Composition: The TruthThis is a talc-bound codex.
The written portion consists of a 20 page essay entitled, Composition: The Truth, authored by Olon Onulolun. It concerns the unfinished journal authored by Elpho Ustuthdeleth. The writing is as vicious as can be. Overall the prose is amateurish at best.
Excerpt:From Snaz Xestsuslozgo's Journal:
The earthblood hung in the air for a moment, so bright it was hard to look at - hot on our faces even in the distance, then it came crashing down, enveloping twenty dwarf-slaves and a few good goblins. I was reminded that day of the violence of the dwarf. The hysteric laughing that echoed up through the stone walls echoed across the sands and drove rage, anger, and fear into our cold hearts. We approached more cautiously, but with blood in our eyes and on our tongues. We would pay and charge life for life that day. Only a few of us walked away, broken - but with a bit of vengeance paid, we slept well that night.
(Relish it, friends - this is the best thing you'll see all post.)Snaz here shows that eloquence the long-lived can gain, though the poetry is tainted with the racism you'd expect from a goblin. I collected this segment not because it was plagiarized by Elpho. In fact, I gathered it for the opposite purpose: to contrast these two great poets. In a rare show of personal creativity in this work, Elpho included the following poem:
Dead.
Dead.
Burning hot dead.
The magma spills everywhere.
The dwarves jump in and burn.
Dead.
Dead.
More and more dead.
Arrows fly from behind the tankard.
No one closes the gate.
Death and heat in Smallhands.
Some scholars have argued that this is not a poem, but rather a list – an inventory of Elpho's survey of the surface following the goblin raid in early Spring 176. This author humbly suggests we give Elpho more credit than that. The sorrowful tone of the poem coincides with a terrible defeat at Smallhands at this time – a loss of a quarter of the fortress' population.
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OOC:
I can't think of a way to convey this in "character" so here it is, boy did I fuck up.
Elated that a goblin siege arrived basically already inside the lava, I got real fucking confident and paid for it. I left the gates open, sure that the magma would solve the problem. It did, but because it only wiped out the first arrivals of the siege, and now the terrain was hazardous, the
rest of the siege arrived over the entire month. Goblin bowmen spawned on small dry bits in the sea of magma surrounding the Tall Bar and were able to fire arrows at dwarves who
dodged directly into the magma and died (4 this way). Another 5 or so were killed in battle, peppered with arrows by archers that were protected by a pool of magma. The rest were haulers trying to get stuff from the surface only to have a heavily armed goblin appear and bash their brains in. I kept trying to switch strategies - engage them, move away, close the gate, just shoot them, wait for the magma to clear. In the end, by not committing to any one of these, I got a quarter of the fort killed. We're down to 44 dwarves. Shockingly, the only named dwarf to die was Tonnot.
Here's what the aftermath looked like - a lot of the invaders were dwarves, so not every dwarf corpse there is one of us...
I gotta find something to lift my mood...
That ought to do it.
Also recon...how do I complete the Tall Bar? I am confounded by trying to figure it out myself.
Author
Topic: Smallhands - nearly 40 years and still tiny! (Read 441038 times)