Last week, we followed the Sylvaneth as they valiantly fought against the Maggotkin of Nurgle. Now, the ongoing war continues with another piece of fiction, with the followers of the Plague God in the ascendancy.
Irathu was dead. Slumped against an embankment of frosty earth, his barkflesh black and his treesap mingled with tarry filth, Athyllar knew of only one cause.
Maggotkin.
‘His heart chamber is hollow,’ rasped Dryaneth, his voice like the wintry wind howling through the Dreadwood. He knelt by the fallen Ancient, shuddering with anger, his grief a clenched fist eager to vent.
Athyllar glared at the Treelord’s massive carcass, taking in every abuse and ravagement that had been inflicted upon him. A cold flame of vengeance rippled within her.
A figure appeared at the summit of the snow-kissed embankment, looming over the small band of Spite-Revenants that had gathered at Irathu’s final resting place.
‘A trail leads into the Nightgrove,’ uttered Neleth from above in a deep, grating voice. ‘We shall wash its arbours with the blood of these transgressors.’
They were about to move on when something stirred in the slick darkness of Irathu’s chest, a dewy wretch of pallid gangrenous flesh. It mewled as it crawled, blinking, into the brumal light of the forest. A foetid yawn passed its pustuled lips, boils dappling its bloated belly. Dryaneth recoiled, his reverie arrested.
Athyllar pinned the creature first with the hatred in her eyes and then with the edge of her glaive, whirling the weapon in an arc before thrusting it deep into the birthed abomination. Its unearthly scream was brief but piercing as it burst like a rancid puffball. Taking care not to inhale the released spores, she turned her spiteful intensity on the deeper forest.
‘To the Nightgrove,’ she declared.
The further they followed the trail left in Irathu’s wake, the more the forest sickened. Slime-wreathed lianas dripped from the trees in reeking garlands and pools of grimy sludge gently bubbled despite the cold. A febrile heat lay upon this part of the forest like a filth-ridden blanket. The Treelord had unwittingly harboured this blight, and in his panic to escape, it had spread its vile tendrils into the ice-clad glades of the Dreadwood.
When the Spite-Revenants reached the threshold of the Nightgrove and the air throbbed with a latent sickness, Neleth called a halt.
‘It is here…’ he uttered, his low voice edged with hatred.
‘I can feel it also,’ said Dryaneth, his blade already drawn.
Athyllar’s pale otherworldly eyes narrowed. ‘Seek it out.’
The Revenants spread out, slipping stealthily through the glade. It didn’t take long for them to find what they were looking for.
The pit was a ragged mouth of darkness, easily wide enough to consume a Treelord. And it was deep, like a black well into rancid fecundity. The stench and sheer sense of wrongness emanating from the pit gave even Athyllar pause.
‘I feel a quickening in the air, an unhealthy threnody in the spirit song,’ warned Neleth.
‘Perhaps we should turn back, bring more warriors to slay these interlopers?’ suggested Dryaneth when he felt Athyllar’s hesitation.
Athyllar hissed her disdain and plunged into the pit.
Tunnels stretched out from the base of the pit, threaded with oily, unclean roots like cancerous veins. The foul reek thickened here, almost palpable. And there was a light in the darkness, a smudge of jaundiced yellow.
The Spite-Revenants followed it.
They found their fellows before they saw the enemy. Dryads slain and severed into pieces, stacked like firewood for the sickly crackling blaze that cast feverish light around an arboreal chamber. It was a pestilential fire and far from natural. Greasy, noxious smoke spilled from the burning bodies.
Neleth wept, shaking with fury at the desecration.
Loping out of the penumbral gloom came pallid-skinned wretches, their flesh writhing with pox. They sniffed the air as the Revenants entered the chamber, their eyes hidden by beaten scraps of metal plate. Axes begrimed with treesap hung from their emaciated fingers as they made ready to fight.
Athyllar let out an anguished war-cry as she fell upon the diseased host. The rabble clustered together, relying on strength of numbers. It mattered little against warriors like Athyllar and her kin. The plagued creatures were cut apart by the wrathful Revenants, who slew them cruelly and painfully. Yet they did not fall easily. Wounds that should have seen the cultists vanquished merely slowed them, their putrid flesh seemingly inured to pain. It only led Athyllar and her kin to greater acts of spite, fuelled by hatred. By the time it was over, a mass of rotting bodies littered the chamber in various states of dismemberment.
Dryaneth lingered by the fire, which had guttered since they’d first breached the threshold.
‘What is this? It burns and yet… I can feel the contamination in its flames.’ He reached out tentatively but withdrew his hand.
‘An act of defilement,’ sneered Neleth.
‘They are poisoning the land,’ uttered Athyllar. ‘This is but the tail of the worm. We must find its head… and sever it.’
‘How can they endure the wood?’ asked Dryaneth, gesturing to the dead cultists who wore little more than scraps of cloth.
‘They feel little pain,’ offered Athyllar, ‘and these fires chase away the purity of our ice-bound lands, it seems.’
Neleth was about to voice his thoughts when he canted his head to one side, listening.
‘Can you hear that?’ His pearlescent features approximated a grimace. ‘A dirge, like black claws raking against the spirit song. Is it… singing?’
The tuneless ditty led them deeper into the tunnels beneath the Nightgrove, signs of foulness everywhere the Spite-Revenants stepped. It was as if the very fabric of this subterranean place was being supplanted by something unclean. Flies clustered in every crevice; white-bellied maggots squirmed in the flesh of rotten fruit, seemingly growing from the roots of the great trees far above.
They had each seen this kind of contagion before. The influence of Nurgle, the foul Plague God that had so blighted Ghyran, was now here, in the sacred heart of the Dreadwood.
Athyllar led them on a determined course until she at last came upon the source of the disease.
A hollowed, arboreal chamber, much larger than the first, presented itself. More fires had been lit around its edges. Monstrous trees, sweating amalgams of flesh and rancid bark, stood like columns in the four corners, their grotesque branches reaching up into the ceiling. Three bubotic masses sprouted from each trunk, a ragged line of glistening teeth running up the middle.
Dryaneth gasped in horror at this corruption before his gaze drifted to the walls. Dryads had been embedded in the tangle of earth and roots, held fast with waxy pus and other putrescent matter. Several of the poor creatures stirred but displayed the distinct signs of the same blight that had taken Irathu.
‘They’re still alive!’ hissed Dryaneth.
‘That is not life,’ Athyllar countered, weeping inwardly for her diseased kinfolk. ‘They are fuel,’ she uttered softly as she realised their fate, turning her attention to the figure standing in the middle of the chamber. He wore the garb of a sorcerer, though his back was lumpen beneath his dirty robes. Sores and visible carcinomas colonised his bare flesh. A moth-eaten hood partly concealed a face similarly afflicted with pox.
It was from the sorcerer that the singing emanated.
‘He tills the field and reaps the yield, oh fiddle-di-fie, oh diddle-di-die…’
Athyllar could make little sense of the words, partly obscured as they were by the sorcerer’s glottal cadence. It sounded like nonsense, the ravings of a mad human. The robed figure clutched a staff crowned with a tri-lobe sigil and was using its rusted ferrule to finish drawing a ritual circle in the dirt.
A fount of power had lingered here once, a vital spring now reduced to an oily trickle. It had fed the ice-oaks and the frost-glades, nurturing growth and purity. Athyllar could feel the corruption now running through it, subverting its healing aura with something malevolent and insidious. She stepped forwards, almost unthinkingly.
As he caught the Spite-Revenants in his milky-eyed regard, the sorcerer stopped singing and chuckled.
‘Be welcome, strangers. For all are welcome in the Grandfather’s embrace.’
Athyllar scowled, the sorcerer’s ebullience only further stoking her ire.
‘Defiler…’ she snarled.
The sorcerer frowned and cast about as if looking for the person of whom Athyllar was speaking.
‘Nay, I say, nay. ’Tis but a garden ripe for the planting and I, its humble caretaker.’
‘This was a place of sanctity!’ cried Dryaneth, voice trembling with hatred.
‘It is an abomination!’ bellowed Neleth.
Athyllar was about to lunge at the wretch when a gangrenous fug began boiling up from the patch of earth upon which the sorcerer had drawn his circle. Not a circle, Athyllar realised, but three intersecting circles. Another tri-lobe. From within the noisome mist, a silhouette, something large and malformed, could be discerned.
‘Abomination…’ repeated Neleth.
A daemon shambled from the fog, clods of tarry rock and earth clinging to its rancid form. Its long arms hung by its side and it clutched a pitted sword. A grimy horn protruded from its misshapen head. Looming over the Sylvaneth, its single cankerous eye glistened with malice.
It was not alone. Bleating and baying with eager hatred, a herd of flyblown beastmen gathered in the shadows ‘holding rusted spears and hatchets.
A sense of despair fell like a heavy shawl of snow. It dragged at Athyllar like a snagging root.
‘This is beyond us three,’ uttered Dryaneth.
‘Back to the forest above,’ agreed Neleth.
Athyllar fought the urge to act, to fight. She wanted to purge this filth; to her core, she wanted it cleansed from the Dreadwood. She knew her fellows wanted it too. Yet clarity prevailed – or was it the growing feeling of hopelessness worming its way within her?
‘Move swiftly…’ she said, but as the group turned to make their retreat, they found a burly armoured headsman impeding their path. His bloated paunch was buckling his cuirass at the rivets. Beneath the corroded visor of his helm, rotten teeth glinted in a gap-toothed grin. Chuckling evilly, he swung his axe across his body. The blade was black with old blood and treesap.
‘The soil ripens. ’Tis time for the harvest,’ he intoned in a wet, guttural voice.
Athyllar felt the corruption behind her draw closer, her own barkflesh blackening and seething with the daemon’s presence, yet ahead was this daunting executioner. As the Revenants closed protectively about themselves, she looked askance at the Dryads nested in the walls, at their slowly decaying flesh.
Had they thought to fight too? she wondered.
Her blade felt heavier than before, her grip uncertain. Sweat dappled her skin for the first time she could remember.
‘Make it quick,’ said the sorcerer from behind her, his false bonhomie vanishing like light at the onset of a smothering darkness, ‘I have need of more incubators if all of the Grandfather’s children are to rise.’
Want to do your own gardening in the name of Nurgle? Pick up the Plague God’s head gardener, Horticulous Slimux, and turn Ghyran into a true paradise worthy of the Grandfather.
