Year 522From the journal of Deler Cerolgim, bookkeeperSo, Tekkud and the other Founders have retreated to the "safe zone" for now, in anticipation of their protective clothing reaching its best-by date. The task falls to me to breach the mysterious flooded chamber that's been discovered underneath Upper Battlefailed. I'm not a very experienced miner but Kikrost assures me the plan is very simple and pretty much foolproof. Looking it over I have to agree; dig a staircase straight down from the Boneyards so that it passes near the flooded chamber, continuing down another floor and then out the side to drain into the giant lake filling the first cavern layer. A stoneworker accompanied me to help carve only a narrow Beast-proof drainage slot at the end of this tunnel. Then, once that's all done, strike the wall and as soon as the water starts flowing climb up a level to remain clear of it.
Ral Iddeduk, a bowyer who was a passing acquaintance of mine, told me this morning that he'd had a vision that night. He'd been peculiarly secretive about it and as I'd headed down here to dig he'd gone off to the workshops muttering under his breath. I wondered if he'd somehow known something about what I might find.
As I passed near the chamber's location the stone became damp, groaning quietly and sweating under the great pressure of the water. The flooded staircase leading down here was almost fifty flights tall so there was a lot of weight bearing down on it. But the path Kikrost had marked on the maps was indeed safe. I dug past it and soon enough the stoneworker and I were down in dry rock putting the finishing touches on the drain. I paused for a moment once it was done, peering out through the narrow fortification into the first cavern level. A steady low moan echoed through the vast space and at first I chalked it up to wind. But then the moan paused and I swore I could hear Aci draw a breath somewhere out there before it resumed. I shuddered and went back up to the part of the shaft with moistened walls to finish my work.
The oozing water had been filtered through several meters of porous rock and yet it still reeked, the fresh-hewn walls already showing unwholesome stains and streaks. I shook my head and grimaced. This wasn't going to be glamorous. I struck, my trusty pick biting into the rock and flaking away rough chunks. Eventually the wet sheen became beads, actively dripping, and then thin high-pressure sprays began trickling through cracks. Almost there...
The final blow sank the pick's head unexpectedly deep, and then it was immediately blasted back out of the divot it had made by the jet of dark water. The jet was mixed with gravel as it clawed at the edges of the hole. I scrambled backward and hurried up the stairs, exactly as I'd rehearsed over and over in my mind, and managed to beat the flood. I was drenched in the foul-smelling stuff but unlike Tekkud my clothing held firm; after surviving the poisons of Battlefailed a little stink wasn't going to bother me.
The torrent blasted through for some time as the stairwells above drained. Technically, my job here was done; there were masons up there who'd been waiting for that to start happening and were no doubt already following the water down bearing blocks of stone to patch up the exploratory shafts that had been dug earlier. But I waited for the initial surge to subside, the staircase's water column emptied and the immense pressure gone with it, and peered back down through the hole once an airspace finally appeared at the ceiling. I had to admit it; Kikrost's regret at not being able to be present for this discovery had piqued my own curiousity in no small measure.
The passage beyond looked strange. Its walls were carved by tools, clearly, but it meandered in an aimless curving way that seemed unplanned. A mineshaft that had followed a vein of minerals, perhaps? No, from what I could see of the floor and ceiling there were no traces of minerals - just ordinary granite. Very strange.
The water was
foul. Now that the stairs were empty the water was draining from the farther recesses of the twisty passage, and it bore with it the stench of decay. I was used to it, though - this would be far from the first flooded chamber packed with old corpses that I'd encountered here in Battlefailed. I started wading against the flow to get a better look around some of the corners, ready to flee if any skeletons roused themselves like that one terrible time in the magma works.
But there were no skeletons, no traces of any bodies. Just an oily sheen of rotten fat and pus on the surface of the water. I grimaced and forged ahead. What had died down here? Finally I spotted it. A huge, looming form half-submerged at the end of the twisty passage, curled up as if it had hidden itself away. It was some sort of giant lizard-like creature, and although it looked emaciated and its skin was glistening with rot it seemed basically intact. The great depth and stillness of the water must have preserved it somehow. I wrinkled my nose, hoping the butchers and cooks didn't get any ideas.
The water was deep and still no longer. The corpse
shifted. I froze. Had it just been nudged by the flow? No. My heart started hammering harder as it stretched, rolling over onto its rotten paws. Disgusting fluids oozed from the network of scars that covered every part of its body. This was no corpse even though it looked more than halfway to that state. It was alive. It turned its eyeless head toward me and emitted a shuddering huff. A hurricane of dust blasted through the cavern's air.
I, of course, ran screaming for the stairway. The creature followed in hot pursuit.
"Forgotten Beast! Seal the Boneyards! Seal the Boneyards!" The Boneyards were the old marble mines, a series of regularly spaced narrow passages below Upper Battlefailed that served as a common frontier when dealing with threats like this. The masons were already hard at work on the task and frantically put the finishing touches on their barricades as I ran past. One of them, I couldn't remember his name, worked so quickly that he accidentally sealed himself into the stairwell with me. That meant that the only way out for us was the flooded stairway's original entrance, in the magnetite halls of Upper Battlefailed.
It was a long stairway and my mind was racing as fast as my feet. The beast had been down here all along while we'd been exploring and refurbishing Battlefailed, with free access to the fort at any time. The only thing that had kept it quiescent had been the enormous weight of water flooding the staircase. Had the previous inhabitants of Battlefailed trapped it there that way? Was that the reason why the magnetite halls had apparently been abandoned before they'd even been furnished?
Every provision had been made in Kikrost's plan to allow this chamber to drain safely. No provision had been made to
stop it from draining.
As we approached the top of the stairway the mason and I began to falter. The beast behind us was tireless. This near the original surface of the water there had been some life in it, a scum of biofilm on the rocks, and it made the stairs slippery; the mason slipped and fell in a puddle. I grabbed his arm and helped him up. "We need to seal the stair behind us!"
"Can't... can't..." the mason panted. "It's too wide, and there's no raw stone nearby. No time!"
"Then we keep running. Upper Battlefailed has been lost before, maybe we can survive losing it again." I wasn't sure I really believed that; I knew that Upper Battlefailed would be relatively easy to seal off from Lower Battlefailed, but not from the surface. And once this creature was out there, how could it possibly be contained? We'd be trapped below.
We made it up to the magnetite hall and I grimaced. So appropriately, the useless space had been converted into yet another refuse stockpile; bones and skeletons were stacked everywhere. The huffing blasts of dust were coming right on my heels now and I knew my only hope was that it would pause to destroy some of the doors we'd installed for no reason other than a sense of neatness.
Then the creature stepped in the same puddle that the mason had slipped in.
Whatever had happened to the beast in the lost history of Battlefailed had left terrible wounds, but only now did it falter. The poisons of Battlefailed seeped in easily through the skin of its ruined feet. By the time it reached the top of the stairs its legs were barely working at all and it began crawling through the mounds of refuse, the splintered bones tearing at its glistening skin and rupturing the blood-filled blisters swelling in it.
Finally, the creature shuddered to a halt. Its breathing stilled, its dust settled, and it joined the rest of the corpses piled throughout the magnetite hall.
Later, as I shakily returned to Lower Battlefailed for a much-needed drink, I heard a shout of triumph from the workshops. I detoured by to see the crowd of dwarves clustered around the bowyer's bench.
Perhaps Armok is indeed telling us something.
From the journal of Kikrost DuralkosothWe drained the upper part of the mystery chamber. There was a bit of excitement with some creature that had been lurking but Battlefailed poisoned it when it came out. Disappointingly, it seems to be just a random rough-hewn passage. There is a yet lower chamber that's still flooded, however, down a short flight of stairs. I've ordered a drainage pump built to see if there's anything more down there but I'm not expecting much at this point - perhaps this was just some sort of unfinished project started by one of the managers of Old Battlefailed.
Speaking of projects, I think the cleanup operations are in a very satisfying spot now - all of Lower Battlefailed is safe from poison and the clutter is being sorted and dumped efficiently. It's time for a few renovations to help settle us in here for good and assert our control over the caverns and surface beyond our walls. If this is where we're going to live, it's going to not just be livable, it's going to be
nice.
Firstly, I'm going to have the magma works overhauled. There's floorspace down there for a lot more magma workshops than are currently installed, but the magma ducts will need to be re-dug to support them. For efficiency of operations we'll also need stockpile space down there for raw ore and other materials. For stockpiles, I'm directing that a second level be dug out directly above the forges; they'll be accessed by a series of nickel stairways directly between the workshops.
I've also had the fort go on a major door-installation push. Many doors had to be dismounted during the draining of Battlefailed, and many seem to have never been installed in the first place, but the masons have been busy and they'll be good for further compartmentalization of Battlefailed in the case of future disasters or flooding.
Many of the statues and workshops left over from old Battlefailed have items of trash (or even perhaps items of value) that the flowing floodwaters have wedged in to inaccessible locations. I'm having them removed and rebuilt.
We're in need of wood. While going over the maps planning out the drainage for the mystery chamber I noticed that the mystery bunker out on the northern beach has a ramp that leads directly down to the first cavern level. This should allow wood harvesting without risking exposing the fortress to the beasts that might be lurking elsewhere on that level. I've ordered that the bunker be refurbished with a drawbridge and roof to allow it to be sealed off completely as needed.
Armok damn it! This thing showed up right where I was going to cut down trees, just minutes after I finished designating them all. Fortunately I'd already had a hatch cover built on the ramp in that bunker years ago, before I'd known where it led -
because I didn't know where it led. So this beast will be locked underground while the bunker is properly finished up and sealed to prevent surface vandals from accidentally unleashing it.
Instead I'll have wood harvested from the northeastern corner of the third cavern layer. There are a couple of Forgotten Beasts lurking down on that layer too, but they're all non-flying living creatures so if they're disturbed they should die easily enough when they enter the stairway of death. Hopefully we won't lose many woodcutters or haulers in such a circumstance.
I've determined that there's just three ramp segments between the safe zone and the magma works that are still contaminated, I've ordered them rebuilt with fresh stone to expedite cleaning them. Then Safe Zone workers should be able to work the forges and furnaces too.
Meanwhile, digging out the new "attic" for the magmaworks has run into some odd difficulties. It seems that the stone in this area has an interesting history behind it. The miners reported discovering a tiny water-filled cavity in the obsidian with a full-grown still-living black-cap tree sealed inside. Another contained a goblin-cap. Elsewhere they encountered inexplicably warm walls. It seems that this area was at some point covered in magma and then doused with water to harden it, leaving pockets behind. How peculiar.
Well, there are no visible connections to the magma sea or any other fluid sources, so these pockets shouldn't be all that big. I ordered an exploratory hole poked in one, as far from the stairs down as possible to give any flow time to dissipate.
It looks like there was an old magma channel at the former ground level that got sealed over by the flooding. That's not so bad. In fact, the magma is doing some good up there - when the trees were dug out the spilled water washed some contaminants off of the miners and spread it around a little. This magma is cleaning some of it up. To get the rest I ordered the next section of the magmaduct to be breached as well.
Damnit! What kind of engineering were those old Battlefaileders up to here, was this a magmaduct or an aqueduct? This unexpected deluge spread quite a bit of contaminant around. Ah well, the miners finished lancing the magma pockets and the rest of the mess can be cleaned up later once the magma fades away.
That stairway at the north end of the last exposed section leads down into solid rock. Most peculiar.
Surprisingly, although the magma cleaned the poisons it flowed over, I have discovered that Longland flour and several other common substances are magma-safe. Who knew?
Winter still remains of the year 522, but I don't anticipate much excitement now. The mysteries have been delved into, now all that remains is rearranging the furniture. New projects will be planned at the turn of 523.
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Topic: Reclaiming Battlefailed (Read 97373 times)