As we get closer to the festive holidays, we’re left wondering which Chaos God would enjoy Christmas the most? Tzeentch probably likes planning out gift purchases to surprise, delight, and confound, and we reckon Slaanesh gets a kick out of all the excess. But after the big day passes, we think it’s Nurgle who is in ascension. Everyone’s in a stupor after over-indulging, before the inevitable seasonal malaise kicks in as no-one can work out what day it is and all that’s left is the inevitable trudge towards tomorrow…
Khorne? He just really likes pulling crackers. Anyway, today’s Grotmas gift is a chunk of fiction from Warhammer Age of Sigmar, set during the Blighted Wilds campaign. Let’s find out what’s going on in the Realm of Life!
THE WATERS, WEEPING
Come to me.
Well now. This was a surprise.
Or not, considered the unhallowed plague-lord Rangletch, as he crouched amidst the mire and watched the yellowed blood seep. It trickled from the rapidly decaying corpses of the Kairic cultists. Yet, in how it fell, words appeared: ‘come to me’.
Within his cyclopean helm, Rangletch grumbled. His flesh was itching.
‘Curious.’
It was as his trident impaled three war-painted grots and reduced their shrieking forms to mulch that the lord Rangletch felt his sores suppurate.
Come to me, Rangletch, they said, pus weeping.
Ulcer-ridden fingers flexing around the rotted ironoak grip of his weapon, Rangletch sighed. He shook what remained of the grots’ corpses from his trident’s prongs and stamped it into wreckage. The slaughter did not cease just because he did. Incessant buzzing and the snicker-slash of bladed forelimbs confirmed the presence of his Rot-Fly mount still nearby, darting to and fro, venting its puerile spite upon the wood-grots with whatever sort of glee it could still muster. But Rangletch stood, and Rangletch thought.
He had, after that initial visitation, briefly wondered if this was the Call of the Everchosen. It only came to champions who had caught the gaze of the Three-Eyed King, and Rangletch undeniably was a champion. All the squalid ruins, dissolved soulseeds and cairns of befouled bones left in his noisome wake spoke to that fact.
But, perhaps, this was not so, Rangletch mused. He had a nose for pox, and this did not strike him as some brewing of the Everchosen’s. No, this was daemon business. Such divine attention should have been a comfort to the loyal Lord of Afflictions, but it was not. Instead, it left his distended guts itching. Itching.
‘Later,’ Rangletch said, backhanding a grot rider that was about to hurtle past. He was stomping forwards now. Motion made it more bearable. ‘The disease must spread outwards, not fester inwards. Leave me to my work.’
The squelch of sodden foliage marked the passing of his plague-ridden disciples as they carved into the grots’ front line, forcing the loonatics back to their moon-headed shrine that squatted amongst the trees.
‘There are horizons still to receive Grandfather’s gifts. I have a purpose.’
Come to me, Rangletch, his sores spat back.
The prongs of Rangletch’s trident, each encrusted with filth, punched down into the loam. The earth shivered, its skin bristling as the champion’s fury flowed into it, before a noxious wave rippled outwards. Solid became liquid. Rock grew rancid. And, slowly, the grots’ shrine began to sink. So did its wailing defenders.
‘Not yet,’ Rangletch spoke to the thickened air. ‘Not yet.’
When the third visitation came, Rangletch knew it could no longer be ignored. He stood atop the barrow of some ancient Ghyranite chief, listening to his huddled sorcerers retch incantations. His warriors ransacked the huddled tombs, dragging out the treasures of the old kings to befoul. Horned Pestigors shuffled and brayed in sullen processions around burning osseous totems.
But as thick, gelid rains fell, Rangletch heard the words hissing in the waters.
You will attend me, Rangletch. You are seen by the God, so it goes. Deny me not.
Within his helm, Rangletch’s maggoty tongue licked at lips long rotted. His gaze lifted through the siling rains. On the horizon, the immense shadow glowered back at him. A behemothic axe-prow of dripping iron rising over the treeline that was the outline of a fortress. It was not really there, the castle; its physical form was many leagues away. Had any of his warriors looked they would have seen nothing. All the same, Rangletch knew the nature of this shadowy apparition.
‘Plaguespire.’ Wheezing like a punctured bellow, Rangletch picked at a scab, resting his trident over a shoulder as the weary shepherd did their crook. ‘Very well.’
The moons of Ghyran glowed green the night the Lord of Afflictions took flight. Ghalea seethed like a pus-swilling wound. Kurnalune hid its face and muttered its atavist cants. The glow cast the Thyrian jungle sprawl below into silhouette. Trees rose like cupped beggars-hands. They awaited charity, yearned for a boon. Rivers twisted between their trunks, glittering, taunting.
Plaguespire loomed before him in the rusted ‘flesh’. Through the haze of his Rot Fly’s beating wings Rangletch took in the sight of its living, gibbering gargoyles, the burn-marks where besieging hordes had hurled fungal blast-spores at the walls, the gargant-tall wounds carved into tower flanks. He banked right, over the grand and gummous avenue that was the Droning Procession, with its flagstones of despairing meat. He passed above the Bridge of the Three Holy Bells, the air quivering with the howl of the triplet druid-queens still trapped within those tocsins.
At last, he alighted on a dais of stinking cartilage that protruded from one of the spires. Cassocked and buboe-wracked wretches shuffled forth to tend to the champion’s mount. One let out a desolate murmur as the daemon’s proboscis lashed out to engulf him, snuffling down his putrefying body on a whim. Rangletch shouldered aside the others as he followed the nagging summons into Plaguespire’s guts.
Down into the fortress’s bowels. Down through yawning, lung-like halls and spiral staircases cramped as clotted veins. Down, down, plod, plod. As hours of descent passed, Rangletch tried to let himself be swallowed in the dull, delirious monotony. There was always that nagging imperative: the lust to proliferate, the lust to pollute. More than once, he considered turning, ascending. Each time, the rasping that ran through the walls beckoned him on.
Rangletch’s bottomless path led, at last, into some natural cavern. Poisonous fountains of slime cascading across tumorous stone walls. Only the occasional flash of metal, the hint of carvings in the Dark Tongue, confirmed he was still within Plaguespire. From clouded pools echoed a guttural sloshing. If Rangletch focused, really strained his senses, he could discern the faint wooden creaking of unseen water wheels.
‘So. You can listen to orders,’ Gurgled a voice from the shadows. ‘Good, good.’ Rangletch turned, armour grinding as he levelled his trident. From one of the hollow’s slick walls, a throne of mottled black protruded. It was empty, though the air around it bore a wet, fecal stink that even Rangletch could not easily bear.
But then, the presence of Gelgus Pust – ascended Prince of Sores – was always overpowering. Divine Grandfather, ever adroit, had made it so.
‘Oh, lower the weapon, boy.’ A muscid buzzing filled the air as Pust’s glottal voice resounded. ‘Lower the weapon and heed me.’ Slowly, Rangletch did as he was bidden. His breath steamed. Gelgus Pust was one of the Fly Lord’s chosen. The delectable corpse-scents he emanated were scraped from the bowels of the Munificent One’s iron cauldron. To be in the Daemon Prince’s presence weakened the knees and filled the ears with a beatific droning cant.
And yet…
‘You are… formless, my prince,’ Rangletch said, just on the right side of awe-struck. The air seemed to thicken about him; the best, perhaps, that Pust could manage. However insistently his presence bore down upon Rangletch, it was only that: a presence implied, intangible. When Rangletch blinked, he thought he could fleetingly spy the daemon’s true form, and that was little better. Cuts and gashes were carved deep across Pust’s gelatinous form. Each of the Daemon Prince’s extremities was blackened, as if burned. Mites and ticks crawled across his body and gnawed at the lacerations, their ordure scabbing over the wounds.
‘Hurghh…’ Pust’s disembodied presence rumbled in displeasure. It seemed to be circling Rangletch, a steady and heavy procession of wet, squelching steps. Thick bile seeped up from the rock wherever those sounds echoed. Unnameable things wriggled within the liquid.
‘This pinprick? Bah! Bah… but, aye,’ The Daemon Prince chortled. Or perhaps seethed. It was impossible to tell. ‘The Jade Abbey was to be mine, Rangletch. Mine! I would have defiled its wards, drank deep of the Everspring, consecrated it to our lord. Instead… instead I was thwarted. Thwarted by a pack of miscreants and apostates!’
‘They will seek to punish me for this. The courtiers of our lord,’ Pust gurgled. Rangletch did not think the daemon was addressing him, now. The air stilled like a huddled breath before he continued. ‘They will try to recall me to the Garden. I have business upon this mortal plane still. The Rainfather, my patron, has… expectations.’
The seethe of water in the hollow seemed to grow fearfully quiet. Rangletch glanced at a trickling pus-fall. Rather than his own reflection, something dire gazed back at him – something cowled and rotten, a carrion-prelate of the netherworld, haloed by an undulating squall of sludge. The Lord of Afflictions averted his eyes as Pust continued.
‘We must bring the deluge, so we must. For even in this time of adversity, when our foes would spurn our offerings – then, we dig deep of Grandfather’s stolid purpose and waver not, aye?’
There were murmurs that Pust had once been a holy man. Certainly he spoke with a friar’s cadence, arms raising in mock benevolence. Soon he leant forwards in his seat, wagging a finger.
‘I have received a vision, mortal. In defeat, revelation. I had been… ungenerous. Believe it, can you? Me?’
‘Tales of your giving nature are known.’
‘But it is so. I focused on the target of my own disdain, but are there not many who deserve baptism in Father’s love? Aquia and Thyria go untended. Reprobates lay roots there, bringing persecution to the faithful. I weep to see it.’
‘You speak of the Sigmarites.’
‘And their allies. The Everqueen, the wicker-lady, chief amongst them. There are choicer forms of misery I have been lax in visiting unto her.’
‘I believe you drive towards a point, my prince.’
‘Oho! Eager! Careful now, young pusling.’ Pust’s presence drew closer. Too close. Rangletch perceived it like a yoke about the neck. It was all he could do not to brandish his trident. ‘Careful. A plot’s afoot, and there’s a place for you in it, Rangletch, for we have watched your victories with approval. But collar this impatience.’
‘There are horizons yet unvisited. I have work—’
Rangletch, even as he spoke, knew he had overstepped.
A tidal surge of filth-water slammed the champion from his feet, pitching him onto his back with an echoing clang. The water, he realised, moved at Pust’s command. Disembodied or not, he was no minor princeling. The liquid rancidity crept higher, higher, as the monstrous presence pressed down upon him. The waters washed over Rangletch’s helmet, seeped into it, crept down his throat. He was thrashing. He was dying. And yet, he was seeing.
The building was a great beast of wood, crouched above the lake. Strapped to its flank, marked with the holy tri-lobe, a wheel ground and clanked, powered by the waters. Mechanisms shifted within the mill: mechanisms, and weights, and grinding stones. They screamed, those stones – but no. Stone did not scream. Men screamed. Women screamed. They wailed as they were crushed into paste, crushed into slime, crushed into the bubbling broth that filled Grandfather’s blessed basin.
And that basin tipped over, and what wonders spilled forth! He was as the skrag-winged paradise bird, hovering high on the thermals above the Thyrian jungle, watching as a wave of glorisome disease spilled across the land. It sloshed around the broad boles and left them stinking carrion things. Beneath the ground, ley lines flashed a virile green-black. They shrivelled like dead centipedes, before being blotted beneath the floodwaters crashing through the Sylvaneth glades and Sigmarite cities of the Thyrian reach.
Rangletch saw all of this; saw the manifestation of Pust’s ambitions. And as the earth of Ghyran liquefied, he saw the metaphysical struggle also.
He saw Alarielle – ever bound to her realm – begin to sputter and drown.
Even as his mind was blasted, Rangletch still managed to clasp his trident. Instinct saw him thrust it upwards into the infernal pressure crushing him. Though his waking mind knew he simply stabbed at air, the champion could not shake the feeling that those triple points of iron speared through folds of flesh.
Pust’s presence dissipated. The daemon’s sneering chuckle filled the cavern air. Retching, wheezing, Rangletch dragged himself up to a knee. He braced himself on his weapon, turning over the vision in his mind.
‘A… flood,’ he said at last. ‘A poisoning. You would raise corruption to the brim before washing all these lands with gifts in one swoop.’
‘Does that satiate your impatience, mortal?’ Pust’s voice echoed from every fold of wet rock, rasping right in the air. ‘We shall wipe it all away, so we will. Many of my champions are already about my work: Foulhoof, the Cystwitch, more besides. But I am ever in need of lieutenants. Do my work for me, and there shall be a seat at the table for you.’
Slowly, slowly, the echo of Pust’s words faded. The dripping of the waters reclaimed its prominence in Rangletch’s senses; that, and the feel of Plaguespire’s corpulent iron immensity pressing down overhead. The itch had returned to Rangletch’s body. It ran through him like the God-King’s accursed corposant. Rangletch lifted his head, shaking off the last of the waters. He was salivating.
‘Speak, Prince of Sores, and it will be done.’
This isn’t the first time the Realm of Life has suffered an attack from the forces of Nurgle. The Plaguefather and Alarielle the Everqueen have a long standing and bitter rivalry, and the Jade Realm is the primary battleground – you can find out about it in a Loremasters episode all about Ghyran.
Tomorrow we’re sticking with the Mortal Realms, as Da Red Gobbo attempts to steal a prototype mechanical suit from a Hashutite inventor…
Catch up on the Grotmas Calendar
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