Father Rain Rotigus descended upon the battlefield with an endless tide of daemons, their grotesque forms spilling forth from the rotting depths of the Warp. It was a foul invasion upon sanctified ground, a land where the banners of the Imperium stood defiant against the encroaching filth of Chaos.
Above, Saint Efilar spread her immense, flaming wings, their radiance stretching for dozens of meters, illuminating the war-torn sky. The towering Aquila Imperialis—the Eagle Banner of Destiny—stood resolute, a beacon of faith and fury. Every warrior bathed in its golden light felt their resolve harden like ceramite. Where the Emperor's banner flew, there could be no surrender, no defeat—only unyielding victory.
The warriors of the Imperium held the line before the sacred gardens, standing firm against the tide of daemonkind. Hideous, malformed entities surged forward, driven by the pestilent will of their loathsome patron, but the faithful did not falter.
For the Imperium. For the Lord of Mankind. For the honor they had bled to uphold.
Above the battlefield, Imperial warships rained destruction, their lance batteries and plasma broadsides carving through the daemonic horde. Each blast seared the land, burning away corruption with righteous fury. The ancient garden, once a place of serene beauty, became a pyre upon which Chaos burned.
The war had only begun, yet already, it raged at its zenith. Neither side sought retreat; neither side would accept anything less than annihilation.
On the front lines, a bloated Plague Lord, as vast as a fortress, staggered under relentless bombardment. When the final salvo struck, its diseased flesh ruptured in a grotesque explosion, spewing viscera and virulent ichor across the battlefield. The foul rain of corruption hissed against power armor and shattered ceramite, but the warriors of the Imperium fought on undeterred.
The battle cries of the Great Unclean Ones, once jovial in their grotesque mirth, now carried the weight of frustration. Even in their infinite decay, they felt anger, for the relentless march of the Imperium threatened to undo their work.
Yet in this blighted domain, the daemons were inexhaustible, drawing strength from the Warp-infused corruption of the garden. But the warriors of the Imperium were no less resolute, standing beneath the golden radiance of the Aquila Imperialis. The Emperor's light burned within them, and against such purity, even daemons could break.
The Realm of Nurgle was boundless, as ceaseless as the entropy that fed it. No matter how far the Imperium's warriors advanced, they could never truly reach the domain's heart—not unless a path was carved through reality itself.
But that was irrelevant.
They had but one purpose, one command from their master.
"Burn it. Burn it all."
Each step taken by the Emperor's warriors erased the stains of millennia. Each blade stroke, each bolter round, was an act of righteous vengeance.
"Advance! Advance! Advance!"
The battle cry rang through the ranks as Doom bellowed his command. Even in the absence of their Primarch, the Slayers surged forward, their will unbroken, their purpose clear. No horror could sway them; no nightmare could halt them. They pushed into the festering heart of the garden, where the very trees wept in agony. The souls bound within their rotting trunks wailed in despair—innocents, long trapped by the plague god's cruel embrace.
With blade and bolter, the Doom Slayers cut them down. There was no hesitation, no remorse. In destruction, these tormented spirits found release. The wails faded as the trees fell, their eternal suffering ended by the cleansing purge of war.
The ground itself fought back. Vile, writhing tendrils burst from the soil—rooted in rot, lashing like a thousand hungry tongues. These plants were no mere weeds but the tendrils of the Garden itself, each thorn pulsing with the potential to infect. But against the burning charge of the Imperium's finest, they withered and died. Power armor crushed the pustulent weeds underfoot, leaving only ash in its wake.
"For the Emperor! For the Primarch! For the Angel!"
The voices of the Blood Angels' Dreadnoughts rang across the battlefield, their battle cries broadcast through vox-amplifiers. Though their voices were flat and mechanical, devoid of mortal inflection, the sheer fervor of their zeal was unmistakable. Those who fought alongside them could feel the insatiable hunger for battle that burned within these ancient warriors.
They were veterans of a thousand wars—noble warriors entombed in sarcophagi of adamantium and ceramite, eternal sentinels of the Blood Angels Legion. To fight in death was their greatest honor, to shed blood in the Emperor's name their final purpose.
"Brother, that is not the Warmaster. The Warmaster betrayed the Imperium ten thousand years ago."
Commander Dante's voice cut through the din of battle. He had always been reluctant to awaken the Dreadnoughts for war, knowing well the torment they endured, yet he had been given little choice. When word spread of the campaign, the ancients had stirred within their slumbering tombs, demanding the chance to fight once more. They had followed their brother, the Primarch Sanguinius, into war ten millennia ago, and in their hearts, they still did.
"Brother, you speak of the Primarch of the Second Legion, His Highness Dukel. The one who bore the title of Warmaster before the Heresy. It was Horus who led the Imperium to ruin, not he."
Dante's voice, ancient yet patient, carried across the vox to the Fearless Dreadnought. He, too, was a relic of a lost age, but compared to these warriors, he was but a youth. Though he might command them in war, he knew better than to challenge their memories.
A deep, rumbling laughter filled the channel—more the groan of shifting ceramite than true mirth. The ancient Dreadnought, a warrior from the dawn of the Imperium, responded with something between reverence and condescension.
"Little whelp, you know nothing. The leader of the Second Legion was the true Warmaster. Horus was merely a usurper—a pretender. He did not inherit the will of his forebears, and because of that, the Imperium fell into ruin. If he had been worthy, the Great Crusade would have never faltered. The Emperor's dream would have never turned to dust."
His voice, distorted by the centuries-old vox-speakers, carried a tinge of sorrow. Memories, once so sharp, seemed to waver at their edges, as though eaten away by the decay all around them.
"We followed the Warmaster in the earliest days of the Great Crusade," the old warrior continued. "I remember those wars, waged across nameless stars. He led us—bold, unrelenting, never doubting. The Imperium grew like the dawn breaking over a long, endless night. It was a golden time, and though it lasted but a few decades, it will live in my memory forever. That golden age endured until..."
His voice trailed off, vox hissing with a moment of static.
"Until when? Why can I not remember? How could I have forgotten?"
After hearing the veteran's words, Commander Dante fell silent. He had been born in an era far removed from the Great Crusade, a time when the Imperium was already in decline. He could not truly imagine the golden age the ancien warrior spoke of, nor could he share in the same nostalgia.
Dante did not fully believe the veteran's words. He knew that centuries of confinement within the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought could blur even the sharpest of minds, distorting memory into legend. But to challenge a warrior who had fought in the Emperor's name for thousands of years? That was neither wise nor honorable. So instead, he chose to divert the conversation.
"Brother, you should not be here," Dante said, his voice betraying his concern. "This is the domain of the Plague God. If we fall, our souls will be ensnared, damned for eternity in torment. You have already given everything to the Imperium—your noble soul should not be put at such risk."
Dante knew the truth of the battlefield they stood upon. The Garden of Nurgle was no ordinary war zone; it was the very manifestation of the Plague God's will. Here, the dead did not return to the Emperor's embrace. No, their souls would be feasted upon, twisted into grotesque forms, and tormented for all eternity. Every Astartes who set foot in this putrid realm knew what it meant. They fought with the knowledge that their sacrifice extended beyond mere death.
The Dreadnought's response was immediate and filled with fury.
"We are Dreadnoughts! We do not fear sacrifice!" The ancient warrior's voice boomed like an angry war-horn.
"In the Emperor's name, in the Warmaster's honor! By the blood of Sanguinius, we shall never falter! We shall not retreat in the face of corruption! We will see the great banner of the Imperium raised on every world, and the Warmaster's vision shall be fulfilled!"
Hope is never a gift freely given by fate. It is something seized, something won through the suffering of countless warriors, a prize claimed by those who dare to fight for it. Dante stared at the Dreadnought, the weight of his words pressing upon his soul.
A fire ignited within him, yet it was a heavy fire—an understanding that settled in his chest like a great burden. For the first time in millennia, he was at a loss for words, struggling to breathe as the lesson took root within him.
The Dreadnought, its massive frame shrouded in battle-scorched ceramite, bellowed its final declaration. Raising its colossal power fist to the sky, it let out a roar that seemed to shake the very fabric of reality.
"We march toward damnation! But not before we seize hope and burn our foes to cinders! We do not kneel! We do not yield! We are the Emperor's Wrath made manifest!"
Above the battlefield, in a realm beyond mortal perception, the war raged on.
Dukel stood locked in battle with Rotigus, the Rainfather of Nurgle. Even in this hellish landscape—the Garden of Nurgle, thick with pestilence and the foul stench of decay—Dukel's presence burned like a wrathful star. Crimson flames wreathed his form, millions of incandescent eyes opening and closing across his shifting, ever-burning flesh.
All around them, lesser daemons of Nurgle shrieked in terror. Their bodies, bloated and putrid, melted into the seething filth as red fire clashed against rotting miasma.
Rotigus loomed high, his corpulent form a mountain of seeping sores and writhing intestines. His voice was a sickly whisper, yet it rumbled like thunder.
"I did not expect you to stand against me here. This is the Garden of Grandfather Nurgle. This is my domain. It feeds upon the sickness of the stars. It thrives in decay."
Dukel, wreathed in sacred flame, loomed just as large. His body blazed like the heart of a dying sun, the light in his countless eyes flickering with divine fury.
"Daemon," he intoned, his voice filled with the wrath of the Imperium. "Compared to the atrocities you have committed, what I ask in return is but the smallest vengeance. I will not cease until the Great Reckoning comes upon you!"
His wrath burned ever brighter, his incandescent form swelling with righteous fury. Power surged through him, drawn from the immaterial currents of the Immaterium, weaving together into a raging inferno of pure wrath. Even here, in Nurgle's dominion, reality itself trembled under the pressure of his will.
The Rainfather, once so smug in his dominion, now staggered. The endless tide of filth and disease that had poured from his rotting bulk began to wither and evaporate in the relentless firestorm.
His gnarled voice boomed across the blighted landscape, his pain and fear palpable. "What makes you think you can defy the Grandfather? By the Plaguefather's hand, your Imperium will crumble. The Corpse-Emperor rots upon His golden throne, awaiting the embrace of death!"
Dukel's burning gaze seared through the daemon's monstrous bulk. "Plague-begotten wretch, do you hear them? The cries of the innocent whom your filth has defiled? Their suffering will not be in vain. Before this war ends, you will know a torment greater than any you have inflicted. You will know extinction."
His flames flared with righteous wrath. Every sacred protocol of his armored form ignited at once, drawing upon the immaterium's power in an all-consuming surge. The empyreal storm he summoned roared outward, a crimson pyre reducing the Garden of Nurgle to a charred and burning ruin.
The very earth recoiled, repulsed by the unclean filth. Smoke and embers choked the sky. It was not just an attack; it was an unmaking, a holy reckoning. The once-verdant Garden wilted under the weight of the Emperor's wrath, and in that moment, for the first time, the Daemon of Nurgle knew fear.
"Grandfather... I have failed you..."
Rotigus let out a mournful wail, his corpulent body unraveling as he tumbled backward, his bulk crashing into the festering swamps. The foul waters churned as his form was swallowed by the filth, sinking into the abyss from whence he had come.
For the first time, Rotigus felt something alien to his nature—true, eternal fear.
He was being unmade. His essence, consumed by the void, severed from the endless cycle of rot and renewal that Nurgle had always promised his followers. It was not decay that awaited him. It was oblivion.
And as he disappeared into the noxious depths, Rotigus uttered his final, piteous words:
"Spare me, Grandfather..."
The plea went unheard.
Meanwhile, deep within the Plague God's domain, in the cavernous, pus-seeping halls of Nurgle's Garden, a great cauldron roiled and churned.
Kugath Plaguefather, Grandfather Nurgle's favored Tallyman, stirred the foetid brew with his massive, clawed hands. The reeking mixture swirled, thick with the bodies of the fallen, their rotting remains bubbling into new horrors yet to be unleashed upon the Materium.
A sudden tremor rippled through the Garden. The heavens themselves trembled. Kugath's beady, yellowed eyes bulged from their sockets and rolled into the cauldron with a wet plop. He let out a belching groan of irritation.
"Damn the noise… the endless noise," Kugath grumbled, plunging his bloated hand into the cauldron to retrieve his eyes. "And now the rain too? Blasted Rotigus. Always ruining my brews."
With a disgusted grunt, he fished blindly into the seething broth. But instead of his eyes, his fingers closed around something else—something solid. It resisted his grasp. He pulled harder, and the object twisted violently, yanking back.
With a sickening squelch, it broke free from the muck, sending Kugath sprawling onto his bloated belly. Gurgling in confusion, the Great Unclean One flailed before righting himself, his putrid guts sloshing over the floor. He wiped thick pus from his milky, sagging sockets and looked up.
A vast, rotting figure loomed over the cauldron.
Antlers. A torn, festering hood. Leering, despairing eyes. A familiar, pustulant hand gripping the cauldron's edge.
Kugath recoiled. "Rotigus... Grandfather's second-favored? What in the Blight's name happened to you?!"
As Rotigus heaved himself from the broth, his own rotting teeth tumbled into Kugath's cauldron with a series of wet plops.
"Oh, Rotigus, you look like a sack of rancid excrement," Kugath muttered, sneering at his wretched kin.
"Who did this to you?!"
Rotigus glowered, but his putrid form was ravaged, his body stripped raw, his flesh in tatters. His voice, once thick and bubbling, now quivered with something Kugath had never heard before: terror.
"I was burned, Kugath. It was... It was him."