Utterly Mad

How the hell is that re-occurring? D:

I have no clue. If I could effectively weaponize it, I would. I made the mistake of building my above ground farms under it because I forgot. Now, every year, I lose three or four fields to it. It has shown me something interesting though: creatures and items caught near the center of the blast are atomized. The kids before were killed by impact with walls and flying objects. The cat is no where to be found, so I can only assume that he was atom smashed by the explosion. Imma build a tower around it and use it as an execution chamber.

It doesn't just occur and then explode upwards either. I've taken a hard look at it. The dust cloud "occurs" in a 7x7 square like:
  XXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
XXXXXXX
  XXXXX
that. The dust originates on every single tile from where the top of the tree was, down to the most solid floor it can hit. It is literally just an explosive column of dust that just appearates in the spring, causes havoc to everything nearby, and then settles for a year. My next experiment is to channel a deeper pit to see if I can get it to extend in some way.

One of my starting 7 became king when the old king was killed during the invasion of my civs capital. Which of the starting 7? Let me just go over real quick how brave my starting 7 are, or rather, how brave 6 of my starting 7 are. They moved about the canyon as a group, except this fucker, who always lagged behind. When the cyclops was found and slain, the 6 moved as one without thinking and attacked it with the full fury of the mountain homes. Except this fucker, who upon seeing the slightest hint of something slightly resembling raspberry sauce, turned and fled with the big "!" over his icon. The cowardly little fuck is king now? I think an "accident" is in order.

Another of my starting 7 was bit by a werewolf. He is trapped in a dwarf dug pit south of the fort. He was infected when, during a badly timed dumping of supplies to my forts old resident werewolves so they could make their own mini fort, he removed the cover over the pit and to my surprise, the werewolves inside had no problem leaping through 2 z-levels of open air to bite the miner and kill a farmer. After that werewolf and the miner were placed back in the pit and everything sealed up, the miner killed the other two werewolves during the next full moon. He is alone now, waiting. His life is an endless cycle of "build workshops, dig rooms, change into monster, destroy workshops, change into dwarf, repeat."