Deep within the shrieking winds of a collapsed world—where architecture bled and gravity whimpered—Nurgle's forge-world churned with fevered life. The air reeked of putrefaction and molten metal, dense with spores that clung to flesh like whispered promises of decay. In the heart of this industrial hell stood a monolithic structure assembled from the shattered remnants of Pangea's technology—a grotesque imitation of Dr. Dew's Gen 3 Synth Creation Station. Wires pulsed like veins, and organ-matter fused with circuitry as Nurgle's personal daemon-tech priest oversaw its unholy resurrection.
He was once known as Magos Eluth-Karn, a Tech-Priest of Mars, before he embraced entropy. Now, his body was little more than a swollen sack of flesh tethered to mechanical limbs rusted with age and smeared with ichor. Tubes pumped toxins into his spinal column. Dozens of mechanical limbs dangled from his back, welding, injecting, calibrating. A data-tether, thick as a serpent, slithered from his neck into the core of the corrupted Synth Station. He crooned lovingly to it, murmuring ancient binary twisted by daemonic tongue.
"Begin ignition cycle," he gurgled, voice modulating between static and wet coughing. "Let the false life emerge anew, as Nurgle's children."
The chamber shook.
Sarcophagus-shaped pods hissed open, releasing clouds of necro-smog. Inside, twisted forms stirred—sickly amalgamations of bone and artificial sinew, grown from the harvested DNA of human prisoners and corrupted serfs. These were no perfect Synths. They were crude imitations. Their flesh bubbled with plague nodes; their eyes leaked thick, yellow ichor. Where Dr. Dew's creations were elegant and durable, these were unstable, disposable, and born to die screaming.
But they didn't need perfection.
They only needed numbers.
The first Plague Frame emerged—eight feet tall, plated in warped ceramite, its internal core burning with a viral rot that oozed between joints. It twitched, then flexed, letting out a guttural mechanical howl that shook the steel walls. Another followed, and another. Dozens were born in hours. Hundreds in days. The machine, corrupted as it was, was functioning—barely held together by glue, filth, and sorcery.
Eluth-Karn cackled. "More... more... pour the rot into them! We are rebirthing death itself!"
In the upper reaches of the forge cathedral, Nurglings danced and splashed in cauldrons of corrupted lubricants. Poxwalkers fed the biological slurry into reactors that stank of open wounds. This was mass production under the banner of ruin. Already, other Tech-Acolytes infected with data-blight were exporting blueprints to neighboring daemon-forges across the galaxy.
By the seventh day, over 10,000 Plague Frames stood ready—stacked in lines, motionless, weapons fused to their limbs: acid-cannons, bile-bursting mortars, and swords that screamed when drawn.
And that was only the first wave.
---
Across the galaxy, in the Segmentum Obscurus, Imperial planets burned. The 27th Hive Legion, stationed on Valtrax-9, had received garbled reports of new enemies—entities that bled oil and spat infection. Initial encounters were dismissed as corrupted servitors or failed Dark Mechanicum experiments. Until the Battle of Mirth's Hollow.
It was supposed to be a minor purge.
Three squads of Tempestus Scions entered a plague-ridden city under the command of Inquisitor Veraxis. They found rot, yes—but no cultists. No daemons. Only silence... and humming.
Then came the whine of servos.
And the march.
The Plague Frames struck without heraldry, unleashing swarms of liquefied bile across fortified bunkers. They walked through lasfire, tore through ceramite armor, and exploded in green mist when destroyed—killing allies and enemies alike. The battle that should've lasted hours dragged into days. Valtrax-9 fell. Its skies turned green. And a new doctrine was quietly passed between terrified regiments: "Avoid the Metal Walkers. They do not fear. They do not bleed."
In orbit, Mechanicus observers stared at data streams in disbelief. The enemy used modified human DNA. The code patterns matched—but degraded, haphazard, stitched together like a horror show of science gone mad.
"They're reverse-engineering something," murmured Magos Rahven of the Iron Sigil. "This... this is no standard servitor. This is mimicry."
And that mimicry was spreading.
Over the following month, nine worlds fell. Each one hit by a wave of Plague Frames. Each time, the attackers left no salvage—no corpses. Only slag, rot, and a lingering sense of something stolen. They moved differently from daemons. They coordinated, not as warbands, but as an industrial wave. Their behavior echoed machines—not minds. Someone was building them. Mass-producing them.
---
Back in Eden, Dr. Dew was unaware.
He worked tirelessly, side-by-side with Cassidy, Da Vinci, and Paracelsus to prepare the next phase of migration. Eden's cities were expanding rapidly, shaped with Isu-formed architecture and reinforced by nano-weaved alloys. The new homes shimmered like living glass and metal—structures tuned to resonate with the biological rhythms of their occupants.
Hundreds of teleportation pads, built with Starbound's matter-deconstruction tech, now formed rings across the planet. Each pad was linked directly to cloaked locations on Pangea—initiating controlled, instant migration. In the skies above, satellites provided protection, while hidden drone fleets swept nearby systems for signs of intrusion.
And then... the first citizens arrived.
In a burst of white-blue light, the first family stood on Eden's soil—eyes wide, faces frozen in wonder.
It was quiet here.
Different.
They looked up at blue skies, at mountains unfamiliar, at trees that weren't quite alien—but weren't quite home either. Everything was foreign and yet... peaceful.
Over the next 72 hours, millions followed. Synths. Androids. Humans. Enhanced constructs. Families. Teachers. Warriors. Scientists. Children who had never known a world without emergency drills or alarms. They walked out of the teleportation rings with awe in their steps. Eden felt strange... but it didn't feel wrong.
Some wept at the sound of birds.
Others fell to their knees, fingers running through real grass.
There were no towering bio-mass forests like on Pangea. No psychic beasts. No night-singing insects. But Eden had its own life now—curated, crafted, deliberate. It was a sanctuary.
One that must never fall.
Zoos were established to house preserved samples of Pangean wildlife—kept in massive biodomes overseen by Mage-Constructs, programmed to simulate their homeworld's environment. The creatures were not prisoners. They were memories, living testaments to what once was.
Dr. Dew watched them arrive from a high platform above the main city. Cassidy stood beside him, her hat tucked under her arm. Behind them, Da Vinci and Paracelsus debated over which districts should be expanded first to accommodate educational centers.
"How does it feel?" Cassidy asked. "Seeing them here. Safe."
Dew didn't answer at first.
Then: "It's not enough yet. But it's a start."
Down below, the crowds continued to gather.
---
Back on Pangea—now a scarred husk left behind—there were no signs of civilization. The surface had been scoured, blasted clean. Cities had been erased, ruins buried beneath layers of synthetic sandstorms. The Isu pillars were dismantled and dropped into the planet's magma core. Any trace of technology was supposed to be gone.
Except... it wasn't.
Deep in the crater where one of the final cities had once stood, the corrupted ground hissed.
A team of Plague Marines, led by a bloated sorcerer named Mar'Ghul the Seep, climbed over melted ferrocrete and shifting mud. The air here was thick with electromagnetic residue.
Mar'Ghul raised a hand. "There. Bring it forth."
Half-buried in stone, fused to a ruined generator coil, was a twisted slab of alien metal and chrome.
The Plague Frames had not been born from nothing. This was the seed.
The damaged Gen 3 Synth Creation Station—cracked, leaking fluids, and partially melted—still pulsed with inactive data.
Eluth-Karn's corrupted acolytes had salvaged it. They had already decoded enough to begin replication. But what they could not understand, they corrupted. What they could not replicate, they twisted.
And now, Eluth-Karn sent his emissaries back for more.
They pulled the device from the wreckage, ignoring the whispers of residual Isu code screaming as it was desecrated further.
They brought it home.
And with it, the war changed.
---
In orbit over Eden, Dr. Dew finally received the first troubling report.
Cassidy read the telemetry out loud. "Warp echo detected in an adjacent system. No direct signatures... but it's Chaos, alright."
Dew frowned. "Which legion?"
"Unknown. But there's movement. A lot of it."
He stared out into the stars.
They had escaped the fire.
But rot had long roots.
And it had just begun to bloom.
End of Chapter Forty-Nine