The Warp boiled.
A vast wound yawned open above the edge of the Orar Sub Sector, a raw, throbbing slit in the fabric of reality. It belched out filth, entropy, and vessels twisted into shapes that defied logic. They drifted like bloated carrion beasts from some primordial sea, covered in lesions of rusted metal and leaking pus colored contrails. Warp fire licked across hulls forged in madness. The first of the plague hulks spilled out, followed by heavier warships, daemon barges, and corrupted cruisers thick with plague zombies and rotting crew. Vox casters across the system screamed and died.
The Terminus Est drifted through the void like a bloated corpse in a blood tide. Its hull groaned with every kilometer, ancient plates slick with rot and pitted with the bite of warp exposure. Fungal tendrils bloomed along the bulkheads. No one bothered to clear them.
Inside, the air was thick meat sweet with decay, metallic with rust. The stink of Nurgle's blessing. Tech priests long turned heretical chanted wet binary into vox pools, crooning to the engines like lovers.
Typhus stood unmoving on the command dais, his scythe resting against the stone floor, its blade streaked with dried meat. His bulk eclipsed the consoles behind him, a swollen silhouette against the green glow of diseased starmaps. The whispering voices in his head the drone of the flies, the susurrus of a thousand poxed souls never quieted. He didn't want them to.
He turned slightly as the hololithic projector flickered to life.
"Arkham," he rasped. "You're late."
The image of Maleficia Arkham resolved into place, standing tall and sharp. His armor gleamed with runes and crimson litanies, in contrast to the rotting grandeur of Typhus' throne room. Maleficia's helm hung at his side, revealing a pale, thoughtful face carved by discipline rather than decay. His ship, the Red Echo, prowled behind him in the warp like a knife through gangrenous flesh.
"I was busy purging insubordination," Arkham said coldly. "My lieutenants are loyal now. The slow ones screamed, but that's the price of clarity. But I see you are still brooding. You'd think a plague lord would be less… pensive."
Typhus's voice was a gravelly rasp. "Brooding keeps the mind sharp at least. Unlike your spark flinging. How's that daemon conjuring coming along? Still chasing shadows?"
Arkham smirked behind his helm. "Better than your pests choking on their own filth." He stepped closer, tone dropping. "You know the Warmaster expects results. And yet the Plagueclaw is gone because of your incompetence."
That stopped Typhus.
Arkham stepped closer, voice lowering, mockingly. "Vanished. Silent. Drifting through the void like a tomb. Tell me, did your rot grow so thick you couldn't hear it dying? Your brain damaged because of your dear grandfather?"
Typhus's armored fist curled. "Watch your mouth, psyker. I'll not have you speak ill of what you don't understand."
"Oh, but I understand all too well," Arkham said smoothly. "Your warships reek of decay and sloth. Nurgle's gifts slow your reflexes, cloud your mind, soften your instincts. And now? The Plagueclaw is dead. The Grandfather was silent. And your legacy drifts in pieces somewhere in void."
"You overstep—"
"I step where I please, rot king." Arkham's voice had gone sharp now, flaring with contempt. "You think the Warmaster doesn't notice? You think he doesn't see your failure? Despite him not saying anything."
Typhus surged forward, knife rattling in its scabbard. "Say that again, sorcerer. Say it, and I'll bury you with your ship."
Arkham laughed unhinged, "You think death scares me anymore. I have already been damned since I sold my soul to those abominations."
The psychic pressure between them thickened. Warp energy pulsed faintly from Arkham's gauntlets as he laughed. In response, a low, diseased growl echoed from Typhus's armor flies stirred, daemons hissed behind the veil.
For a moment, the corridor aboard the flagship felt too small.
"Mark me, Arkham," Typhus growled his eyes showing no remorse. "When Orar burns, you'll see what real war looks like. Not dreams, not sorcery. Decay. Inescapable. Eternal."
Typhus didn't show any pity for him, all who joined chaos did not deserve pity for him at all. And he disdains people like Arkham. You made your bed, you lie on it. It was as simple as that for him.
Then, with a grunt thick with contempt, he turned away. "Just don't get in my way, sorcerer. Or I'll feed you to your own gods."
Arkham didn't answer. Just watched him leave, eyes cold behind his helm. The holo closed.
The chamber fell silent once more thick with warpfume and the stench of rot.
—-
Arkham stood alone on the bridge. No other officers were permitted to breathe near him. Only daemons flitted around the consoles, their bodies flickering like shadows caught in a lightning storm, whispering and giggling, adjusting dials, steering the trajectory of the fleet.
A servitor chimed. One of the Black Legion's vanguard frigates had sent a transmission encoded and blood-l stamped.
"Warmaster," the voice hissed from the vox. "We have confirmation. Loyalist reinforcements from Battlefleet Forgeworld Volatrix has reinforced orar planet world."
Maleficia Arkham gave a tight smile. "Let them come."
"I trust you have your... toys ready?" The voice asked from the vox.
Arkham nodded and stepped toward the bridge's central pit, where a containment pillar rose like an altar. Inside swirled a mass of shadow and teeth something that didn't obey natural laws. A daemon of the Warp, bound in soul iron chains, roared silently in its prison. Its body shifted one moment a horned beast, the next a writhing mass of tongues and bone.
"It is fed. Soon it will be hungry again."
The voice spoke back.
"Then we will give it Orar."
---
Planet Orar - Defense Bastion, Upper Spire
The sky above the planet was normal for now.
But the Astropaths started screaming warnings. The Mechanicus shrines lit up with alarms. Fleet Command from Forgeworld had deployed every last cruiser and destroyer to form a bulwark in high orbit. But they all knew it was not enough. Even now, orbital augurs showed hundreds of contacts spilling out of the Warp. The largest single incursion in the region since the Gothic War had begun.
---
Aboard the Terminus est, hours later
Typhus stood in his reliquary chamber, feeding gifts to his hive.
Below him, a thousand prisoners were caged in filth ridden pens. They had been taken alive from the last world.
He extended a hand, and a cloud of the Destroyer Hive burst from his armor. Flies, fat and glistening with warp-pus, descended. They crawled into mouths, eyes, orifices. Bloating the flesh. Turning skin green. Filling lungs with eggs.
Typhus listened to their screams with detached pleasure.
Behind him, Ignatius grulgor entered, flanked by two mutated psykers with stitched eyes.
"You still play with corpses like a child," grulgor said, watching a woman burst as her stomach exploded into maggots.
"They make such good hosts," Typhus replied, wiping a strand of bile from his scythe. "You should try it. There's a freedom in decay. It is very relaxing"
Ignatius then started speaking for what he came here for.
"The wards are in place. The tear will open when the orbital bombardment begins. A warpstorm, directed straight into their capital hive. Then, we unleash the summoning."
"Which god?" Typhus asked without turning.
"Why choose?" Ignatius smiled. "Let them all feast."
---
The garden was quiet.
A bloated, gentle silence. Wet with the sounds of things not dead enough to rot properly. Each leaf pulsed with damp, bacterial breath. Each gnarled vine shifted sluggishly in place, weighed down by pus heavy dew. It was a silence of surrender. Of the world exhaling its last breath and forgetting to inhale again.
At the center of it all, Grandfather stirred his pot.
Thick. Churning. Ancient.
It groaned under its own weight, the same way a mountain does when it dreams. Within it, countless lives small and microscopic, lives flensed from the warp rolled over one another in a slow, boiling churn. Every swirl was a universe dying and being born wrong.
Nurgle hummed. His voice was syrup. It squelched and bubbled from somewhere too large to be contained in a throat.
"A little more marrow," he gurgled happily, fingers like tree stumps crumbling as he plucked something off a dangling tendon and flicked it into the stew. "And a pinch of it. Just a pinch. Wouldn't want her to lose her appetite."
He laughed.
Not a cruel laugh. Not a mocking one either. But deep, full bellied like a loving father who's just sewn his child's corpse into a scarecrow.
The pot replied with a belch. The surface parted, briefly, to reveal a single eye still alive, still screaming before it was pulled back down by a ladle carved from thighbone.
"Ahh, she will love this one," Nurgle said, licking his lipless maw with a tongue fat as a dying sun. "Sweet Isha, sweet little flower. Still she resists, poor girl. Still she refuses to taste the gifts I've made her. But she will. She always does."
He leaned in, his face cratered with cysts and moss. His eyes were bottomless, full of infinite patience.
"She'll come around. They all do. In the end. Even gods decay, you know." Mumbling to himself or perhaps an unseen audience?
His smile split further. Down to the throat. Down to the gut.
Even gods decay. It was not a threat. It was a law. A truth so ancient it predates cruelty.
Still humming, he ladled another scoop from the pot and examined it: something half formed, all wrong. A twisted foetus made of despair and putrefied hope. A perfect little thing. But not enough. Not yet.
He stirred.
And as he stirred, his thoughts turned slowly, like a turning wheel under mud to the mortal plane.
The children of his garden drowned by the Imperium's dogs. The Casualties his forces were getting making him lose face.
They killed my garden, he mused, slopping stew back into the pot. And the others laugh. Khorne with his frothing fists. Tzeentch and his snide games. Slaanesh, giggling in her pit of velvet teeth.
He grunted.
The air grew thick around him. Not angry. Not wrathful.
But heavy.
Disappointed.
"Tch. I give them gifts. I give them eternity. And they spit it back at me, such disappointing and unfaithful children."
His hand twitched. Something ancient and dead fell from between his fingers.
And yet…
…his garden had been slighted. Mocked. His name made smaller in the eyes of his siblings. Grandfather, the others sneered. Grandfather's rot is slow. It festers and lingers but does not conquer.
So be it.
If the mortals wanted thunder, they would hear it in their lungs.
If they wanted fire, they would cough it up in blood.
He would go himself.
He would walk among them again.
Not as an echo through the warp. Not as dreams of filth and disease. But as a storm. As a presence. As inevitability.
He stirred faster. The pot churned and wailed.
"After the soup," he cooed. "After Isha's next course. I will step into the Gothic sector and remind them."
He leaned over the pot again. Steam curled around his face, and within the cloud, ghostly images danced fleets burning, admirals coughing blood, Titans sinking into oceans of pus.
"I will remind them that death is not the end."
Another laugh.
This one made the garden quake.
---
Word Count:1908
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