AN : IT'S ALIVE ! ALIIIIIIIIVE !
Hello, dear readers ! Forgive me for this chapter's lateness. College is coming soon, and preparations for it have taken a great deal of time.
Anyway, here it is. The second part of Seeds of Ruin, with this time the honored Chaos God Nurgle as our guest. I hope you will enjoy it, but first, I would like to thank some of my reviewers and answer their questions :
Garmon z evil : Thanks ! The governor keeping his mind - in some fashion - is actually part of a long term plan of which I can say nothing more. As for the reason the Forsaken Sons don't use daemons, it's simple : they don't trust them, and with what happened during the Exodus, can you blame them ? For the resurrection thing, I don't think it has ever truly been used in WH40K official fictions, except when they brought Eliphas back, and he was a Dark Apostle, so it's not like any Chaos Marine can get it. Besides, it involves pacts that Arken would not want to make - unless he really has need of them. As for the xenos ... well, most warbands don't use them because they are racists (is that the term ? I will need to look it up) and still firmly believe in Mankind's superiority - after all, one of the reasons for the Heresy was, at the start, to protect Humanity from them. Arken may want to accept them, but you will need to wait.
Spider : That's a big review, and lot of questions ! Let see ... First, thank for your compliments. 1-1a : well, not for a while - I have a plan for the Fallen making an apparition at least, but it's not scheduled for a long time from now - and yes, I have actually a plan for this story. Shocking, I know. Other renegades will join in time, too. 2 : as for the previous question, not for a while at least, but that WOULD be an interesting encounter. 3 : weeeell ... let's see ... catphractii ? I guess ? I mean, that was the only pattern back then in 30K, so it must be ... 4 : Thanks for the tip. And yes, Talon of Horus is out ... now hurry up and publish the standard edition, Black Library ! DO IT ! DO IT NOW !
As for the others, thank you very much for your reviews, and please review this chapter too !
Now, onward with the story. I won't see you at the end, so here is the info for the next chapter : it is dedicated to Khorne, and its ETA is ... well, unknown. College, moving, you know ...
I do not own Warhammer 40000 or any of its characters. All of them belong to Games Workshop.
Upon the surface of the moon, great domes of plasti-glass and force-fields enclosed small bubbles of breathable air. The artificial atmospheres and gravity were maintained by complex engines the size of Titans, and gleaming, towering structures rose within the confines of Parecxis Alpha's pristine moon. Grand palaces had been built there by the artisans of the planet below, to host the elites of a prosperous world when they desired a moment of tranquility, away from the tumult of existence and the weight of their many responsibilities. Museums received the expositions of artists whose star was in the ascendant, and vast halls were dedicated to the works of the remembrancers – the Ultramarines had been one of the first Legions to accept them at their side, even to encourage their presence, long before they were tasked with such a task by Malcador and his Council of Terra – who had accompanied the 1027th Expeditionary Fleet when it had come to Parecxis. Vast amphitheaters hosted great performances of newly written dramas and those rare ones who had endured the Long Night.
The bio-domes were connected to each other by long underground tunnels, and each was its own independent ecosystem. They were a testament to Mankind's ability for making its home into even the most hostile conditions, and had taken ten years for the system's Adeptus Mechanicus to complete. The moon's colonization had been something of a side-project, as most of Mars' disciples prefered to focus their minds on the construction of the orbital docks around Parecxis Beta – an endeavour much more rational and practical in their cold, logical minds – but the commanders of the Expeditionary Fleet had decided otherwise. The people of Parecxis, too long under the yoke of alien tyranny, needed a reminder of Mankind's might, one that they would be able to always see and that would stoke the fire of their conviction into the Imperium of Man. And thus, the moon's Palace of Glass had been built.
Once the work was done, only a few dozens adepts remained on the moon, keeping the engines running and their machine-spirits happy with ritualistic devotion. Most of the time, these hooded figures remained outside of the bio-domes, their efforts focused on the machines standing against their walls, in the cold, thin, unbreathable air of the moon – the product of attempts at more complete terraformation that were still under way, but had been deemed unimportant enough that no real means had been given to their completion.
The tech-priests' work remained unseen, though vital to the moon's stations' continued existence. One figure, however, was known to all who had ever walked upon the satellite. He worked day and night, never stopping. He was called the Gardener, and was responsible for the floral magnificence of what most people called, quite simply, the Grove.
The Grove was one of the smallest bio-dome, only two kilometers broad in diameter, but it was also one of the most visited – though entrances were strictly regulated, as oxygen consumption had to be kept as low as possible to preserve it. Within it, hundreds of different species of flowers and trees were carefully cultivated, ordered in patterns that made one want to weep upon beholding them. To walk down the myriad paths of the Grove was to be lost amongst a profusion of life and beauty, of colors and forms that were perfectly in harmony yet ever-changing as the plants grew and withered, only for their seeds to grow again from the fertile soil. There was a deep, undeniable feeling of peace in the Gardener's work.
It was the source of no small wonder how one of the followers of the Machine God, who were generally not known for their aesthetic sense, could have created such beauty. Typical worlds placed under their authority were nightmare of industrial exploitation and pollution barely kept under what even the augmented minions of the Adeptus Mechanicus would find dangerous. The Priests of Mars didn't see beauty in anything but the order of machinery and the technological wonders they were capable of creating. This made the Gardener all the more strangely fascinating to the Palace of Glass's visitors.
To a common observer, the Gardener appeared to be little different from any tech-priest : he was taller than most men, and wore the red robes of his ilk, his face perpetually kept hidden in a hood, with twin points of green light glowing within. Mecha-dendrites rose from his back, carefully measuring, plucking, and sometimes even stroking the delicate flowers as if they were pets while his main hands – that had long been replaced with augmentics, along with the entirety of his arms – held the typical tools of his work. If anything, his robes were tattered and dirty, and rumor had it that he was actually a servitor who wore the robe to hide his condition in order to avoid disturbing the visitors and had been programmed to somehow possess a sense of beauty that would have put many artists to shame.
The truth, as ever, was far more complex. The Gardener had once been known as Arch-Magos Biologis Pharod. Born on the holy soil of Mars herself, he had quickly – relatively to the way the Mechanicum measured such things – risen through the ranks, and joined the Great Crusade as an expert on xenos biology and bio-weapons of all kinds. For decades, his advice had helped the armies of the Emperor to face whatever horrors they met amidst the stars, from the poisoned waters of Linusia to the nano-plague of the techno-heretics of Madertix III. By the time the 1027th Expeditionary Fleet had reached the Parecxis system, Pharod had been one of the most influential members of his command council, his advice heeded even by the proud Astartes that directed it.
Then, during the battle for control of Parecxisian space, his ship, the Mars' Apostle, had been boarded by xenos forces. His skitarii forces had fought hard, and many of the aliens had fallen, but ultimately they had reached his command deck. The Arch-Magos had fought hard too, and by the time the Ultramarines had arrived to rescue the ship, he had been laying atop a pile of xenos corpses, victorious even if fallen.
Pharod's wound had been grievous. What remained of his human brain had been badly damaged, and the cogitators that were part of his nervous system had been disconnected from each other by some kind of techno-sorcery that no adept of the Mechanicum could identify, such was the state of the bodies those the Arch-Magos had defeated. Even after his external wounds were tended, his augmentics repaired, he still stayed in a coma, unable to wake up as his mind painstakingly processed what had happened to it through broken cogitators and bruised grey matter. It had been deemed too dangerous to replace the mechanical parts of his brain, and so the Arch-Magos had been left behind by the Expeditionary Fleet. A weakened mind couldn't be brought through the Warp : there was too much risk that Pharod would be used as a conduit for one of tha abominations that dwelled there. Some had whispered that the Arch-Magos had been left behind because of political bickering amongst his fellow tech-priests, but these rumors had quickly been dismissed as groundless, for the Adeptus Mechanicus was well-known to be above such petty disputes.
Pharod's prone body had been laid to rest on the moon, amidst the beginnings of the Palace of Glass' construction, in the care of the adepts that would remain behind to help the integration of the Parecxis system into the Imperium. Soon, something that had looked suspiciously like a shrine had formed around his body, where tech-priests would come to pay their respect to the fallen Arch-Magos. Then, several years after the fleet's departure, Pharod had stood up and left his shrine. Not heeding his colleagues' calls, he had walked across the Palace randomly, before arriving to one of the domes that was scheduled for transformation into a garden. Then, he had started to work on it, no one daring to interfere with his work. Who but the Omnissiah Himself could know what was going on in Pharod's shattered mind ? Even if it was a waste for someone with his talent to spend his time working on something as inconsequential as what would become the Grove, they did nothing to stop him. The adepts had quietly dismantled the shrine they had built to Pharod, and left him to his own devices. Years had passed, and turned into decades. Tech-priests' assignments had changed, and soon no one on Parecxis Alpha's moon remembered the true identity of the being called the Gardener. Few of the God-Machine's disciples stationed there even knew of his existence : they had just been told that they shouldn't interfere with what was going on in the Grove, and not inquire about the causes of that interdiction. And so Pharod had continued his work, creating a thing of beauty and wonder with patient and careful work, his mind listening to tunes unknown. Perhaps he had even been happy during that time : who could tell ?
Now, though, things had changed. The Palace of Glass, once merely a sight on the moon amidst a sea of stars, was now the only thing the people of Parecxis Alpha could see in the night sky that wasn't a threat to their very sanity. The moon hung over in the middle of the Warp Storm, and to look at the face that was visible from the ground was to put one's very soul to risk, as the creatures of the Empyrean swarmed at the edges of one's vision, eager to reach an unfortunate being's flesh and blood. The skies were filled with the color of blood and madness and the blurred images of fanged maws and leering skulls. During daytime, the light of the sun reached the planet still, but it was weakened and pale, despite instruments still indicating it possessed the same intensity as before. The people of Parecxis Alpha felt cold under this light, and when night came, that sensation only intensified, doubled by a feeling of inexplicable dread as they felt the gaze of the Warp upon their souls.
When the Warp Storm had reached the Parecxis system, riots had broken out in the streets, led by those whose sanity had been consumed by the nightmares and visions that plagued them. Though the situation had ultimately been brought back to an appearance of normality by the troops of the Imperial Army, the rich and powerful had not waited for their rescue and fled to the Palace of Glass aboard private ships and transports, seeking refuge on the moon. It had not been a desperate retreat, the abandon of the planet by its most wealthy citizens. It nearly had been, but the newly appointed Governor, following the mysterious demise of the previous one, had been able to arrange for organized evacuation. Assets and valuable personnel had been brought to the Palace of Glass for safety, not just those who happened to have a transport in their possession. A few of the merchants and nobles had tried to ignore their orders, to abandon their charges in order to get to safety more quickly. They had been dealt with mercilessly as the cowards and traitors they were, and their ships and other assets confiscated.
Thousands of refugees had flocked to the Glass Palace, which had remained untouched by the madness of the Warp Storm. For reasons unknown, no beast of the Empyrean had pierced the veil there, and though nightmares were haunting the sleep of those who rested under the shining cupolas of the bio-domes, they paled in comparison to the atrocities that those on the planet had to endure.
After order had been reestablished on the planet, some of the refugees had returned. But many had remained, those who would be of no actual use below or who had the means to secure their position here, in relative safety. In some cases, their stay was purely caused by the fact that, plainly, there were barely enough system-able ships available to ensure the continued existence of the system. The newly formed system command couldn't spare them to bring them back home. Others had simply no home to return to, as it had been destroyed in the riots.
All of this had led the population of the moon to increase dramatically, and problems were beginning to appear. There had never been more than a few hundred visitors at the same time on the moon, and they never stayed for more than a few weeks. But now, by the last counts of the local Adeptus Administratum, more than seven thousand souls lived in the Palace of Glass. While food and water were thankfully still sufficient thanks to the regular supplying from the planet, space was a far more scarce commodity. The refugees massed in the great exposition halls, in the audience floors of the theaters, through the corridors of the galleries. But still, with yet more and more arriving from the planet, sneaking aboard supply ships to escape the even harsher conditions of some of Parecxis Alpha's regions, it wasn't enough. The administrators had first tried to protect some of the rooms, to safeguard the treasures within from the inevitable depredations inflicted by so many people living, sleeping, eating in the same place, but as the pressure increased, they had opened more and more of the bio-domes to the newcomers.
They didn't know that this would ultimately seal their doom.
There was pain coursing through his nerves, but that was nothing new. Pain had been a constant companion to the being since he had awakened from his long sleep. Short-circuits in his damaged frame, caused by the most minor moves of their components, were the source of this phantom pain that had never left him. He knew now that this pain would never cease : it was part of him, one of the pillars of his existence, and to remove it, one would need to destroy who he was. He didn't remember how he had come to this conclusion ; the logical process that had yielded it after much self-diagnosis had occured in a part of him he could rarely contact, and never for long. But he remembered how many times he had run this process before accepting the result : twelve times. After he had first learned of his fate, he had tried eleven more times to find a way to heal his compromised mind, but eventually, he had yielded. That information seemed like it should have a meaning, an important one, but he couldn't know if that was genuine intuition – something he somehow knew he didn't really believe in – or yet another product of his conflicted, fractured mind.
The being didn't know his name, nor did he know what he was. He knew he had been great, once, but had been broken. His memories were a mess, with some of them he could only access through long, painful probing of his inner cogitators, and others that had simply been lost. Words echoed through his mind, but their meaning eluded him. Arch-Magos … Leader … Honored Adept … He didn't know. The words were combinations of letters and sound, of binary code, but what they designated wasn't stored in any of the data-banks he could still access.
He remembered waking up on an altar, and laying there for hours – days, perhaps – as he had struggled to reassemble his identity from the pieces that were left. When he had been able to, he had stood, and tried to explore his surroundings, searching for a clue as to who and what he was. He had found other beings who looked like him, and whose appearance stirred something in him, some knowledge he couldn't call upon at the moment, and they had tried to communicate with him. But their language had been lost to him, and he had ignored them and continued his walk … until he had arrived to his Grove.
Back then, it had only been a park, with grass and a few trees, and benches for those who wished to enjoy the tranquility of the place. Some of the trees had been of rare, even extinct breeds, brought back to existence by the genetic mastery of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Bags of seeds and tools were stored near it, ready to be sown, but had been more or less forgotten by the adepts who had created the place as they left for other, more worthy endeavours.
At that moment, he had found something he did not even know he needed : purpose. He had seen what he could do here, what he could create. Mathematical equations describing the water, light and nutrients needed for the optimal growth of plants, schematics and plans depicting the combinations of flowers and trees that would make this place the most beautiful and projections of the effects each plant's pheromones would have on the brain of the visitors had bloomed in his mind. The knowledge he had once possessed was, by some quirk of fate and the damage that had been done to him, only accessible when turned toward gardening of all things. It would have looked ridiculous to any disciple of the God-Machine, perhaps even blasphemous – and some who had seen what Pharod had been reduced to had indeed expressed that opinion – but the circumstances and extent of Pharod's wounds could justify a lot of things.
Working for decades in the Grove, the Gardener had found peace. While he was caring for the myriad lifeforms in the bio-dome, he didn't doubt himself, nor did he fear that he would never find out who he was again. He had more or less abandoned any notion of discovering it at this point, and was content with simply continuing his work. But then, his work had become threatened. More and more visitors had come to his Grove, not just walking the paths he left amidst his creations to contemplate the results of his labors – that, he didn't mind at all ; indeed, he felt some sort of pride at having his work being admired thus – but actually staying here, consuming oxygen, placing sleeping bags on the paths and dropping their waste amongst the plants. The Gardener had adapted to their presence : he had modified the Grove, condemning some of his work to death in order to make place for the intruders so that the rest of his children – as he had come to think of the the plants of the Grove over the decades – would be able to survive.
But it wasn't enough. More and more kept coming, and he knew, from what he had been able to gather of their conversations in the moments when he was able to understand words, that they were far more on the moon. Soon, if things continued like this, the fragile equilibrium of his Grove's biosphere would collapse, and all his children would die. And the being couldn't accept that.
So, as he carefully handled yet another of the endless tasks of the Grove – this time, harvesting the seeds from a blooming orchid so that they may be seeded in another part of the bio-dome – the Gardener pondered his options. His thought process wasn't quick, nor was it entirely logical : his fractured mind couldn't possibly follow the same ways as a functional one. There were sudden leaps in his reasoning, and pieces of knowledge that returned suddenly caused him to have to start over his considerations, only for that knowledge to be lost to him again. A normal human would have been driven mad by the frustration … but the Gardener was no normal human.
It took days that changed into weeks, and all the time more and more intruders made their way into the Grove, but finally, he had arrived at a conclusion, and drawn a plan to take care of the problem. The conclusion itself was fairly simple, but the plan had taken a lot of time, since it relied heavily on the secrets that dwelled in some of the data-banks to which he had the most rarely access. Then he had had to gather the elements his plan required, and prepare them accordingly.
Now, at last, he was ready. The last decoction he had prepared in his inner mixing chambers had just reached maturity, and to wait any longer would risk his body being compromised by the various products stored within. The Gardener put down the tools he held in his hands and the various plants his mecha-dendrites were examining, and went on to continue his work, albeit in a very different fashion. There were a total of sixty-seven intruders in the Grove proper – forty-six males and twenty-one females – and he would have to deal with them first.
At a single mental command, the Gardener's transmission systems, that had taken him days to repair and learn to use again, emitted a single pulse of scrap code that locked the Grove from the rest of the Palace of Glass and would scramble any communication within it. As surprised shouts came from the intruders who were closest to a vox, he changed the way he moved, uploading a new system that would make him more apt for the next step.
He ran, faster than anyone would have thought he could given his heavy bulk and typical slow, careful manners. He pounced on the most numerous group of intruders, all his mecha-dendrites up, their tools growling with the promise of death. The firsts died quickly and messily, torn apart by the – from their viewpoint – suddenly insane mechanical creature that had been a part of their lives ever since they had settled in the Grove.
With confused, horrified shouts, the rest scattered across the Grove, trying in vain to call for help through their vox. There were no weapons in the Grove except for those carried by the Gardener himself, and he tracked them down and executed them, one by one, without pause nor mercy. When the last of the intruders was dead, he put their corpses into one of the compost vaults, where they would decay and provide nutrients for his children – some paltry way to atone for the damage they had done during their sojourn.
The Grove had been purged, but it was still in danger. There was no doubt in the Gardener's fractured mind that the moment communications had been lost, someone outside had raised some kind of alarm. The gate was resilient, but it would eventually gave way, or the outsiders would send people across the plain surface of the moon in isolated suits, and they would reach his children again. He had to take more definitive measures, and this was what the decoctions were for.
Adept Tilusch Lesbros wasn't a violent man. The small, thin secretary had been born and grown on Parecxis Alpha, and had joined the Adeptus Administratum at a very young age. He had quietly marched his way up the hierarchy, until he had been able to obtain a post at the Palace of Glass. He knew he would never have had a chance of going there otherwise, and the chances he had had to walk through it on occasion more than made up for the years of tedious bureaucracy down on the planet. In all of his life, not once had he given to anger, not even when faced with some of the more infuriating aspects of a governing system that spanned entire worlds – a thing that was told in an half-joke to be able to enrage even the Space Marines themselves.
And yet, at this very moment, he felt the crushing desire to kill someone, anyone, for what he was going through.
His job at the Palace of Glass had been easy, before the Warp Storm had arrived. Welcome all visitors, check their identities, ensure they know the rules. Even the Great Heresy had changed little, except for making the controls stricter. But the Warp Storm had done what even the Arch-Betrayer couldn't.
Hundred of refugees had flocked his precious Palace, and his superiors on the planet had either died in the riots of were just too overworked themselves to send any aid to him. He had to organize the whole mess himself, with just a few more adepts and the maintenance servitors under his command. Ensuring that every one got food and water on time was his responsibility now, and the stress and unceasing complaints were starting to weigh heavily on his nerves. And now, this …
They had lost contact with the Grove. The door was sealed, even his own codes were unable to unlock it, and nothing they had could cut through it. There was something going on behind that door, he was sure of that, and that he had not the slightest clue as to what that something was irked him to no end. He knew he was losing his temper, but at that point, he didn't care. He was standing in front of the door, at the one end of the tunnel that ended up in an art gallery. There were servitors connected to the obstruction's machine-spirit, sending it the protocols that normally should have opened it. Already, people around him were beginning to whisper that something had gone wrong. They were right, of course, but if he let fear spread amongst them, who knew what could happen ? Throne of Terra, he would not let a riot break out in the Palace of Glass !
Then the door opened. There was an hiss of pressurised air, and the heavy panel turned on its hinges, revealing …
Was that the Gardener ? What was the old construct doing out of the Grove ? And what was that container in his metal hand …
Adept Tilusch Lesbros saw the container drop and break. He saw the greenish liquid within spread on the floor. He smelt it, too : it smelt like decay and rot, like death and infestation.
Then he saw nothing, as his eyes suddenly melted.
The Gardener walked back to his domain, ignoring the first screams of agony and horror rising behind him. He did not need to see the result of his actions : the patterns by which the disease would spread across the Palace of Glass were known to him, calculated before he had even started to prepare the plague itself. He locked the heavy, void-sealed gate behind him, and advanced, once more secure in the knowledge that his Grove was safe from all that could threaten it.
As he strolled down the paths he had created, one of his sensors detected that an especially rare and difficult to cultivate flower was about to bloom. The Gardener walked toward it, and beheld the spectacle : a pure blue rose the color of sapphire. Gene-crafted centuries ago, during the Dark Age of Technology, the blue roses had been the realization of a dream, a myth of Old Terra made reality by the will of some techno-wizard with too much free time on his hands. They were incredibly rare and difficult to breed, and the Gardener still didn't know how exactly such a rare specimen had arrived on the moon. In truth, the seeds had been one of the personal treasures of Arch-Magos Biologis Pharod, collected amidst the ruins of Mars itself and carefully stored for many years in the hope that he would one day be able to study the genetic wonders of the plant.
It was beautiful. He looked at it, and for a moment his many mechanical limbs stopped their constant movement as the entirety of the Gardener's attention focused on the small miracle taking place before him. Then, he felt something he knew he had felt before. It had happened once since he had first woken up, and it had heralded the beginning of his Grove's trouble. It hadn't directly caused damage to it, but the consequences of it had been what had forced him to take action to protect his children. This time, it was lesser in intensity, yet somehow, he knew the consequences would be far worse. Had he still possessed his full capacities as Pharod, the Gardener would have recognised it as the re-entry of a massive ship from the Warp into reality.
Outside the Palace of Glass' bio-domes, the Sea of Souls roared with what a mortal mind could have felt as delightful anticipation. The Empyrean rippled with the impact of the Forsaken Sons' arrival, and the effects of it reached throughout all the Parecxis system. It reached the remnants of the plague, sealed within the Gardener's inner compartment. The disease started to mutate as microscopic denizens of the Warp found their way into its genetic code, turning it into something far more dangerous than it had previously been. The toxins tore their way through the steel of the Gardener's body, and the daemonic plague infected the first life form they found.
The flower's color paled as the being held it in his hand. It went white, then grey, then black, then fell into thin dust, the grains passing through the being's mechanised hands. His sensors registered the scent he had associated to putrefaction, but subtly different, as if the process of decomposition was somehow more complete, more absolute. The rest of the plant began to undergo the same transformation, and a few seconds later the entire bosquet was gone.
The being jolted, as if struck by lighting. An alien sensation flowed through him – some part of him that he didn't have access to identified it as utter terror – and he looked around him. Wherever he looked, the myriads of plants and trees of his Grove were dying, their delicate shapes turning into the black dust as their keeper watched in mute horror. He twitched uncontrollably, unable to process what was happening. New connections formed and were lost in his circuits as his random movements made cables touch each other for the briefest of moments before they were separated again. Bursts of meaningless data coursed through him alongside his panicked thoughts, and the persona he had built from the ruins of who he had been before threatened to fall apart.
Then the final plants withered and died, revealing the panels of plasti-glass that enclosed the bio-dome. Standing alone in the vast pool of black dust, the Gardener's fractured psyche gave in under the weight of his loss, and finally shut down, refusing to face the atrocity of its existence any longer.
But it wasn't over. Within the darkness that took him, the being that had once been Arch-Magos Pharod was found by another being : an entity so vast and terrible none could look upon it without being consumed by its magnificence. The presence was, without any doubt, that of a god. It was filled with the essence of what once-Pharod had used to protect his Grove, of what it had done to the threats, of what it had done to his beloved garden. It was an entity of putrefaction and ruin, of decay and death. But it was also a thing of rebirth, of endurance and resurrection. That entity reached out to his broken mind, and comforted him. It brought back together the fragments of his mind, each piece further corrupted by its touch, and put them side by side with loving, benevolent care. Twelve pieces were thus reassembled, and then Pharod was whole once more, though he was much different from all he had ever been.
In the middle of the ruined Grove, the cybernetic eyes of Pharod the Reborn flickered alight with a green, sickly luminosity, and the Gardener started his work anew. Cracks began to appear in the fabric of reality as he called upon the new knowledge his god – a true god, not like the pathetic idol the fools of the Adeptus Mechanicus blindly worshipped – had imparted him. The laws of physics started to swirl on themselves, and the power of the Warp came down upon the moon from the ever-raging storm outside.
The Plague Marines were walking through a charnel house. The dead laid everywhere, most of them on the very spot they had been first touched by the contagion that had spread through the Palace of Glass' very atmosphere. It seemed as if they had fallen to a thousand different contagion : some of the corpses laid as if merely asleep, peaceful expressions on their faces yet untouched by rot, while others appeared to have exploded, splattering black, putrescent blood all around them and spreading their affliction further. But despite the differences, it was clear to the corrupted Marines that the humans had died in a moment, perhaps even before their stupefied minds had the time to register the rot that had taken them. It could be seen in the pattern of the corpses : there hadn't been a rush toward the medical zones, nor desperate attempts to escape the propagation of the disease. Some of the corpses were in such a state that it would have been impossible to any mortal to see these signs, and to most Astartes as well, but the Plague Marines knew disease like no other beings in the Legions, and perhaps the entire galaxy.
There were five of them, clad in the rotting armor that they had been wearing when the Father of All had taken them as His beloved sons. The black blood of Mortarion, ripe with contagion and plagues, flowed through their veins, and the weapons they bore were so rusted it was a miracle they worked at all. Patches of their armor had fallen, revealing the festering wounds their flesh had sustained when the protection of ceramite had failed to stop a bolt or turn away a chainsword. They wore the colors of the Death Guard, except for their shoulder pauldron, which were painted in black – but the fresh paint, applied not three hours earlier, was already falling away, reduced to its basic components by the entropic forces that inhabited the Marines' bodies.
'It is quite beautiful,' said Larriman, his voice carried over by the vox as a wet growl produced by a throat filled with phlegm, 'isn't it ?'
The bio-dome they were currently in had initially been a museum, though what little furniture could be distinguished under the rotting corpses indicated that it had been converted to yet another urgency room for the people of the planet below relocated by riots and warp-induced earthquakes. The most massive of the artworks that had been exposed here had been stowed away to make space for the mass of humanity, but there were still paintings, fresques and other, more exotic pieces hung on the wall. No doubt the appropriation of the museum for shelter had been hasty, and no time nor manpower had been waster in moving the works that didn't take any valuable space. The rotting corpses formed a tapestry of death that played wonderfully with what had been left behind, to the eyes of the Plague Marines at least. In a way, the building was fulfilling its original purpose again, though both the works exposed and the audience it entertained were as far from what its builders had envisioned as possible.
'It is,' answered Petronicus, the leader of the pack of Plague Marines. 'But do not forget why we are here, brother. The Awakened One has seen something that may be of use to us here, and with what we have seen in these little bubbles, I am inclined to think he was right again.'
'I don't trust the sorcery he is using, Petronicus,' grunted Nicas. 'It may have profited us all so far, but he is still exposing himself to the lies and treacheries of the Warp. Bad enough that he takes the advice of the cursed Coven, must he also listen to the whispers of an agent of the God of Sorcery ?'
'Lord Arken knows what he is doing, brother. He does not trust the Oracle, nor does he follows blindly the advice of the witches. In truth, I don't think he trust anyone anymore. He is a cold one … but he is strong. He will not let himself be swayed by the denizens of the Empyrean, nor will he let himself be forced to make foolish bargains with them to survive.'
Even beneath the distortion of his voice caused by the cancer that had grown in his throat, Petronicus' bitter tone could still be heard by his packmates, and they stopped talking, unwilling to rise their leader's ire. Like most of the Legionaries aboard the Hand of Ruin that bore the Lord of Death's genes within them, Petronicus and his pack had renounced Mortarion as their father. The Primarch – if the thing he had become could still be honored with such a name – was no longer worthy of their allegiance. He had grinded his sons in the war, taking monstrous losses even before they had been forced to embrace the Plague God. The Fourteenth Legion had always been willing to fight some of the hardest battles that had to be fought, be it in the Great Crusade or in the battles that had followed the purge on Isstvan. It had been their philosophy, how they saw everything : service. Battle. Pain. And, at the end of the road, death. The Death Guard knew that their demise was inevitable – same as all the other Astartes in the galaxy – but they didn't shrug away or refuse to face that truth : they took it in, and made it their strength. It had made them powerful, able to stand against overwhelming odds and terrifying conditions of battle. It had been one of the reasons their Primarch had never trusted psykers – anything that hinted at something beyond the now was anathema to him …
And it had led them to ruin. By the time they had marched on Terra, their numbers had already been dangerously low, and the gene-seed they would need to recover either had been inexplicably lost to freak warp occurences or showed deep signs of corruption. Apothecaries amongst the Fourteenth Legion had never been numerous, and they had seemed to die more easily than their brothers after Isstvan – that four of them were with the Forsaken Sons was no small miracle. For all the Primarch's vaunted distrust of the Warp, it seemed that in the end, his was the Legion that suffered the most at its toxic touch. When they had left the Warp to wage war on the soil of Terra, battle-brother Petronicus had thought that his Legion was going to die on the Throneworld, to buy the Warmaster's final victory.
Petronicus had fully expected to die on Terra, after that terrible journey and the transformation that had taken them all. He had welcomed the thought : better to die than to continue to live as the grotesque monster he had become. But he had lived … And he would continue to live for a long time, he suspected. For in the long days of the Exodus and his discussions with the Word Bearers – one of the few groups aboard the Hand of Ruin who were still willing to approach the sons of Mortarion, their faith apparently protecting them from contagion – had showed him the way.
Yes, they had been destroyed … but the seeds of the Imperium's ultimate demise had been sown in Horus' Heresy, and the many, many corpses it had left in its wake would be the catalyst of their blooming. The process may take a century, a millenium, perhaps even ten thousand years, but the Imperium would fall eventually. This was the way of Nurgle, the Dark God of Decay to whom all Mortarion's sons owed their souls, and Arken would lead them into the long process of decomposition that would one day topple the False Emperor's kingdom. That was why Petronicus and the other Death Guards had pledged their allegiance to a warrior of another Legion : Arken's undying hatred for the Imperium was the incarnation of Nurgle's ineluctable will, and the Awakened One had proven his worth time and again. He had even unleashed the power accumulated by the Plague God on the carrion world, channeling it so that it may engulf an entire sector in the tides of the Sea of Souls. Arken clearly had the favor the the Octed, and thus the Forsaken Sons in whose veins the blood of the Death Lord flowed followed his orders.
These orders were the reason of their presence here. The Awakened One had sent Petronicus and his pack down the moon in one of the warband's Thunderhawk, with mission to find the source of the disturbance he had felt in the Warp, and, if it was possible, to acquire it for the Forsaken Sons. As they had neared the planetoid, the Astartes aboard the Carrion Bird had intercepted panicked vox-chatter, desperate calls from the planet to those stationned on the moon that went without response. Parecxis Alpha had no longer the ability to send anything through the system – the void belonged to the Hand of Ruin and the ships that they had claimed during the first engagement, a few hours ago. The first calls had been orders to ration what stocks of food and water the moon's inhabitants still had, for there would be no resupplying, and to prepare for assault from the traitor forces who had appeared in the Parecxis system. Then, when no answer had come, they had started to demand reports. When still nothing had come, then they had started to panic.
Petronicus couldn't blame them, nor could he blame the Awakened One's wisdom in sending him and his brothers here – he doubted anyone not already touched by the Lord of Decay could have survived the journey. The plague that had spread through the Palace of Glass still hung in the air, a potent presence that the former Death Guard had felt the moment their craft had left the Hand of Ruin's protective Geller Fields. The impression of death and decay was palpable, and for those who lived literally in the moon's shadow, to have such horror hanging over their heads, even if they did not know what it was or were separated from it by hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the pressure had to be almost intolerable. Now wonder they sought to understand what had happened – an evil you knew was almost always less scary than the one you did not.
Their craft had landed outside one of the domes, and they had walked the surface of the moon until they had reached an entry shaft, unhindered by the thin atmosphere of the satellite. Their armor wasn't void-sealed anymore, far from it, but oxygen was just another thing the Plague Marines no longer needed to survive. The hatch had been defended by a few servitors and tech-priests, who had been working on the gate's control panel – no doubt attempting to understand what had happened within. They had died quickly, torn to pieces by the Legionaries' bolters. The cold, the near absence of air and the nature of the dead had prevented rot from taking in their flesh, and the Plague Marines could feel that this irritated their patron, though it didn't diminish His joy in what had occurred within the Glass Palace. What were the corpses of already dead, soulless husks, or those of the deluded servants of the Mechanicum ? Nothing.
They were nearing their quarry, Petronicus could feel it. They left the gory museum through one of the tunnels, consulting the gore-splashed plans on the walls to deduce which one would bring them closer. The name written next to their destination was still visible, as if the blood had deliberately avoided hiding it. It was called the Grove, and within it waited whatever it was the Awakened One had sent them to find.
'What do you think we will find ?' asked Larriman.
'The one responsible for the dead,' answered Nicas.
'Well, of course,' said Larriman with a mildly exasperated voice. 'What I meant was, what do you think we will find ? Who in this decadent station could have caused such a magnificent slaughter ?'
There was no answer to that, and Larriman shrugged, accepting that he would have to wait to see. The Forsaken Sons had seen much things they would never have thought possible, from the xenos empires they had overthrown during the Great Crusade to the visions of war caused by Horus' rebellion, to the things that had happened during the Exodus. They didn't take anything for granted, and did not believe for a moment that they knew everything about any situation. In that sense, the Awakened One's habit of sending packs into missions with only the vaguest of objectives had proven greatly effective, as the one thing the Forsaken Sons were talented at was improvisation. They still carried on the specializations of their respective Legions, but all shared that new trait, gained through the trials of the Exodus.
'Here we are,' murmured Petronicus. 'Let's get this done.'
The door before them was unlike those they had crossed before. While these had been pristine and in a perfect state of function, this one was rusted so much it was a wonder it still hung in place. Petronicus suspected that if he had punched it, he would have made an hole – and considering that this was a confinement door made of adamantium twenty centimeters thick and hermetically sealed, that spoke plenty of the power of decay that lurked behind.
The pack leader pushed on the door, his brothers standing ready behind him, bolters aimed at the opening. The door creaked, resisting the pressure, then fell with a loud clang, revealing what laid on the other side. For a moment, Petronicus and his pack couldn't move, their brains trying to comprehend the sight before them.
It was a garden of sorts. But the last time the Plague Marines had seen such a garden had been during their ill-fated journey to Terra, in the delirious visions of pestilence and death that had striken them as their bodies fought against the diseases that coursed through their veins. There were trees made of white bone and leaves of flesh, bushes into which human, unblinking eyes looked all around while shedding oily tears, and flowers that spread poison without ever stopping. Swarms of insects flew in the air or crawled on the ground, their bodies forged from the very substance of the Empyrean. They consumed every plant they crossed, only to die under the effect of the toxins within and for their corpses to be consumed, producing the fertilizer for the next generation. Small animals wandered at the periphery of one's sight, their rotten fur pierced by infected wounds that oozed pus onto the ground while they hunted for the rare pieces of vegetation that weren't a promise of immediate death.
Above them, noted Petronicus, the sky was a pale green, with figures like eyes appearing and vanishing in a moment and arcs of lightning the color of dead skin …
Wait. The sky ? They were supposed to be in one of the bio-domes of a moon station ! How in the name of Grandfather Nurgle could he see the sky ?
'This isn't the Glass Palace anymore,' murmured Larriman, his voice filled with awe. 'This is … why, it looks like the Garden of Nurgle Himself !'
Petronicus realized that, of course, he was right. The power of the Warp was everywhere. Petronicus could feel it, a pulse on his mind that was not unlike a constant grating of his skull's inner side, combined with the instinctive knowledge that, no matter of much of the Empyrean his own form was now made of, this was not a place he was supposed to be. The dead outside had fallen mere hours ago, but this … this was obviously much, much older. Here, time and space were distorted, allowing for this impossible realm of insane, twisted life to be born and sustained.
'We are no longer entirely into our reality,' he declared. 'Even the Warp Storm is more anchored in the Materium than this place. Be prepared for anything. As far as we know, this … garden … is even more dangerous than the Hand of Ruin was during the Exodus.'
The Marines' advance slowed as they adopted a more careful formation, eying every corner of the seemingly endless space around them in search of threat. But nothing came at them. After an indefinite amount of time – this place was too far into the Warp for such a notion to have any meaning – they stopped in their tracks and looked at each other for confirmation. They had all heard the same thing : mechanical noises. There was something nearby that was most probably what they were looking for.
With a nod from Petronicus, they resumed their advance, weapons aimed at the noise's approximate direction – the sensors of their armor had long stopped to work, or at least to be reliable, and their own enhanced hearing had been lost to the various diseases that plagued them at about the same time.
They arrived in a small clearing, surrounded by impossibly tall trees that they could have sworn weren't here a minute before. The trees were covered in rot, lichens and parasites that formed sigils on the wood that the Plague Marines recognised all too well. This was some kind of natural altar, a sanctuary dedicated to Nurgle, sacred even in comparison to the rest of this domain, and at the center of it, standing back turned to them, was a silhouette with several mecha-dendrites that dripped – bleeded ? - with fluids that didn't belong to any true machine.
The creature's movement stopped. It put down whatever it had been working on, and turned to face its visitors. It looked as if it had once been a tech-priest of some rank, but was now as twisted and corrupted as the Plagus Marines themselves had been. Three green lights shone from beneath its hood, and an uncessing buzz rose from it, as did inarticulate voices that seemed to converse with each other in some parody of the binary language the Martian priests used to communicate with each other. When the creature spoke, its voice was filled with glee, as if the former Death Guards were old friends with whom it had finally been reunited after a long separation :
'Greetings, fellow servants of the Plaguefather. I am Pharod the Reborn, and I am the one your master has sent you to find.'