Seven dwarves came here to found civilization.
Only one of them left alive.
Breach these doors at your own peril. -Eliza Nazomas, inscription upon the sealed doors of the former fortress Areliton Addor
The trees of the jungle shifted and shuffled their leaves in the breeze. All else was still and quiet. The corpses of countless fallen lay rotting in the mid-day sun beside abandoned piles of lumber. Everything in sight was soaked in gore: blood and organs littered the landscape clustered with flies. The smell I'm sure you can imagine. The Goblin / Kobold war seemed to be at a stand-still. Weapons of every material and shape imaginable jutted from the earth and wood. Armor hung from branches still containing the decaying limbs of the fallen of many races. Not a soul stirred up above. Here and there amongst the slaughter, if one were to look closely, there lingered a faint white shimmer as if the blood and vomit were marbled. It lay in wait for any fool to step nearby: one whiff was fatal, the slightest smudge upon bare skin brought unavoidable suffering and doom. Above all towered the shattered remains of the rebuilding effort of the dwarven power plant: some fifty odd windmills grinding their gears against one another in dischord. The low rumbling blended with the constant pounding of the waves against the shoreline and seemed to be as native to the landscape as the wind or the rain.
Beneath the earth, within the halls of the rebels, a similar silence prevailed. The entryway bore a resemblance to the surface: indeed, the slaughter had leaked down into their foyer. That same ghastly shimmer also dominated these hallway. The doors; barred with heavy granite and not to be opened.
In the dining room a meeting was being held. Eliza Nazomas presided with little Cilob Saramkogan in a papoose on her back suckling on a tin flask of ale. In attendance were the last surviving and ragged members of the Rags of Paint.
I pause, for a moment, to make note of just how fitting such a name was: they'd been painted in blood and vomit from the first year and as an appropriate metaphor for their existence "Rags" would not fail.
Those in attendance at the meeting had spent the day pondering what they all knew was coming to pass:
Saturnine, a recent addition to the fort at year 1009, listened to her words with great disappointment. She'd desired to help turn this fort into something impressive and worthy of the old civlization. When she'd learned of the fall of Taricus and saw his works she'd pledged to herself that she would do him justice. Now, none of that appeared possible. She'd blown the dust off of the forges only to see the forges useless in the face of an unseen enemy that struck without a sword and killed without ever being seen. Sealdeath could not be felled with weapons or armor. It was an impossible war.
Vanlade, the second of the one-handed warriors, argued with Stumpy the first of the one-handed warriors. His protests were sound: the fort was all that they had left. There was no reason in what they were proposing. There had been no justice for the fallen. Doctor Enolic: still rotting in the quarantined hospital. Guudespelur and Valrandir without proper tombs. Taricus only immortalized in a few blood-soaked steel statues. Salmongod, former mayor, left with nothing but a rock with his name scratched into it. He said he would rather drive his own sword into his neck before agree. Stumpy, ever the pragmatist, had little to argue back with besides "We've got little else t'do, Vanlade. It's an Armok-damned shame but unless we do it we're right focked."
Scaraban stood alone in the barracks. He spoke to no-one anymore. There were no longer any words for what he had seen in the long years since he had come to this place. The last of his gear had been set aside in the armory. Standing in his ragged and torn clothes without his military equipment he looked like the last dwarf alive. He felt like the last dwarf alive.
RedPanda had spent his time looking over Doctor Enolic's only surviving journals and notes. "We must preserve our children," had been noted down on multiple occasions, "We must not let our children suffer the Sealdeath." The emphasis on the survival of the generation they had raised at Areliton Ador was a key element. "We must ensure the survival of our children at any cost."
"We have called this meeting to address the future of our fort," Eliza said, "There are arguments for and against the plan of action we have set forth, and none would agree that it is a desirable one. However, there's nothing else that can be done. Kzul, our only living competent mechanic, has informed you already that the power station would require extensive restructuring of the gear mechanisms involved which would involve a year of work on already infected ground. The jungle immediately above us, and our entryways, are anathema. We cannot trust that a single worker be allowed above for fear of infecting the children."
Grumbles rippled through the small crowd.
"Our mission, as it stands here, has failed. We are not capable of carrying out the work required to construct the tower. The danger is too great, and the war overhead has limited our contact with Kathilmonom to the point where they must already consider us to be dead. We have received no aid within the past three years. By all accounts, our fort has already fallen. We are in no position to argue with facts. Every moment we remain here is another moment closer to our collective death. If we flee, the Wet Papers will find us. We cannot know if Kathilmonom is a true ally of Lashsavior."
"We should be proud to die free!" shouted Vanlade.
"That is why I have . . . altered the plan."
Hushed murmurs issued forth in response.
"Fine, then. Tell us," said Vanlade.
"Our hope is that the children survive. They have no future here, but they would in Kathilmonom. Our hope now is to ensure their safe arrival at that fort. In order to do so without raising suspicion from the Wet Papers, we will have to . . . well, I can't describe it any other way but this. We will have to make it look like they've been abandoned. We will have to make it look like they are orphans. If we return to civilization with them in tow, they'll use them against us. Kidnap them. Assume them to be true indoctrinated traitors. But if only a few mothers were found, tending to a pile of lost orphans . . ."
They set the plan in motion.
As the waves crashed through the halls and soaked the miners, that deadly milk-coloured marbling was seen streaming from their clothing. Sealdeath had already coated their clothes without their knowledge.
The downward stairs flooded rapidly as the soldiers and men fled not upwards but down into the waterlogged fort.
Thirty dwarves were lost that day, clustered in the main dining hall singing their songs of rebellion. The graves of others were washed away by the sea. The fort itself, and all record of the purpose of its existence, finally lived up to its namesake. For years I'd wondered why they'd named the fort "Areliton Addor," that is "The Waterhalls of Drowning." We had never suffered a drowning accident within the halls themselves, which were always salt-dry. The name suddenly came to light on that day. All along they had known that their plan might fail and thus they had kept a failsafe in store: the sea itself. Building the tower by the sea had been their goal, and it had proved functionally impossible at the time, and thus the sea allowed them to escape the wrath of their oppressors. They may have not died the deaths of true dwarves, but they had died free dwarves.
You may ask how I know this all to be true if the fort itself no longer exists as anything but a tide pool reaching to the roof of the magma sea. It is all true and I know it because I was there. My mother was one of the only two survivors to escape with the next exploratory caravan from Kathilmonom, who found us half-starved in the safe house we'd constructed with our supplies scraping the bottom of the barrel.
My name is Zon Zefontosid, daughter of Eliza Nazomas and Doctor Enolic. I am one of the only existing members of the Rags of Paint, whom the Wet Papers consider having been officially destroyed but who live on in myself and my siblings. I have comitted all of their names to memory: Guudespelur, Taricus, Salmongod, Scaraban, Azul, RedPanda, Valrandir, Vanlade, Ultimuh, Ultimuh the second, Stumpy, Metalmilitia, and my father Enolic. I remain here in Kathilmonom, a dwarf just come-of-age, but the day my siblings and I are able we will abandon this temporary residence and return to the coast of the Waters of Lamentation for one purpose and one purpose only:
To do justice to the fallen! To honor our lost queen! To return to glory, a glory we never were allowed!
I swear upon my father's name that will rebuild Areliton Addor!
-Signed Zon Zefontosid and stamped with the Seal of the Rags of Paint OOC EPILOGUE
Rather than leave the fort dead in my fortress folder I decided to suicide. The FPS was too low, every single thing was going wrong that could and I was just fed up with it. However, I fully plan to make Areliton Addor II with either a reclaim or a new embark with the same goal but better executed and more attention to detail in the storytelling. My apologies to everyone who was reading and enjoyed the story: I hoped you liked what I managed to get out before the fort went belly-up.
For now I'm going to start a new community fort, so watch for my new thread when I make it with the current less-buggy version of DF. Thanks for reading and stuff!
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Topic: Areliton Ador, Community Fort - XXXXU: [The End] (Read 32863 times)