Something Infectious is Stirring...

You think you understand despair, mortal? As our armies scour your homeland of everything you know as beauty, you think you’ve come to know the true reality of utter hopelessness. However, you’ve only begun to comprehend this life’s capacity for cruelty.

For ten thousand years, I’ve wandered this plane of existence. I’ve staggered through plains of crystallized despair, and slogged through futility that pulled at my knees and threatened to bring me down forever. I’ve been educated as to what lies beyond the grave, and it is not the frivolous hopes of a thousand cultures, vainly grasping at the wind in an attempt to assign meaning to something that is formless and meaningless. I know what fate the mortal soul is consigned to witness, and it is nothing like the shining existence that is so longed after. In truth, utter oblivion would be preferable to the monstrous madness that is actual truth.

The morass of pain and depression beckons to me, but where once I found an enemy I now know only the comfort of reality as it is meant to be experienced. I’ve known pain no mortal should ever know, but the Great Grandfather has seen fit to reward me with immortality, that I might find purpose in the endless pain that is mortality’s lot. Rather than being crushed by this revelation I am enlightened by it, and though the despair still crushes at my soul I have been given strength enough to deal with it.

We seek to enlighten you in turn, as we were once enlightened. It matters not that you prefer the ignorance of your Corpse-Emperor’s dogma, for we bring the harsh love that only a true god could offer, with the zealous resignation reserved for the zealots that know the truth behind the veil of lies. You see naught but the destruction and chaos we have unleashed, assuming us to be the blackest of enemies. In reality, we are bringing you truth, burning down the fetters and blinders that shackle you to a cold and cruel lie.

There is naught but death and disease, an endless cycle of rebirth that cares not for your existence nor your feelings. All that matters is the eternal play of death and life, of which you are now taking part.

For what it is worth, I can feel the canker taking root within your soul. I would tell you not to fear its coming, but you will fear it nonetheless. Perhaps that is the natural way of things. Yet eventually you will come to accept its inevitability, as all others have. If my brothers and I have given in to the inexorable march of our doting father’s tune, what hope do you, a mere mortal, have against its embrace?

Instead of fear, you should rejoice. Of all the myriad contagions and infections that swirl in the wind around our implacable march, you have been granted the choicest of gifts. Not for you is the Gurgling Malfeasance, or the swift and permanent end of the Fluxing Buboes. You could have even been claimed by the Walking Pox, to which so many of your women and children succumbed as you vainly fought against our coming. Even now they scratch at the doors of your fortresses, and so many of the men they loved in life are having their minds torn to shreds as their loved ones scrabble with rotted fingers at the walls of your fortresses. Look around you – many of the men who defend the walls with you will soon be reduced to this isolated ruin, living on within their own corpses as they butcher all they once held dear.

You, though, have been reserved for a very special purpose, as Nurgle has seen fit to expand his beloved children. His seed has been planted within your flesh, the rotting substance you once considered so clean and pure. Nurgle’s Rot has taken root in you, my new friend, and soon it will enlighten you in a way your comrades can only dream of.

For you see, the myriad diseases that crawl through the guts of your world will eventually run their course, and it will leave those it touches as lifeless as the hope to which they once clung. Even those touched by the Walking Pox will know death, released from the blissful insanity of their bodily prisons when eventually they are destroyed. They will return to the substance of the Warp, fueling our dark masters in their internecine struggles that will continue long after Mankind has drawn its final, futile breath.

You, though, are meant for something greater, for the Grandfather has blessed you with an immortality that matches my own. You did not come willingly into his wretched fold, though, and so you will never know the power that is mine to command. Yet you will be blessed, through the fickle touch of my loving father, and he will show you the error of your ways. Regardless what choices you make in the coming days, know that your soul is forfeit to the mighty and beneficent Nurgle, Lord of Plagues and Decay. Your hope, your aspirations, your memories of family, lovers and friends; all will rot into the morass of re-creation, a fuel to feed the forming of a new Plaguebearer of our father from beyond.

I know you are infected because you hear me, and my mind resonates within your own, drawn to you as one of the first fruits of Nurgle’s triumph upon this world. It is futile to resist the effects of this disease, for it is completely incurable, but struggle you must. It is the way of life to rail against the inevitably of my master’s touch, refusing to accept that his touch is more permanent than anything you could have ever known in this world. For a time you will know agony that I cannot lay claim to, something never experienced by those who willingly bend the knee. Yet with time, your struggle will fuel something beautiful, and a new soldier in Nurgle’s war for enlightenment will be born.

By all means, mortal, struggle. Rail against the fate that is our common destiny. Wish for a better future, as I once wished for such things. Though your hope is useless, and your faith is powerless, it all serves a purpose for the Grandfather’s vision.

Simply know that in the end, all hope will fail. No matter what you do, no matter how you run or scream or kick against the brutality of fate, your soul will belong to Nurgle.

Forever.

-Exalted Vanum, Demon Prince of the 4^th Vectorium