Former chapter master Sophusar of the Stygian Guard, now Sophusar `the Facinorous` of the Psychopomps, stroked the violet skinned cheek of his closest bed-partner as she ran a claw down his muscular chest, over myriad scars, tattoos and sockets within the subdermal black carapace. These sockets would connect him to his armour, be it powered or tactical dreadnought, but here within his sanctum he lay unarmoured and disrobed. Her claw moved lower and he inhaled sharply, grinning and taking a fistful of her scarlet hair, pulling her head back violently and licking her throat. His omophagea allowed him to taste her daemonic spoor and his eyes rolled back.
“I am concerned about your chirurgeon,” she mewled, eliciting a frown from the master warrior and chief architect of his chapter’s debauchment.
“You doubt Polus’ loyalty? He is dedicated to the cause.”
“Is he? Really?” The words were spoken by one consort and finished by another behind him, her dainty yet razor-nailed fingers circling the service studs imbedded in his scalp.
“He is dedicated to me. Along with Zenelaius he created the infernal engine. The very tool of our enlightenment,” his voice shuddered as the Daemonette behind him ranked her taloned fingers down his back, thick, bright Astartes blood dripping onto the leather upholstery of the bed. “His loyalty is unblemished,” he sighed with pleasure.
“Yet he toys with death. He veers from the path. Test him.” Again the sentence flowed from consort to consort as each spoke with one voice, leaping from mouth to mouth as the daemonic bodies and that of the corrupt Astarte writhed upon the bed of cured human skin, the features of those whose flesh it comprised stretched taught under them.
“You have something in mind?” Sophusar grunted, wrestling with one of his partners.
She grinned and nodded, pulling on the chains which hung from barbed piercings in his limbs.
“He will survive?”
One wrapped its legs and arms about his muscular figure as he throttled the other beneath him.
“Either way, he will be transformed,” they answered as one.
Life and death. A fine line and one that the apothecary was charged with keeping his brethren on the right side of. Medicines, unguents, serums, tinctures and elixirs were his province. Yet after the Stygian Guard had become the Psychopomps, chief apothecary Polus had explored not only the very limits of life: contriving with the chapter’s master of the forge a machine via which the Astartes could experience the emotions of other sentient beings hooked up to it. The base emotions of humans soon failed to satiate their awakened appetites and they had turned to using captured Eldar. The Xenos proved to experience a spectrum of sensation far beyond human ken. It was ambrosia. It at once tore the soul and plunged the very depths of the heart. Such pleasure. Such pain. Such sorrow. A regale which ended all too soon as the subject expired, and left a void which could only be filled by future excess.
Yet Polus had also explored toward the other end of the spectrum. The very border of life and death. Multitudinous venoms and viruses, poisons and phages; he had studied all he could acquire while loyal to Terra in order to better protect his battle brothers. And now, will unfettered, he explored that fine line.
Often he conversed with chief librarian Holusiax upon the nature of the Empyrean - the Sea of Souls by another name - and the process by which one made the transition. A one-way transition for all but the strongest of psykers capable of projecting their will astrally into the Beyond.
He had conversed too, while working on their infernal engine, with master of the forge Zenelaius, the latter speaking often - albeit in hushed tones - of the Palace of the Dark Prince; a realm wherein the neverborn of their patron god cavorted and satisfied the whims of their creator.
Approaching master of sanctity Angra, Polus had been granted access to the chief chaplain’s growing library of accursed tomes and therein had found word of that which he sought.
His quest had then been granted the blessing - to Polus’ surprise - of master Sophusar with but one stipulation and thus Polus and a bodyguard of seven terminators prepared. The seven were armed non-standardly: each carried a veritable arsenal of weaponry from melta and plasma guns to assault cannons and lascannons which had been adapted for use by those in dreadnought armour. They and nine-and-two-score thralls were sealed within a chamber deep within the flagship Charon. Incense of sacred, lethal black lotus and that most sought after of blooms: lacrymata, were lit and Polus’ body was daubed with icons which would guide him in the transition, many of them defiled. The indalo, the ankh, the manji, the circumpunct, the om...the trefoil disks and the Octed.
Symbols of life and of death.
Polus awoke to the roar of gunfire. His eyes opening he took in his surroundings within seconds. The poisoning of the cultists had been Charon’s obol: the toll paid for their entry into the garden of the Plague Father. The luridly painted armour of the Psychopomps was at stark odds with the jungle they now found themselves in and its defenders had soon risen to drive them out. Polus’ terminator guard had responded by opening up on them with their assault cannons and heavy flamers. The roar of brother Gabrene’s rapidly-spinning cannon eclipsed all other sound, the hail of rounds sawing through the fetid jungle-swamp vegetation, exploding rotten trees just as easily as it tore apart the diseased and gangly, pot-bellied Cyclopean minions of the Garden’s master.
The terminators formed a circle about the chirurgeon and drove back the plaguebearers as sergeant Nysoces turned to Polus.
“We are where we are supposed to be?”
Polus nodded, drawing his own weapons: a bolt pistol and chainsword.
“That was no teleport, chirurgeon!” the towering sergeant spat angrily, turning back into the circle of guard to add his firepower once more. More and more plaguebearers staggered out of the putrid jungle or pulled themselves up out of the noxious filth which sucked at the greaves of the Astartes. There were hundreds of them now, shuffling forward like a sea of twisted corpses.
“This is naught but a vision quest. Have faith, sergeant.”
“Feels pretty bloody real to me!” swore Gabrene as his assault cannon ran dry. With neither time nor space to reload it he swung the barrel at the nearest plaguebearer as it charged and he felled it, the heat of the barrels scorching the rotten flesh of its collapsed head.
“Stay focused on the mission,” Polus spoke calmly, firing shots from his bolt pistol with expert marksmanship. Each was a custom round, akin to the hellfire rounds carried by Sternguard veterans but loaded with toxins and pathogens of Polus’ own engineering. Unlike his terminator guard, Polus had known - from his research - exactly what he was leading them into and had prepared. Knowing that the spawn of the Plague God would have feasted upon the majority of the harmful viruses in his laboratory, he had had to concoct scourging microbes as yet unknown to man. Hybrid phages and devastating mutant organisms.
He used these rounds sparingly, knowing full well that with each shot the master of this land learned more of his craft and Polus no doubt drew attention to himself. This latter was a matter of personal pride.
He settled his sights upon a Plaguebearer and fired, the bolt burying itself in the daemon’s cranium and vomiting forth its fell payload. He watched with a clinical curiosity as the neverborn’s flesh tried to devour the very phage which was rapidly eating away at its very head. The daemon’s constitution failed and it collapsed, flesh turning to slurry, though the next shot’s effect was already visibly diminished, the next Plaguebearer staggering further before it fell. Polus bit back a curse and made a mental note before changing magazines.
A shot from this new magazine saw the target’s body torn apart as bubbling masses of cysts grew, explo at a geometric rate.
“This is a cesspit, sawbones! You’ll find no weapons here. Master Sophusar must have been mistaken!” Nysoces spat.
The Plaguebearers, the Aghkam’ghran’ngi as they were in the Dark Tongue, were soon upon them and brother Legade was beaten down by the blows of pitted, corrupted blades, firing his weapon even as he vanished into the thick sea of blight at their feet.
“Cover and reload! Move!” roared the terminator sergeant and the squad wordlessly moved, two brothers stepping before Gabrene, laying about themselves with massive swings of their powerfists, giving the other the chance to reload his cannon.
Onward the terminators and their charge fought through the Garden of Nurgle. Through structures resembling the ruins of myriad ancient cultures both human and Xenos, all being devoured by the voracious, pox-riddled vegetation, for Nurgleth was most ancient of the infernal powers. As they pushed on toward its center - a direction dictated by Polus himself to the mystery of his bodyguard - , a constant fight against the garden’s denizens, they passed through areas characterized by different maladies. Here the oak wept thick rheum from cankers in their cracked bark, there the branches of twisted willows were matted with blood-flecked mucous. Bloated fungi shed clouds of noxious spores. Pines dripped virulence; it was these which had seen the end of brother Kradus. In another place towering pitcher plants plucked one of their number from the ground with a snaking prehensile vine, dumping him into its vat of rot. Gabrene had turned his cannon upon the fleshy walls of the plant in order to free his comrade, whose screams tormented them over the vox, and the assault cannon had ruptured the plant’s cask of filth, spilling forth countless millennia of swollen and twisted corpses. Gabrene had found Cagas’ body. The corrosive blight had eaten away at much of the one proud warrior and his armour and weaponry had melted, run and fused. Polus had not been able to retrieve his geneseed nor were they able to salvage any of his weaponry. The loss of not only the warriors but also their precious geneseed and ancient armour was a great loss to both the mission and the chapter.
Pushing through a forest of trees bearing quivering, vein-threaded tumours as fruit, sergeant Nysoces spat as Polus ran his hand over one of the tree’s berries, studying it and Nysoces turned, quickly raising his weapons as his HUD locked on to a figure crouched atop a ruin opposite, watching them. Gabrene, the only other remaining terminator was alerted by his movement and he too trained his weapons upon the intruder, his assault cannon slowly spinning up; its motor and bearings now partially clogged and eroded. It had been almost ten minutes since their last encounter with Nurgle’s servants - a cloud of those giant flies bearing maggotkin upon their backs - and the losses of Lianeau and Zetuseo, but they had always had the feeling that they were being watched. And here was the watcher.
Clad in ragged fatigues stained with blood and diseased bodily fluids, his flak armour corroded and pitted in several places with triumvirate craters, the skeletal figure with swollen belly was heavily reminiscent of the Plaguebearers but was evidently human, or had been human, and a member of the Imperial Guard at that. Cadian if the pattern of his armour was any guide. That he had been corrupted by his presence within the garden was clear but how could he have survived? The filters of the Psychopomps’ gaudily painted terminator armour were borderline clogged yet this human crouched, observing them quite calmly, his face unmasked.
That face. Nysoces stepped closer, his weapon trained on the man, and could then see his features better. Under his helmet, the camouflage now a pattern of rust shades, the man’s mouth was sewn shut with razorwire and his eyes were scabbed over. Yet he seemed to be looking directly at them. Or rather, at Polus.
“Sawbones. Sawbones. Polus!” Nysoces grunted to get the apothecary’s attention, before breaking into a fit of coughs. The sergeant swore that he would have his revenge upon the chirurgeon for bringing him and his squad into this hellhole without proper intel. There was no weapon of immense power here. Just rot, death and the carrion legions of a rival god. He would have words with master Sophusar too, if they made it out alive. The indignity of playing bodyguard to the chirurgeon in order to lead him through this daemon-fouled jungle in search of a lie… There was no excess here. No stimulation but the slaying of the diseased and the already-dead. It repulsed him.
The withered guardsman stood up on the thin branch, not once wobbling or extending his arms to correct his balance. His arms hung limp at his sides, though the hands were curved into palsied talons. The terminators and Polus could then see that the guard’s distended belly was split with a ragged gash from hip to hip. A gash which was home to what at first seemed to be bone fragments but which Polus soon realized were in fact teeth, as a tongue formed of vitae lolled out and the mouth spoke.
“Intruders,” the belly of the watcher hissed, “Servants of the Prince, you will die here. Your bodies will become home to such wondrous infestations!”
“Permission to fire?” coughed Gabrene, the once brightly-painted panels of his armour already beginning to pit, crack and corrode.
“Grant-,”
“Belay that order,” called Polus, raising his hand and stepping between the terminators and the herald.
Nysoces was about to protest when his chest was wracked with wet coughs.
The herald cocked its head questioningly as Polus stepped forth.
“I come here to beseech your lord,” the apothecary said in a powerful voice, unafraid of all he had seen, and the loss of most of his bodyguard.
The belly-mouth smiled, “and what is it you seek?”
Polus licked his dry lips. The pressure of the moment or symptomatic of some pathogen which had penetrated his armour, he did not know. The half-lies he had told Nysoces and his men would now be laid bare.
“An audience with a guest of your master.”
The smile split as the herald’s belly shook with laughter, “the fay goddess is grandfather’s private guest. He would not grant an audience to those who kneel to the Great Serpent,” the herald began to turn away.
“I bring an offering.”
The herald craned its neck over its shoulder, the neckbones cracking audibly.
“My bodyguard,” Polus motioned to the two remaining terminators with his open hands.
“Bastard!” Nysoces spat thick bile and brought his weapons to bear upon the apothecary. As he and Gabrene opened up, cutting down Polus in a hail of gunfire, the herald turned back toward them, a thick green pall flowing out of its abdominal mouth and soon they were engulfed.
The darkness of death receded and Polus heard the wet voice of the herald once more.
“My master accepts your offering and deigns to grant your request...and make you personally an offer of his own...”
There came a heavy banging upon the chamber door, followed by the clatter of weapons being armed on this side as two squads of Psychopomps trained their weapons on the portal.
Master Sophusar stood magnificent in his terminator armour, the falx horrificus –that huge axe, its very blade shaped like the icon of his lord - in his hands, flanked by a coterie of his violet-skinned, jade-masked Peris.
“Open it.”
Huge bolts slid back into the walls and the door was pulled aside to reveal the bodies of the forty-nine cultists within. Stood at the center of the chamber were seven hulking figures, the gaudy hues of their armour dulled by contagion and mutation. Each was now as one with his armaments and would forever be so.
And at the middle of the circle of seven stood a gaunt figure in filth encrusted white armour daubed with the symbols of the Dark Prince yet even these markings were tainted now, dirtied.
“Polus! Polus has returned to us!” Sophusar announced victoriously as he stepped forward into the chamber, his own bodyguard following.
The obliterators parted after a moment’s hesitation and the chapter master embraced his chief apothecary. Polus removed his helm after being released from his master’s grip. His features were drawn and his eyes distant and when they did focus they appeared to gaze through the subject of his scrutiny, as if regarding their soul rather than their flesh.
“You saw her, did you not?” Sophusar asked enthusiastically, his Daemonettes coming close and regarding the obliterators with distain.
Polus’ eyes finally seemed to find the chapter master and focused on him properly, the power of Sophusar’s personality drawing the apothecary from his reverie, if only briefly.
“I stole a kiss from her ruby lips,” he whispered.
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