Old Friends, 40K Fanfic

                                      OLD FRIENDS

    'Where is your master hiding, filthy servant of the Carrion God?'
    In response to the inquiry the Plague Marine, adorned in ancient and poorly maintained power armour painted in the colours and heraldry of the Death Guard, began to chuckle heartily.  His tone was obnoxiously jocund, a fact which, considering the gravity of the situation in which the wretch now found himself, the opponent facing him found altogether discomforting.
    'So then you're the one, eh?' the Plague Marine responded at last, his voice warm and welcoming.  'The Sorcerer.  He said you would come to Bogblast, and here you are indeed.  I'm sure he'll be glad to see you.  You are his oldest friend, after all.'
    Benniel Ohim's mouth contorted into a snarl beneath his helmet and he began to grind his teeth.  Deep in his throat he began to growl.  The aetheric energies cascading through his body began to surge wildly.  In an attempt to appear more menacing he began to redirect the eldritch flow of the warp energy into his power armour, causing it to heat up so rapidly that the thick, blackish-coloured water of the mire in which he stood up to his knees began boiling almost immediately, filling the air around him with a shroud of hissing steam.
    Ohim lifted his ornate, gold-wrought force staff and pointed it directly at the heart of the Plague Marine, who was even now being held suspended in the air an entire metre above the mire by his sorcery.  As he did so the sapphires set along the length of the staff, already already glowing and scintillating wildly, began to rapidly increase in luminosity, continuing to do so until they had become nearly blinding to behold.
    'The disgusting abomination you serve is no friend of mine,' hissed Ohim.  'A more contemptible waste of flesh I have never known.  If you know who I am, then you know that I have come to hunt him down, and this time shall be the last.  Tell me where he's hiding, and your own suffering will be short.'
    'Do you mean to scare me?' asked the abhorrently bloated Astartes, the voice emanating from within the confines of his yellow-green helmet still irkingly jubilant.  He laughed a full-hearted, genuine belly laugh.
    'My own suffering, you say.  Suffering?  What a concept, that.  I must say, Thousand Son, yours is quite an imagination.  Ours is and has forever been a far worthier patron than the pitiful Master of Lies who you so erroneously serve- those of us who he has drawn into his embrace, are forever freed from such baser concepts as suffering.  We are no slaves to our nerve-endings, unlike the rest of you pitiful, quivering mortals.  Your threat is as empty as the armour of those accursed automatons that you and your ilk call battle-brothers.'
    'I take it then that you have no intentions of telling me what I wish to know?'
    'You Thousand Sons are the self-proclaimed masters of knowledge- don't you know already?  If not, then perhaps you should figure it out for yourself.'
    'So be it,' spat Ohim, and with a flick of his staff, the death of the Plague Marine began.  His ancient, bile-coloured armour, the ceramite plates of which had been long desecrated by erupting fungal growths and cracked from within by the Plague Marine's own corpulent body, began tearing away from his flesh in sheets, emitting shrill shrieks as it was rended by the power of the warp.  The gelatinous, maggot-white flesh beneath started to bubble and ooze, melting off of his bones.  His helmet violently shattered into thousands of shards, which flew away from him in every direction, revealing a bald, lichen-ridden head beneath.
    Even as the Plague Marine's lips dripped away from his skull like melting wax, still he continued to laugh, his eyes mirthful and wide as they began to bulge out of their sockets.
    Quicly wearied by the bastard's sickening display, so pointedly nonchalant even in the face of his own slow death, Ohim decided to finish him off quickly.  He reached out through the empyrean with his thoughts and tapped into the simplistic consciousness of the other eight beings who were present, automatons all, immediately subjugating their own negligible minds to his own, superior will.
    Instantly and simultaneously the eight Rubric Marines under Ohim's command responded.  Little more than enchanted suits of eternally sealed power armour, long bereft of their former personalities and now functioning solely as additional conduits of Ohim's will, they aimed and fired at the floating Death Guard, riddling his body with bolter rounds relentlessly.
    When there was little left of the Plague Marine besides a stick-figure frame made from shards of bone and mechanical augments dripping with gelatinous ooze, the Thousand Son ordered his mindless cohorts to abstain from continuing their fire.  He willed his victim's body to burn and so it began to, instantly consumed in an intense, near-white blaze.  Done with it, he released it from psychic suspension, allowing the flaming leavings to fall into the dark, soupy mire below.  The fire that had consumed the wretch, aetheric in nature, continued to burn, even after complete submersion in the foul water.
    'Let's go,' he said quietly, unconcerned by the fact that his cohorts lacked the capacity to discern his words.  They would do as he guided them to psychically- speaking the words aloud was really just a habit, one whose only function was granting him a small measure of comfort.  Worse than lost though they now were, the Rubric Marines had once been his brothers-in-arms.  Pointless though it actually was to do so, he still tried to honour the memory of their former selves.
    He began to walk, his troops fanning out ahead of him as they began slogging slowly through the brackish muck.  As he passed the still-burning body of the Plague Marine, his thoughts turned the fellow's master, the individual who he had come to the plague-covered daemon world of Bogblast to find.
    Lord Pneumatis, Ohim thought bitterly.  His oldest and greatest nemesis, who had once been a mere sergeant of the Death Guard Legion in the all but forgotten time before Horus had led his revolt, was now a notorious champion of the god of decay.  In the millenia since his humble beginning, he had almost completely cut his ties with Mortarion and the rest of the core Legion, taking with him a sizeable host of Death Guard Marines and using them to form the base of his own ever-growing warband.
    Then had come the first Black Crusade, when the Despoiler had called for all of the forces of Chaos to unite under his banner, that he might at last overthrow the Imperium and bring its wretched corpse-god to his knees.  Being forced to participate in battle on the same side as the hated Death Guard had been unpleasant enough, but Magnus, damn his single eye for it, had ordered Ohim to personally lead a contingent of Thousand Sons directly at their side.  Even with the two rival Legions united by the same cause, still the Cyclopean Primarch had found it impossible to trust the footmen hated Nurgle, and he had insisted that his own troops stay close enough to the Plague Marines to maintain a constant watch.
    Needless to say it had been an uneasy situation from the start, and as the "undivided" forces of Chaos had pushed ever deeper into Imperial space, the already great rift between the two Legions had grown exponentially wider.  Then, near to the end of the fateful Gogilmere campaign, when the combined forces of Chaos were on the verge of victory, the Death Guard warband under Lord Pneumatis' command, confident that they would be able to achieve victory even without the help of their erstwhile allies, turned their weapons on Ohim and his men.  Almost every Thousand Son present was killed in the unexpected assault.
    Ohim and the few survivors under his command managed to flee the planet.  They were successful in escaping for only two reasons; because the Death Guard Marines hunting them were in turn assaulted from behind by a massive Imperial counterstrike, and because they were aided in their endeavor a small warband of Night Lords under the command of Scharlec, an aspiring champion of the Legion.
    Because of Pneumatis' betrayal, not only were hundreds of Thousand Sons under Ohim's command lost, but so too was the battle for Gogilmere.  The Death Guard army alone was unable to exterminate the remainder of the planet's defenders, and the Plague Marines themselves were eventually forced to retreat as well, fleeing into the warp.  Magnus and the Despoiler himself had held Ohim responsible for the battle's loss as much so as Pneumatis, and he had been forced to flee from the Eye of Terror to escape their wrath.
    In light of those events, the Sorcerer had sworn by Tzeentch's name that the first chance he got, he would repay the betrayal a hundred times over, even if it took him the rest of his life to do so.  Dozens of times now he had tried to track down his enemy and vanquish him for good, and twice he had come close, only to have victory snatched away from him.
    But this time, things would be different.


    After making their way approximately two kilometres to the southeast, Benniel Ohim and his eight Rubric Marines finally began to gradually make their way out of the mirky water.  They ascended a gentle slope of muck and sludge, taking them from knee-level depths to what seemed like a vast island formed of mud and rot.
    The tainted earth below their armoured feet was greenish-black, covered in slimy algae and decomposed vegetation.  Every time one of them lifted a foot out of the deep sludge it produced a sickly wet sucking sound.  The smell was as disgusting as the sight of the place, too powerful to be tamed by even the air processing mechanisms in Ohim's hemlet.
    The inner part of the land mass was overgrown with things that were not quite plants, making it difficult to see more than ten metres in any direction.  At a glance they were akin to dead or dying trees, mottled grey and green in colour and rising up to about twice the Astartes' height.  They were narrow and brittle looking, relatively bare of branches and completely devoid of foliage.  Their long, sinewy roots, covered in mosses and lichens of various sickening shades, were barely contained by the slop from which they grew, forming a lattice over the earth that made traversing the area difficult at best.  They seemed to coil and writhe as the Thousand Sons moved through through them, belying a level of life that was contradictory to their dead appearance.
    Ohim used his mind to instruct his Rubric-cursed brethren to avoid these trees wherever possible.  Any simpler individual lacking the advantage of developed aether-sight would have taken them for nothing more than degenerate, diseased fauna, but the Sorcerer knew better.  He could sense the distinct warp traces emanating each of them that told him at once what they really were- vessels for daemonic entities.  He had never before encountered daemons that were physically bound in plants, rather than humanoids, but then, Bogblast was located in the Eye.  He had encountered stranger things in the rift.
    In addition to the daemon-trees, the island also hosted less prominent undergrowth.  Like black, tar-covered ferns, the smaller plants grew up from between the choking roots of the trees, laying accross them limply.  Ohim assumed that this was because the wet, sickly things were too heavy for their own rotting forms to maintain.  Through his enhanced senses he could tell that although they much like fauna in appearance, these too were more than met the eye, actually being more akin to fungus than actual plants and filling the air around them with contaminating spores.  Ohim knew instinctively that if he were a mortal man, and not a genetically bred Astartes in full power armour, these spores would quickly have proven lethal to him.
    As Ohim and his Rubric Marines made their way through the disgusting overgrowth, rain began to pour.  It came down from the twilit, grey-green skies of Bogblast without warning, falling in thick, viscous globules.  The moment the rainfall broke it was a downpour, a violent torrent bourn down on an equally sudden tempest of ferociously howling wind.  Like the tears of the planet itself they bombarded Ohim and his warriors, as well as everything around them, splattering loudly and disgorging overgrown colonies of verdigris-coloured microbes.
    Swampy and wet though it had already been, still the land surrounding the Thousand Sons drank deep of the violent monsoon.  The ferns seemed to right themselves, rising up in spite of the the bombardment they were receiving, reaching towards the heavens like blindly groping hands.
    The brittle looking trees began to twist and flail about unnaturally, the creaking of their brittle forms sounding akin to the howling cries of lamenting phantoms as it joined with the already dischordant cacophony.  Their bark began to break open in places, and from within fresh limbs began to sprout forth, as much so aetheric in composition as they were organic.
    'His garden is beginning to bloom,' muttered Ohim softly, looking around and taking in everything there was to see.  He didn't know why he said it- the thought had just popped into his mind and then out of his mouth.
    Suddenly apprehensive, he decided to pick up his pace.
    Heralded by the rain, then came the horde.
    Ohim and his accursed eight had made their way only twenty metres further when they came, pouring out from between the trees or digging their way up from hidden places beneath the lattice of roots.  Quantifiable only as Legion, they were wide-eyed, chattering little things, the largest of them coming to no higher than his knees.  They looked like pale, bile-coloured sacs of edematous flesh and disease-ridden filth made carnate, beset with manic, smiling faces.  They gnashed their rotten and discoloured and broke upon the Thousand Sons like a wave of congealed sewage.
    'Nurglings,' spat Ohim disgustedly as one of the chattering little daemons burst through the ground and grabbed his leg.  Its eyes were wide, giving it an ecstatic look, and as the Sorcerer gazed down at the horrible beastie he was suddenly overcome by a sense of vertigo that sickened him to his core.  He couldn't help but think that the scene looked like some sick parody of a child embracing a long-absent parent.
    With his free foot Ohim kicked the Nurgling loose from his leg, sending it flying back several metres to splatter unceremoniously against a wildly dancing daemon-tree.  At the same time he extended his consciousness more entirely into the hollow bodies of his Rubric brethren, at once guiding them to fight back the daemonic incursion.  Their bolters came to life simultaneously, barking their rage into the air around them in the form of a torrent of enchanted inferno bolts.
    Where each blue-wreathed bolt round struck there was an explosion, and such was the density of the enemy hordes that each detonation culminated in death.  All around them the Nurglings were slaughtered, their monstrous bodies being blown open and showering everything around them with pus and rotting slime.  Some of the bolt rounds went astray, impacting against the daemonic trees and shattering their brittle trunks, eliciting blood-curdling screams from the warp entities trapped within.
    Ohim became alive with the power of the warp.  His staff was glowing brightly in his hands as he spun it around him, pulsating with eldritch energies and instantly evaporating the hellish rain within metres of it.  With his every gesture he turned a half a dozen or more of the lesser daemons into crackling funeral pyres, screeching and popping as their diseased flesh began to sizzle and run from their bodies.
    Besides the first Nurgling that had grabbed hold of his leg, no others even got close to him.
    The aether-wrought flames that the Sorcerer spread were of such intensity that not even the filthy rain could douse them.  They engulfed the Nurglings in droves, then began to catch on the roots of the shrieking daemon trees.  He infused them with a life of their own, and soon the entire area was alight as the mighty inferno spread in every direction.  The lesser daemons were killed in dozens, while Ohim and his sealed tomb soldiers remained immune to the effects of the blaze.
    Yes!  Roared a violent voice in the back of Ohim's mind, one that was assuredly not his own.  That is the way!  Burn his foetid garden- burn it all to ash!
    'You'll have to do better than this, Pneumatis,' the Sorcerer growled, his voice carrying loudly through even the cacophonous din.
    Through the fire and the innumerable Nurglings he pressed on, his troops marching close on his heels.  Thick, oily black smoke filled the air, reducing visibility, but to Ohim it mattered naught.  He and his Thousand Sons continued to cut a mighty swathe through all that stood before them with the fire of sorcery and bolters alike, unhindered by anything that stood in their path.

    Lord Pneumatis had served the Great Lord of Decay for what most would consider time immemorial.  He had served him unerringly, happily sacrificing the lives of allies and enemies alike in his name, and spreading his magnificent diseases to all corners of the galaxy for ten millenia.  He had earned much favour from his master in that time, and although he was not yet thought of in such high regards as Typhus or the Primarch, he had nevertheless been bountifully gifted for his servitude.  Not only had the Unclean Ones gifted him with mastery of some of the most potent plagues their sire had ever brewed, but they had also given to him this magnificent world in its entirety.
    Perhaps it was not the most prominent of planets situated within the Eye, but Bogblast suited Lord Pneumatis quite adequately nevertheless.  Having already been home to myriad gardens of unparalelled stagnant beauty at the time it had been gifted to him, Pneumatis had since helped Bogblast to grow even more.  He had, over countless centuries now gone, started to develope a bond with the planet.  It had become more of a vessel to him than a home.  What it saw, he saw.  What it felt, he felt.  When its gardens bloomed and its power waxed, so too did his own.
    So it was that when Coliira came before him in the walled inner gardens to inform him that the Mites of Nurgle were being rapidly overrun by the impudent Sorcerer and his drones that they had been sent to slow, and the blossoming gardens of Bogblast were being scorched and burned, the Plague Champion was not at all surprised.  How could he have been?  After all, the attack was tantamount to an attack on Pneumatis himself.
    'I simply don't understand it,' Coliira was saying.  'They are only nine, and only one amongst them even has the capacity of thought.  How then can they kill so many of the mites so quickly, and at no cost to themselves?  We have fought the Thousand Sons before.  They are difficult to kill, but not indestructible.'
    'He is no simple aspiring Sorcerer,' droned Pneumatis disconcertedly.  'Benniel Ohim is...  One in a Thousand.  He has ever been my greatest rival, and perhaps now you see why that is?  But it is of little concern.  He burns my gardens?  He slays the progeny of the Unclean Ones?  It is a pity, but when all of this has concluded, it shall not have mattered.  The garden will grow once again, more beautifully than ever.  The Nurglings shall be reborn, tenfold in their number.'
    'And you shall have ascended,' said Coliira reverently, nodding his head.  His bug-like eyes were wide, and his cracked and blackened lips were smiling broadly.
    'Indeed.  So they have promised me, and so shall it be.  In fact, Coliira, the time is very close at hand now- closer than even you could realize.  I can already feel the change, the merger of what was and what is to be.  It is time we called off the mites- I will not have my dear old friend Ohim miss the pleasantries.  He is my honoured guest, after all.'
    'What of the others, my lord?  What of the ones whose armour have become their tombs?  Surely you do not wish for them to be present?  They might represent a liability of sorts, and their pitiful souls are surely not worthy of such an honour.'
    'Them?'  Pneumatis laughed, legitimately amused by his vassal's concern with the pitiful Rubric Marines.  'They are hardly worthy of consideration.  But I suppose, if it suits your fancy to do so, you and the other brethren may see to it that they are...  Taken care of.  Just remember.  No harm is to befall the Sorcerer- he belongs to me.  He simply...  Doesn't know it yet.'
    'As my lord wills,' replied Coliira with a slight bow.  Saying nothing more, the Plague Marine turned and walked away.  Pneumatis watched him go, smiling to himself as the lesser Marine left the inner garden.
    When Coliira was gone, the plague lord turned his attention to a particular tree, situated at nearly the center of his sanctum.  It was three times Pneumatis' own height, and unnaturally thick.  Its bark was blackish brown and covered in slick, protruding veins, and it was beset with countless unblinking eyes that focused solely on him, glaring hatefully.  Fungal growths of immeasurable diversity covered the tree as well, pulsating as though they were breathing.  A small section of ceramite could be seen partways up the trunk of the tree, dark lapis lazuli in colour and covered with an ever-moving veil of cascading lightning.
    Looking at the unsightly tree, Pneumatis' smile grew wider.  'Well now, Scharlec,' he said with amusement.  'It seems that soon, you'll finally have some worthy company.'
    Pneumatis laughed a deep, heartfelt belly laugh that resounded through the inner sanctum of his vast, blooming gardens, louder than the raging strom and echoing into the night.

    The swarms of Nurglings had ceased their assaults, only to be replaced by worthier adversaries.  Even as the last of the chattering daemons charging the Thousand Sons were consumed by Ohim's flames, the Sorcerer became aware of the Plague Marines, slogging through the trees towards their position.  Through the warp he sensed them, their corrupt signatures far too familiar to be mistaken.
    Bolter fire filled the air.  Daemon trees, many of them still burning with aetheric flame, were exploded from within by detonating rounds, shattering like ceramic.  Through his psychic connection to them, Ohim felt the impacts of the bolts against the armour of his Rubric Marines, jarring them but not penetrating their sealed forms.  Bolts intended for the Sorcerer himself fizzled out of existence like burning flies upon contact with the aetheric shield that he raised instantly arround himself the moment the enemy guns came to life.
    As the Death Guard Astartes slowly but steadily encroaching upon them expelled their hail of ammunition into the air, the Thousand Sons returned their fire, guided by Ohim's all-encompasing consciousness.  Between the torrential rain, the violent crossfire of bolter ammunition, the towering walls of flames, and the debris of ruined fauna being scattered in every direction, the battlefield became all but eclipsed to the naked eye.  The mounting din became nearly deafening as every individual noise blurred together with the next, making it all but impossible to discern individual sounds.
    In the corner of his mind Ohim was aware of one of the Plague Marines coming close enough to engage one of his Thousand Sons brethren directly.
    He was a particularly bloated fellow with no helmet over his head, whose mottled black and white skin was embedded with various ribbed, translucent tubules, conducting some kind of dark, viscous fluid between different areas of his body.  His bile-coloured armour, which was adorned with hanging sheets of rancid, fly-covered meat, had been broken and cracked over the centuries, having since been shoddily repaired with welded plates and crisscrossing finger bones.  His eyes were entirely black and seemed to pop from their sockets, granting him a distinctly insectoid appearance.
    The bug-eyed Death Guard lifted up his ancient, heavily corroded boltgun, then brought it down hard against the face of the Rubric Marine he was locking up with, knocking the mindless fellow back several steps.  The force of the blow belied such strength as the Astarte's rotten form did not suggest.  Even as the unbalanced Thousand Son began to right himself, his attacker began to fire at him once more, riddling him point blank with an inescapable barrage of bolt rounds that carried him off of his feet and to the ground in seconds flat.
    Ohim wanted to turn his own efforts to the duel, to save his bested, erstwhile battle-brother, but he could not.  The Plague Marines were too many, and coming in too fast.  Even as the bug-eyed fellow brought down his foot on the chest of the fallen Thousand Son, preventing any chance of him righting himself, his comrades continued to encroach from all sides.  For every two that were incinerated from the inside out by the Sorcerer's fire, three more drew into proximity to begin bringing close combat weapons to bear.
    The bug-eyed Plague Marine lifted the power-armoured foot he had been using to pin the Rubric Marine for only a fraction of a second, then stomped down hard.  He did so with such force that when his boot impacted against the hapless Thousand Son, it cracked the ceramite plates over his pectoral region and shattered the stylized, scarab-shaped seals adorning it in the process.  Without pause the assailant stomped again, and this time the cracked armour of the Rubric Marine caved in completely, allowing the ancient dust and air trapped within to be released and effectively killing the Thousand Son.
    Ohim howled at the loss of one of his brethren.  They no longer numbered the holy nine, reduced now to eight, but there was no time for him to grieve over this fact.  The enemy was directly upon the remaining warriors now, and already he had guided his drones to throw down their bolters and bring their giant, ancient chainswords to bear.  He had hoped to avoid fighting in close quarters, but it seemed that now there was no longer any choice left to him.
    Even as the Sorcerer immolated two Death Guards with aetheric flames and turned to face the bug-eyed warrior, seven more Plague Marines surrounded two of his Thousand Sons along the party's left flanks.  Some tackled the Rubric Marines, while others waited with their own close combat weapons in hand for an open chance to strike.  They carried antiquated, moss-ridden chainswords and oversized daggars, corroded almost beyond the point of being functional and dripping with poison, which they used to lay into the sealed armour of the vastly outnumbered Thousand Sons.  They aimed for joints or assaulted the protruding facets of sealing mechanisms, chipping away at the heavily fortified, enchanted suits of armour one bit at a time.
    Ohim leapt at the bug-eyed Plague Marine with his brightly glowing force staff held high overhead, his teeth clenched with anger.  His target saw him coming and began to move, but he was too slow- even as he began to take a step backwards and level his bolter at his prey, already the power-wreathed staff was upon him.  It took him in the neck, snapping his spine and burning away every inch of flesh it came in contact with.  His oversized eyes quite literally popped from their sockets now, rolling down over his face and then tearing away from the bundles of maggot-infested nerves that trailed after them, then falling with a wet splat against the mucky ground below.
    The body of the Plague Marine had not yet finished falling to the ground when Ohim felt two more of his Rubric Marines, those who had been ambushed along the squad's left flanks, simultaneously snuffed out.  As his own consciousness had been extended into them, he felt a  very small but very real pain inflicted against his own inner self as what was left of their life force vanished.  It wouldn't have been far from the truth to say that when he lost one of his Rubric brethren while infusing his own mind into them, a small portion of his own soul was lost as well, ripped away past the ramparts of reality and into the empyrean beyond.
    One of the remaining Rubric Marines severed the helmeted head of a Death Guard warrior and opened the belly of another with one impressive slash of his chainsword, the blow cleaving through a gaping crack in the power armour of the latter and spilling forth a wave of rotting guts infested with eyeless, skittering white centipedes.  The warrior's pus-covered entrails were still looping towards the earth below, however, when his killer was in turn pulled from his feet by a snaking, vine-like root contracting around his ankle.
    The Thousand Son dropped his chainsword as the root dragged him towards a howling daemon-tree, one that was yet burning with Ohim's aetheric fire.  The blooming phantom branches of the smoldering tree immediately began to wrap around the Rubric Marine, entangling him completely.  They pulled him into a tight embrace and began constricting so tightly that the mystic seals of his armour began to break apart, releasing the cursed soul within.
    Meanwhile, the second of the two Plague Marines that the Thousand Son had assaulted kept on moving, apparently unphased by the displacement of his entrails, which were even now were hanging from his opened belly.  He lifted up his weapon, what appeared to be a rune-covered broadsword that had long since gone to rust and become overgrown with webs of fungus, then brought the defiled blade down hard from behind against the shoulder joint of another Thousand Son.  The Thousand Son, already engaged in a duel of clashing, sparking chainswords with two other Death Guard Marines, was taken unaware, and the runic blade cleaved through the joint of his power armour as it would through warm fat.
    Although they fought with impressive tenacity and cold precision, the Thousand Sons were quite simply outnumbered and outgunned.  There were too many of the Death Guard warriors, and the entire daemon planet seemed to be fighting at their side.  Ohim himself was a force to be reckoned with, but even he had limits to his capabilities.  Soon the numbers of his squad had dwindled to only two- himself and one single Rubric Marine, who he psychically guided in towards him, so that they could fight back to back.
    Even as the last surviving warrior of his Thousand Sons reached his position, an entombed soul who had once been known as Brother Taritrus before the tragedy of Ahriman's Rubric, the advance of the Plague Marines suddenly ceased.  The stragglers still directly engaged remained on the battlefield, but reinforcements from beyond halted completely.  The Death Guard warriors left were less than half a dozen in number, and the raging of the daemon trees seemed to be calming as well.
    Ohim made short work of the remaining Plague Marines, using his psychic abilities to explode them from within and adding the ensuing flames to the still raging inferno burning all around him.  Then the only beings who remained alive on the corpse-strewn battlefield, besdies those daemon trees that yet remained, were himself and Taritrus.
    The torrential downpour continued with as much force as ever.  To Ohim it acted as a reminder, that although the battle was won, the war was far from over.
    Stepping through the flames, Ohim made his way past the disease-ridden corpses of Plague Marines and the scattered, empty armour of his own fallen Thousand Sons.  He marched on with Taritrus at his side, and as he did, he grew increasingly confident that at last, his querry awaited him just ahead.

    As far as Ohim could tell, the inner gardens of his nemesis were arrayed in multiple, concentric circles.  Each one was differentiated from the previous one by the diversity and the level of decomposition displayed by its fauna.
    The daemonic trees were present throughout each of the garden's circles, but the closer to the center the Thousand Sons came, the larger and more terrible they grew.  Some of them were covered randomly in eyes or mouths, or even humanoid limbs, and each of them seemed more conscious than the last.
    The ferns also grew larger as Ohim drew closer to the center of his enemy's gardens, taking on all sorts of pale, sickly shades.  Each of them was covered in a unique pattern of diseased scarring and parasitic growths.  
    Also occupying the beds of the inner gardens were tall, thick blades of grass the colour of excrement, the stalks of which were pocked with open wounds that appeared to secrete some kind of dark, microbe-infested pus.  As Ohim and Taritrus made their way through these, crushing them into slime beneath the weight of their power armour as they went, the sickly stalks seemed to recoil from the presence of the intruders, bending away from them as far as their frail forms could manage.
    Then the two Thousand Sons came upon a large stone wall, one that looked to be circular in shape, running off into the distance.  It was an ancient looking structure, built from blocks of weathered, crumbling granite that were covered in wet, dripping vines, thick layers of shaggy moss, and polychromatic fungal growths that seemed as though they were breathing.  The diversified plants infesting the structure ran so deep into its cracks that the whole thing resembled a reef more than an actual wall.
    There was no opening leading through the wall into the inner gardens anywhere in the vicinity, and rather than wasting time looking for one, Ohim lifted his force staff and made his own door.  A colossal section of the towering partition was instantly blown inwards, slabs of fractured granite being displaced and burning amalgams of fauna showering the ground, revealing Pneumatis' innermost garden.
    As he and Taritrus walked through the opening in the wall, Ohim saw innumerous, highly diversified flowers of such putrescence that it churned his stomach to look on them.  Thorny flesh-tone stems that culminated in human eyeballs were festooned with dripping strands of unidentifiable rotting matter as though it were decorative tinsel.  Daemon trees stood towering far over him that were formed almost entirely from aether now, these overgrown with long, dark brown, ivy-like creepers that sprouted leaves shaped like skeletal hands and berries that looked like curled tongues.  Running between the various flowerbeds were thin streams of tarry black fluid that looked to be some kind of thoroughly decayed mucilaginous sap.
    The Lord of Decay, thought Ohim disgustedly.  He lacks the imagination of the Changer of Ways, and attempts to make up for it with sheer putrescense.
    The Sorcerer continued to walk, guiding Taritrus to fall in ahead of him.  It wouldn't take them long now to reach the center of the inner garden, and if there was anything unpleasant awaiting them- which he couldn't doubt was the case- he wanted the Rubric Marine to encounter it first, to take the fall for him.
    At last they came within sight of the center of the garden.  There was a single tree there, centered in a small clearing, more terrible to behold than even the others that filled the garden.  The very sight of it filled Ohim with an unexplainable sense of familiarity, and after a second his skin began to tingle.
    He didn't allow his gaze to linger on the phantom tree for very long, however, for less than ten metres to its side, was his ancient adversary in the flesh.
    Pneumatis was warped almost beyond recognition.  He stood facing Ohim with a warm, welcoming smile.  He wore no helmet, and the Sorcerer guessed that no helmet would have been likely to fit him anyway, as his head and neck had come ridiculously bulbous, made up of overflowing rolls of slimy, near-translucent fat covered in seeping pustules.  His eyes, pushed together by the corpulence of his own face, were incredibly narrow, lacking irises and covered instead with dozens of tiny, fluctuating pupils.
    Several small black tubules ran out from brazen housings in his throat and his bald, wart-covered head, leading into cracks in his power armour all over his body.  They conducted some kind of fluid through his body that hissed out from the tubes' infinitesimal imperfections as dark, poisonous steam.
    Pneumatis' bile-coloured ceramite plates, from which most of the original Death Guard heraldry had long since been corroded, was broken open all over, giving it a overly piecemeal appearance. Globs of pallid flesh beset with thick webs of black vericose veins oozed through its myriad cracks, edematous and and infested with disease.
    The slick white hands of the Champion of Plagues were uncovered by gauntlets, and each of them branched off into well over a dozen thick, segmented fingers that rapidly twitched like the legs of skittering centipedes.
    Hundreds of techno-organic cables grouped together into larger bundles, consisting of everything from ribbed black tubing to thorny, decomposing vines, ran from Pneumatis' sides and back.  They extended down from his body and into the earth below, as though connecting him to the land itself.  The overall impression that Ohim got from this was of a puppet on strings, only inverted, so the strings hung below him instead of the other way around.  What possible function these could serve, the Sorcerer was not yet ready to guess.
    'My dear old friend,' said the foul avatar of Nurgle, his smug voice a colossal boom that seemed to radiate out from everywhere in the garden.  'You've come to visit me after all this time- how very touching.'
    He likes to talk, came the voice in the back of Ohim's mind that wasn't his own.  They all like of them do, the servants of wretched Nurgle.  It is one of their weaknesses.  Exploit it.
    Ohim said nothing, and nor did he move, instead guiding Taritrus to begin creeping around to the left.  He hoped to occupy Pneumatis' attention enough to allow the Rubric Marine to get around to his side, so that he could lay down fire from two directions at once.
    'To be honest,' the Plague Marine champion continued, 'I was beginning to wonder whether you would even bother to show.  I shouldn't have doubted you though- you've never let me down before.  Besides, our mutual friend here was simply dying to see you.'
    'Mutual friend?' Ohim asked, taking a few slow, casual steps towards his enemy.  He didn't like the idea of making conversation with the bloated creature that had once been Pneumatis, but he was willing to do so to ensure that Taritrus had an opportunity to get into position undetected.  'Enlighten me, slave to the rot god- to what friend do you refer?'
    'Why, Scharlec of course.'  As he spoke the name, Pneumatis feigned genuine shock, his wart-covered brow furling in some pitiful mockery of surprise, as though it should have been the most obvious thing in the world.
    'Scharlec,' Ohim repeated slowly, as though tasting the name in his mouth.
    Of course he was familiar with the name, although he hadn't heard it mentioned in well over a millenium.  Scharlec had been the leader of a small warband of Astartes from the Night Lords Legion.  He and some of his troops had been present on Gogilmere during the first Black Crusade, when Pneumatis had first turned his forces against Ohim and his Thousand Sons.  If not for the assistance of the Night Lord, the odds were that he and his few surviving battle-brothers would not have made it off of the planet alive.
    'Do you not recognize him?' goaded the former Death Guard.  When Ohim didn't respond, the monster gestured towards the single, abominable tree growing in the center of the clearing.  The Sorcerer followed the gesture with his eyes, and when he realized what Pneumatis meant, he couldn't help but scowl.
    Indeed, the lone tree that occupied the approximate center of the plague champion's garden, which he had initially thought of as feeling quite familiar, had once been an Astartes of the Night Lords.  Now that he knew what to look for, Ohim was easily able to recognize the familiar spirit that glowed so dimly from within its place of entrapment, deep inside of the swollen and monstrous daemon tree.
    'You trapped him in a tree,' spat the Sorcerer, not bothering to conceal the distaste in his voice.
    'Trapped him in-?' Pneumatis cut off for a second, acting as though he were deep in contemplation.  'Is that all you see?  I'd have expected better from you, Ohim.  By the way- did you really think I was going allow your pet to flank my position?'
    Before Ohim could even reply, the ground beneath Taritrus' boots came to life.  It all happened so suddenly that there was no way the slow Rubric Marine could escape the trap.  Dozens of vines and roots beneath the brown, mossy pads erupted upwards, springing forth from the ground like a nest full of vipers striking in unison.  They rapidly entwined themselves around the Thousand Son's power armour, snaking up his body and wrapping him from ankle to neck in a second's time.  The creepers were covered not only in sharpened thorns, but also in openings containing bleary, pus-covered eyes and sharp toothed mouths that sprouted lapping, forked tongues.
    Seeing that whatever advantage the Rubric Marine might have offered him was now lost and not wanting to compromise the situation any further, Ohim leapt into action.  He charged towards Pneumatis, twirling his glowing force staff at his side so fast that to anyone besides himself it would have surely looked like nothing more than a blur.
    Even as he felt Taritrus' power armour being pulled apart in every direction by the vines and his faint, cursed soul evacuating it, Ohim came within suitable range of his adversary to leap at him, drawing his staff back over his right shoulder for a mighty swing.
    'Too slow,' mocked Pneumatis nonchalantly, grabbing Ohim's staff with both hands as he brought it down, then using it as leverage to kill the Sorcerer's momentum and force him to the ground.
    Ohim grunted with the force of the impact.  He immediately infuriated, unable to recall the last time an opponent had successfully pit him on his back.  Immediately he discharged a mighty blast of aetheric energy through his staff, searing the plague champion's hands where they still grasped it and melting their edematous tissues enough for him to pull the force weapon free.
    That much energy would have incinerated most men, he thought to himself as he rolled away from his position on the ground and then sprang to his feet off to Pneumatis' side.  The Lord of Decay protects him closely, it seems.
    Ohim swung his staff horizontally at the Pneumatis' ribs, aiming to impact his torso from behind.  Pneumatis began to turn, the massive heft of his form being bourn up not by his legs, but instead by the vines and tubes that ran from his body into the ground below.  This time he was too slow, however, and Ohim channeled another blast of psychic energy through the blunt surface of his weapon as it impacted.  The force of the blow shattered several of the piecemeal chunks of Pneumatis' power armour and cracked several more, causing them to fall away from his body and allowing huge sections of the pale, veiny tissue beneath to balloon outwards, sizzling as it did.
    The plague champion reached out to grab the staff at his side, but by the time his hand arrived Ohim had already retracted it and was leaping away to a safer distance.  However, when the Sorcerer's boots hit the ground, before he could even secure his footing, more of the slithering vines broke through the earth and began looping around his feet and ankles.  With unthinkable speed they began to constrict themselves, while at the same time snaking into every joint and opening they could find, trying to pry his apart his armour as they had done to Taritrus'.
    Intoning an ancient curse in the name of the Lord of Change, Ohim drew forth the power of the warp and channeled it into his power armour.  While on the inside the ceramite plates became cool to the touch, on the outside they burst into brilliant white-blue flames, transforming him into a fiery avatar of combustion.  He blazed like some mythical phoenix, incinerating the vines at his feet instantly and causing the wounded, sizzling creepers to which they had been connected to recoil away from him, shrieking from their countless daemonic mouths like wounded infants.
    Knowing that the dated and imperfect spell would not last indefinately and not wanting to waste the brief moment of empowerment it offered him, Ohim charged at Pneumatis once more.  If he had been quick before, he was like lightning now, unleashing an impressive volley of blows against his adversary.  The strength of his assault was slightly diminished, but the effect was more than countered by the sheer number of hits he was able to get off.  His staff, which had itself become a billowing, barely contained inferno, smacked Pneumatis twice in his right shoulder and accross his ribs on either side, blackening his grotesque flesh wherever it protruded from his cracked armour.
    Ohim raked the fiery weapon hard against his rival's neck.  The globular, gelatinous fat of Pneumatis' neck opened up deep as it began to run down in waves, bubbling and sizzling all the while.  The force staff sank into the rancid mess very quickly, and before Ohim could withdraw it to strike another blow, the Plague Marine's wound began to close around.
    Slick black beetle-like insects pouring out of Pneumatis' wound swarmed around the staff, apparrently immune to the effects of its fire, somehow smothering the infernal blaze as they went.  They washed over it like a seething tide, quickly followed by blossoming globs of regenerative tissue that sprang up from their host's wide throat.
    Before Ohim could react they had begun to scuttle down the length of his moored weapon, many of them falling off as they were pushed aside by the rest of the relentlessly clamoring swarm.  They continued to extinguish his fire as they went, and rather than allowing the swarm to overtake him as well, the Sorcerer let go of the staff and took several steps back.  He muttered an obscenity as the ancient weapon fell to the ground, covered in the shiny beetles and globs of Pneumatis' oozy runoff.
    His concentration having been broken by the loss of his weapon, Ohim's armour returned to its normal state, the fire that had enveloped it vanishing into hissing, sinewy curls of oily black smoke.
    'I was wondering if you were going to actually fight,' laughed Pneumatis.  'Not that it matters now- you're too late to stop anything.  My ascension is at hand at last, and you are here to bear witness to it.  You know, Sorcerer, I find it amusing.  Although you are the servant of the Changer of Ways, you have remained almost exactly the same since the day I made your accquaintance; while I, who am forever devoted to the glorious Master of Stagnance, have continued to grow, forever evolving beyond what I once was.  Is such irony not amusing to you as well?'
    Although Pneumatis' wound had mostly closed up, it was still bleeding the swarm of insects as a mortal man's neck might spray arterial blood.  They swarmed all over him now, moving in every direction over the surface of his body.  They flooded into his gaping, laughing mouth, climbed up his abhorrently flared nostrils and behind his squinty eyes, and flowed like little rivers into the openings and cracks in his armour.  The Plague Marine quickly became eclipsed by the ever flowing tide, and as he was, his form began to change, growing upwards and outwards at an alarming rate.
    He is becoming something far worse than he already is, warned the voice that wasn't Ohim's.  He is becoming a Daemon Prince- you must slay him now, or there will be no stopping him.  You must not let his ascension come to pass!
    Willing to sacrifice no more time than he already had, Ohim dove for the ruined remains of Taritrus' tomb armour, which had already become partly submerged in the mossy soil and was yet entangled by vines and roots.  He grabbed up the fallen Rubric Marine's chainsword as he rolled to his knees beside it, tearing it free from the rotting vegetation that was clinging to it, then sprang back to his feet.  Even as he was righting his equilibrium he broke into a charge, having already thumbed the massive weapon's activation rune.  Its buzzing teeth howled for blood and vengeance, flinging off the decayed remains of rotten vegetation that had clung to it and trailing wisps of grey smoke.
    The form of Pneumatis had already swollen to twice its previous volume.  Pale yellowish pus oozed out from between the scuttling swarm of beetles encompassing him, large globs of which dripped to the ground below, hissing as they burnt through mounds of fungus and moss like acid.  The veinous cables connecting Pneumatis to the earth below had broken free now and were whipping about like monstrous tendrils, sputtering blackish-green fluid the consistancy of sewage.
    Ohim leapt into the air, struggling to reach as he swung the chainsword.  With a sickeningly wet sound the teeth of the blade cut through a large protrusion of insects and ooze, spattering him with rancid fluid as what the Sorcerer assumed to be an arm was severed.  He came down hard on his feet about two metres past Pneumatis' back, landing in a crouch but quickly standing back up and turning on his heel to face his opponent.
    Already the hive of beetles had begun to bulge back out from where he had severed the daemonic being's arm, as though regenerating the limb beneath alarmingly fast.  He could feel the acidic pus that had dribbled on his armour hissing as it began to corrode it, and his chainsword too was beginning to smolder.  He knew that he had precious little time left to finish Pneumatis, and for the first time in his memory, he could feel desperation sinking in.
    As Pneumatis turned to face him, the momentum of his spin tossing countless skittering beetles from his form, Ohim charged at him once more.  He stabbed his chainsword out towards the area where he believed the Plague Marine's primary heart would still be located, and it buried itself deep, as though meeting with no resistance.  However, when he tried retract the howling weapon, he found it to be lodged, and himself unable to jar it loose.
    With a curse he let go of the chainsword, then tried to take a step backwards as it sank into the mass of ooze and insects, becoming completely eclipsed from his sight.  He was too slow to retreat, however, and Pneumatis reached out with his dozens of flailing pipe-tendrils, wrapping them tightly around Ohim's torso and using them to draw him into a crushing bear-hug.  He felt the pus and beetles encompassing Pneumatis expand to cover his own power armour entirely, causing it to creak with strain under the immense pressure.
    In a desperate attempt to break free he used the power of the aether to send brilliant balls of flame emanating out from himself in every direction.  He could sense them searing through the tides of insects and the corpulent, ever-swelling flesh of his adversary, and although they managed to burn loose some of the cables binding him, many still remained.
    Too little too late, he thought bitterly.
    The last thing Ohim was consciously aware of was swarms of beetles finding their way through newly-formed cracks in his armour, trickling in on a river of hissing pus.  They began to cover the entirety of his body, singular of mind and purpose, then flow unrelentingly into the orifices of his body.
    Everything went dark.

    Slowly, painfully, Ohim began to return to consciousness.  His ears were ringing, his head was pounding.  Faintly he could feel his body, but he couldn't move it.  It felt as though he were weighed down by some enormous mass.
    He opened his eyes, but his vision was terribly blurred.  He saw something ahead of him- a tree, it looked like.  A very hideous, monstrous tree.  He thought that he had seen it before, but he wasn't quite sure.  As he squinted at it, trying to make it out more clearly, a name popped into his head.
    'Scharlec,' he tried to say, but his mouth was filled with some kind of growths, and the word came out as little more than a muffled grunt.  The very act of speaking seemed to cause him immense pain, so intense that he body tried to seize up, but it couldn't- it was completely immobile.
    He reached out with his mind, trying to tap into the aether and use it to fortify himself, but he couldn't- it was as though the warp wasn't even there.  This too caused him pain, of a very different sort.
    'To torture a fly you remove its wings,' came an overly familiar voice that instantly filled Ohim with rage and hatred.  'To torture a spider, remove its legs.  To torture a Thousand Son...'
    Although Ohim's vision simply refused to clear up, he nevertheless became aware of the towering form of the being who had once been his oldest rival, standing just aways back from the daemonic tree containing Scharlec.
    'To torture a Thousand Son,' repeated the daemonic being, 'You take away its magick.  Which, as I'm sure you've noticed, I have done.'
    'Pneumatis,' hissed Ohim, his pain now second to his outrage.
    'Pneumatis?' repeated the Daemon Prince distastefully.  'Pneumatis...  Such a mortal sounding name, wouldn't you say?  A name with implicit confines to it.  Confines which I have now, at long last, transcended.  A new body, a new soul, a new being...  I think I shall take for myself a new name, as well.  Like this world, with which I have literally become one, I too shall be called...  Bogblast.'
    The Daemon Prince was twice as tall as he had been when he was Pneumatis, and twice as bloated too.  Although Ohim could make out precious few of the details, he could tell that he still retained the mess of pipes and tubes that had once connected him to the world whose namesake he now took.  He appeared to have three arms, and his mottled flesh was covered in moving black spots that the Sorcerer assumed to be beetles.
    'How?' moaned Ohim, after trying and failing once more to elicit movement in his extremities.
    'How?  Very simple, actually.  Perhaps you could ask my other dear guest here- he knows.'  In so saying, the Daemon Prince gestured towards the horrific tree that contained Scharlec.  As it dawned on Ohim that what had been done to the Night Lord was now being done to him, he was overcome by horror.
    'You had thought before that I had trapped him within a tree,' Bogblast went on, his tone sickeningly warm and paternal.  'That is not quite accurate, however.  You see, I spent a few centuries studying with the Obliterator Cults, sometime around the Tenth Crusade I think it was.  With the help of a certain apothecary of notorious repute, and of course the patronage of my master, the Great Lord of Decay, I was eventually able to derive a new strain of contagion from the infamous Obliterator Virus.
    'I have christened this new virus the Paragenesis Strain.  It has completely changed Scharlec's genetic code, merging his own human strands with the genes of specimens taken from the Garden of Nurgle itself, much as the original Obliterator Virus causes flesh to merge with technology.  A masterfully ingenious stroke of engineering to say the absolute least, I do admit.
    'You thought that Scharlec had been trapped inside a tree?  How obtusely simple-minded, Ohim- I would have expected more from a Thousand Son!  It seems that your imagination has grown stagnant over the years.
    'Oh, and let me not fail to mention, in case you haven't figured it out yet.  Like Scharlec here, you too have now been infected it.'
    'Please,' forced Ohim, so unnaturally terrified by the detestable concept that he was even willing to plead with his most hated enemy.  'Kill me...  Just let me die...'
    'Now why would you want to die, Ohim?  Such a terrible request to make of me!  When you have been gifted this rare honour, of living forever within the sanctity of my magnificent garden?  I could never let you die!  After all, we are old friends, aren't we?'
    Bogblast's began to laugh heartily, his deep and resonant voice jubilent as it echoed through his inner garden and out accross his namesake world.  The Sorcerer became aware of other voices laughing as well, those of the Daemon Prince's Death Guard warriors, who had stayed out of their lord's final duel but come now to bask in his greatest victory.
    When his garden waxes, came the alien voice with which Ohim had become quite familiar over the years, there is precious little that can be done to hold it back, and even when it does recede, always it is only after it has drank deep of his enemies' holdings.  You have failed us, Benniel.  You have failed the Changer of Ways, and so this shall be your fate- given over to His enemy for all of time.
    Benniel Ohim tried to scream, but by then it was too late.  His mouth had ceased to function, leaving him silenced for ever more.