~Oceans of Flesh~

~797. M30~

~Segmentum Tempestus~

~Barbarus~

~Roboute Guilliman, Lord Commander of the Imperium and Imperial Regent~

The day after Morrigan first spoke to her sisters, their war effort went into full swing, using the swiftness provided by the webway and the bonesingers to rapidly mobilize, deploy, redeploy, relocate, and construct. Within the first day, one of the overlords had their tower raided, forces put down, body skewered, and corpse-silo set aflame. Afterwards, the tower was fired upon by the naval cannons of one of the three Eldar ships in orbit and completely demolished.

Then, following the planned war procedures, they repositioned to go to the next lowest tower on the planet and attacked it just the same. Using the webway gate, they were able to transfer over and attack before any significant force could be mustered to defend against them. The second overlord was quickly pulled from his tower and decapitated by Morrigan, as Guilliman, the Exodites, and the Wraiths held off the legions of pale flabby corpses.

Just as he was suspecting, the second sorcerer was more powerful, being quicker about its spells and having more corpses to throw at them. Still, it wasn't impossible to defeat, and their tower was destroyed all the same. The corpse was put on a wraithbone stake, and sent off. Then they redeployed through the webway to the next highest tower, and started the third assault. It was the third tower in which trouble started to actually arise in the battles.

They had learned that they were being attacked at this point, and the defenses of the third sorcerer's domain was significantly more than the last two. The toxin of the air around it was potent enough to burn away their cloaks and eat into their armor, the corpses were empowered by some spell to make their movements quicker, and the sorcerer had more wargear on its person. Still, between Guilliman himself, Morrigan, the Eldar snipers, and the Wraiths, the third sorcerer fell without casualties on their behalf, and their corpse was staked with the others.

The tower burned, then demolished, but their armor was significantly ablated, and the corpses were only growing stronger. Their armor needed repairs, as did the wraiths and environmental sealing. That, and the sorcerers were sure to counter attack by assaulting the villages soon enough, to stockpile more corpses to build larger armies. That's where the second phase of the war planning came into effect.

While waiting for their armor to be repaired, and thus ready to resist the material-dissolving toxins of the higher towers, the corpses of the sorcerers were carried around to each of the villages, used as rallying standards. Making sure that it was handled exclusively by a wraith, and nothing living, of course.

With the proof of three dead overlords, it made the besieged humans far more willing to listen to their proposals, and follow the commands of the giants that were fighting on their behalf with food in hand and medicine to offer. Everything of value in their villages were packed up and moved through the webway gates, all of it cleaned by a legion of Eldar maids and priests, and then moved to the planned site of construction.

Torchwood had been undergoing significant renovation and expansion since the first sorcerer fell, and the corpse had been displayed. With the chance to finally shed the despair of living under necromancers at hand, and no small amount of fear from the openly sorcerous giants descending to command them, the village relented to have their home rebuilt from the ground up.

A barren, rocky outcropping near the village became the foundations of a fortress made of summoned bone. Rising from the very earth and out of the air by song alone, a towering keep of cream-white contrasted against the pale muck of the world around it, even as awe-struck villagers were given shovels, axes, and hoes of the same bone material, stronger than anything of metal that they had ever used before, free of rot and splintering handles.

With tools in hand, these people were immediately asked to start digging the canals that would distribute the swampier regions across a larger section of land, thus increasing the total amount of farmland that would be available in the future and decreasing the amount of spawning pools that biting insects had available to breed within. They were escorted and protected by squads of Eldar warriors, making quick work of any pale that decided to attack.

These canals would also serve as improvised pits and defensive lines in case of attack, which only added to the overall defensive nature of the region they had chosen to develop. Right alongside these human laborers, many Eldar worked. The Exodites were, after all, not warriors by trade. They were farmers and ranchers, all of this work was something they were well-used to, and had long since learned to enjoy.

Land was cleared of tree and shrub, rocks hauled off to delineate paths and shore up potential regions of muck, canals were dug to funnel water, earth was tilled to make farmland. All of this work proceeded quickly with their new tools in hand, many hands with them, and Eldar cooking to return to.

The fortress was erected in a matter of hours, followed quickly by roads and bridges of the same pure white, and quickly-rising house-structures, missing only the doors and furnishings inside to make them livable, but otherwise massive in scope, two stories each, with space for a warmly crackling hearth in the center of a well-insulated and well-ventilated main chamber.

About four of these buildings were built every hour, for many hours. Enough to house the entirety of Torchwood's roughly one-thousand original inhabitants were finished by the time the day was over.

Guilliman had long since decided that he appreciated bonesinging quite a bit. The ability to summon structures such as this was incredibly helpful.

By the end of the first day, three sorcerers had been slain, a fortress had been erected, the innermost buildings had been constructed, old torchwood had become obsolete aside from its farmland, thousands of unbreaking and ever-sharp tools had been distributed, the canals had started to be dug, a dozen or so smaller villages had been evacuated and their supplies in the process of being cleansed and blessed, and thousands of pale corpses had been burned.

The sheer amount of work that could be done with a handful of bonesingers and a few webway portals… He would've signed over a world for just one of each in the past.

Wraithbone was able to repair itself over time, another reason it was such a wondrous material, so all they had to do was wait for their armor to be repaired before attacking the next sorcerer. In the meantime, Guilliman set up the process of organizing a militia and medicae out of the healthier volunteers, armed and trained hospitaliers who would be responsible for fighting the pale and fighting sickness among them. They were given short chopping swords, shields, light armor, and a few trainers.

Merely giving men tools was not enough, you had to educate them on how to use them as well.

Then, a few days later, their armor had been repaired and another assault had been launched on the next tower. The fourth overlord had spent his time preparing for their assault, and had readied a titan made of fused corpses, stumbling forwards to crush the attackers beneath its massive bulk.

It had not been prepared for the Wrathknight Mallryn to step out of a newly opened webway gate and rip into it with its sharp and ready ghostglaive (the proper name for its style of sword, as Guilliman had eventually learned). With most of his stockpile of corpses and preparations poured into that necrotic colossus, the sorcerer had little in the way of defenses, and was quickly slain and mounted on another stake. Morrigan taking yet another head of the thin, wiry, barely humanoid creatures that terrorized Barbarus for so long.

She had started to smile already, looking at the corpses of the four sorcerers strung up like scarecrows on a distant hill. Her old scythe had already deteriorated into uselessness, and he was able to give her a war-scythe of wraithbone as a replacement.

The victory had invigorated all of the people of Barbarus, and progress continued like that for some time. Men were trained, buildings were summoned, ditches were dug, and the winter on Barbarus passed at a steady pace. Work was constant, mood was high, and sorcerers were being killed every few days of preparation for each.

Eventually, there was only one tower left, and the thirteen inner-cities of Barbarus had already been constructed, with white houses and white walls surrounding them all. A mere month had passed, and the hospitaliers were starting to approach competency, and some thirteen thousand people worked and dwelt in the swiftly-growing collection of settlements, relocated from the most distant corners of Barbarus first and working their way inwards, towards Torchwood.

Each sorcerer was progressively more difficult to defeat. More preparations, more corpses to throw at them, more spells of poison and decay readied. Even being able to ignore the time it took to travel up the mountainsides to their towers only helped so much, with their armor starting to slough off fast enough to be visible at the third-to-last sorcerer.

Being able to attack through the webway gates helped negate much of the dangers of that as well, only scant moments of exposure to the toxins before the gate was closed again, and then the process repeated until the sorcerers had nothing left to slow their attacks with.

They had begun to suffer losses. One Wraith taking a lobbed vial of explosive acid ment for a squad of living Eldar, his soul-stone disintegrating in psychic screams as the sorcerer was torn apart by angry Exodites. There had been a funeral held on the ship afterwards, which he made sure to attend.

Normally, Guilliman would be relatively pleased with so few casualties. Years of campaigning and these battles against nurglite sorcerers? Only one loss was incredible compared to the grim expectations he would normally have. Spells of rot and infection would inflict massive long-term losses on human armies, regardless of how quickly or effectively the battles were carried out.

But as the first loss of a remarkable campaign, Guilliman could only see it as an incredible failure on his part. He supposed he had gotten too used to things going right already, a very bad state to be in when the fate of the galaxy was at stake. He needed to carry the expectation that everything would go wrong, and with that thought in mind, he decided to review all the strategic information he had again.

It was very fortunate that he did so, else he might have condemned a planet to death with his arrogance.

"It was never a struggle." He declared in perturbed realization, staring at a large map and various stacks of information gathered for this brief campaign. His hand brushed aside a sheet of paper to reveal the numbers listed upon them, then at the marked locations for each of the sorcerous towers, then again at the marked locations for all the villages and their populations.

It was all too consistent.

"There was never a war against the overlords. This planet isn't a battleground. It's a farm." He breathed out, hot air from his lungs creating misty vapors with the cold air of winter's-end Barbarus.

"...Explain." Morrigan growled out, leaning forwards to look down at the map and papers with him. He pointed at the locations for the towers, then at the villages, then at the list of estimated numbers of pale dead thus far.

"Each tower appears roughly random on its own, outside of its height, but when compared to the locations of each village and the populations in each, all of them are within the range of nearly the same number of overall people. If you compare the numbers of pale dead that they showed they could rally at once, the overlords could have already swept over all remaining settlements with the weight of bodies."

He leaned forwards, tapping the back of his hand on the table. "But they chose not to. That means they want a human population on the planet, and a human population almost perfectly equal between each tower? They were farming the people here, regularly sending pale dead to attack and cull the numbers when their harvests were ready."

Morrigan retreated into a slowly building fury, knuckles white around her scythe, as Asarnil leaned forwards to consider it on his own.

Nodding once, Asarnil spoke a question with his brows furrowed. "How fast do human populations increase?"

Guilliman considered it for a moment. "Worlds such as these? The population would increase by about ten to twenty percent per century. It depends on a multitude of factors."

"...How many pale corpses have been found and fought thus far, and how long has Barbarus been inhabited?" Asarnil's eyes were hard and flinty.

Guilliman at once understood what Asarnil was implying, and quickly compared the lists. Morrigan realized shortly after, not quite as experienced as either of the two of them, her eyes slightly widened as the implication settled upon her.

"...About eight-tenths of the corpses from last century are still unaccounted for. Not accounting for any corpses from earlier than that, or the supposed ten-thousand in the last sorcerer's silos." He growled out, mind beginning to churn and revisit old information. There was something here, something that he was missing.

"There were rituals Necare would perform." Morrigan began, voice low and hateful. "Where he would burn corpses to ash, and cause something to grow immediately. That could be where the missing bodies are, sacrificed to fuel some magic."

Corpses sacrificed to make something grow. That certainly sounded like a magic of Nurgles, but almost nothing was growing on…

…Barbarus…

"Strangleweed." Guilliman whispered. Hands moving rapidly, he chopped urgently at a nearby seer. "A map of the planet, quickly!"

The nearest seer obliged, an item of wraithbone placed on the table before them, and an exertion of psychic will later a holographic display of the planet Barbarus appeared before him.

"The areas of brightest green, highlight them in red!"

They began to glow a bright red, contrasting against the pale greens and whites of the planet in winter.

The areas of arrowroot were massively expanded compared to a mere month ago. Arrowroot was supposed to do poorly in the cold, yet this had only grown larger in scale. Expanded enough to see a visible shape starting to emerge between the numerous spots.

"Seer Yashal. Please highlight the mountains in the same red, then flip the image upside down." Asarnil asked, polite but emotionless. He crossed his arms in front of his chest, eyes burning in ever-more confident theory.

The seer did as he was bid, and all present could see the shape beginning to emerge, a shape drawn in rapidly growing, parasitic vines, at a scale large enough to be seen plainly from orbit.

"...I saw that symbol before, in Necare's tomes." Morrigan's breath came out slightly unsteady as she stared at the massive spell-circle being grown onto the planet itself. "But I don't know what it means…"

Three circles, arrayed in a rough triangle, split by three lines between each that met in the center, directly under the tower of the last sorcerer of Barbarus.

"It's the symbol of a daemon. The one that the sorcerers worship." Guilliman's frustration bled into an otherwise icy-cold voice. "It's a massive ritual that we completely overlooked."

A Nurgle-ritual, with a spell-symbol the size of a large continent, fueled by however many corpses the sorcerers had been burning to complete it. Something that they practically let happen under their noses.

Guilliman, you brainless sloth.

"Our preparations here are completely useless." Asarnil declared, staring at it grimly. "It's already almost complete, killing the sorcerer isn't going to stop it at this point. The works of the plaguefather grow on their own."

"We don't have any large-scale weapons that can burn that much growth either." Guilliman's fingers felt numb in the cold, even as his heart burned with wroth. "It's grown this much in a month, we likely only have days before it's complete."

Guilliman exhaled mightily, in frustration, and stared at the cancer he had allowed to spread. "We have to evacuate the planet immediately. Staying here when it's complete will likely doom us all."

"What!" Morrigan burst out in fury. "Necare still lives! I need his head!" She almost yelled out, steam bursting from her throat with the exclamation. Her eyes burned with a deeply-set fury. Guilliman let his face distort with his frustration, and his hand came up to brush through his short hair.

"Our armor isn't repaired from the last battle, and won't be in time to launch a full attack while also saving these people." Guilliman began to reason out their situation. "Choosing to attack him unprepared will almost certainly end with our deaths, and choosing to attack him after preparations are finished will mean staying on the world while the ritual is completed."

"So we shall stay and deal with it! It's just a big spell!" Morrigan displayed her ignorance in another outburst of fury.

He turned to her, and let his eyes lock on her own. The eyes of a veteran who has seen too much clashed against the eagerness of youth. Slowly, painfully, Guilliman began.

"...Morrigan. I have seen entire worlds die to the rot of this daemon. I have seen oceans turn to pus. I have seen cities rot to mounds. Maybe if I had been paying more attention earlier, maybe if I hadn't been so lax, this could've been avoided. But please…"

Morrigan swallowed, staring at his eyes.

"Please trust us in this. If we are here when a ritual this large is complete, it will kill us all."

Morrigan glared, knuckles cracking furiously at him.

Tiny drops of liquid pooled in the corners of the amber eyes. She broke the gaze first, teeth grinding as she glared at the ground.

"...I get to shoot the ship-guns at his tower." She demanded harshly. Guilliman nodded, an understanding smile coming to his face.

"Of course." He reached a hand out…

Morrigan turned quickly, stomping away with heavy footfalls. Her boots shattered the frost on the ground with each impact. Guilliman let his hand fall back to his side as he watched her storm away.

A final sigh escaped his lips as he turned back to Asarnil. Asarnil stared at him with a grim understanding. Guilliman reached up to rub his temple. The weariness of an unfinished task settled into his bones.

"Call for the evacuation of the planet, if you would. We'll have to work around the clock to escape in time."