was the amount of debris that came with the water. Heavy wooden logs, corpses, pieces of armor. It was impossible to evade them all. I made it to the top of the stairs once, only be swept away again. Only the fact that I do not need to breathe saved me from drowning.
I thought about the enormous halls below. It would take days for these halls to fill, and for the water levels to rise above the stairs. I might never fill up if it was draining somewhere, which it probably did because it had not filled up over the past decades. There was also no guarantee that it would freeze over in the coming night. (ooc; there was also no way to rest or skip time, so waiting would be unbearable.)
I was trapped and had to look for another way out.
I dove deep underwater, and found a door leading deeper into the fortress, There was another door behind it and this worked as an improvised airlock. I closed the first door, and could therefore keep the area ahead free of water. I had entered the mines. I explored every tunnel, and all were dead ends. finally I made it to the magma forges. They were still glowing brightly after all these years. There was a narrow corridor ahead, towards a magma lake. I had to jump across a shallow puddle of magma to reach it.
I jumped and made it across, only to slip on the stairs beyond (hidden below that boulder), and to lose my footing and slide into the magma below.
It only took a second before I was back out. As if by a miracle I was unharmed and not on fire. Was I immune to fire? Unlikely. None of my clothes were burned, and they were normal flamable rags. (I exited DF at this point and checked if I had the temperature settings on, which I did, guess I was extremely lucky. My status was actually -swimming- when I regained control)
I guess the fact that all my belongings were absolutely soaked in water from my earlier ordeal saved me. It was now clear the corridor ended at the magma lake. The lake was surrounded by steep walls, but in the glow of the magma I could see other caves connect to this cavern, high above me. Climbing with just one arm would be a terrible risk, but this was the only way out. I studied the rock to plot the shortest and safest route, then went for it.
I made it to the cavern without losing my grip. I had escaped from the Iron Deep.
It was a long walk underground through the caverns from the Iron Deep to Pasttimegears, the closest place that I knew of that connects the surface to the underground caverns. As there is no light down there I have no idea how many days I spend in the cavern, but I had to backtrack dozens of times, many of the tunnels are dead ends. In the end, I did make it to the underground stairs of the fortress.
From there I returned to Herograves where Scarone’s remains were laid to rest. I put the morion crown in the casket as a gift to accompany him in death.
With that I will take a break from my journeys, I need to work on some papers on the history of the Iron Deep, and need to properly write down the new insights I’ve gained about the adventurers that have now been laid to rest.
I have submitted the dragon bone bracelet to the museum, and have also provided new pedestals which I crafted at Herograves, as we had run out of room to store items.
------
The save game can be found
here.
I have not updated the map yet, but it should be sufficient to know that Herograves lies between the Shelter of Adventurers and Healerlashes, so very close to the museum.
Author
Topic: Museum III, adventure succession game (DF 0.47.05) (Read 407870 times)