The thin veil of reality on the Plague Planet was torn asunder in an instant. A massive, brownish-green hand—covered in pustules, ulcerations, and slime—reached out from behind the splintered reality toward Mortarion, who stood opposite the girl. "Grandfather?!" Mortarion let out a cry of shock.
Turbid, decayed, and festering miasma rapidly enveloped him layer by layer, dragging his existence back toward that putrid domain. He was pulled deep into the Garden of Nurgle. The girl did not interfere; she simply took a light, almost airy step forward. As the arm of the Plague God whisked Mortarion away, the fractured reality began to attempt a closure. Nurglings, lesser daemons, and Great Unclean Ones within the garden shrieked as they wove spells, trying to heal the rift and hide the Garden once more in the deepest reaches of the Warp.
They failed. Flame, like the solar prominences of a dying star, ignited out of thin air. The girl's golden eyes burned hot and bright, reflecting the Garden of Nurgle within them. Reality itself began to burn, disintegrate, and tear. Daemons shrieked in terror as she took another step. Her form instantly bypassed the barrier between reality and the Warp, entering the realm of corruption.
Dying flowers bloomed; a viscous carpet of mycelium served as the ground; trees with gaping maws spat out foul digestive juices. Winding paths were flanked by swarms of buzzing flies and brambles swaying with sores. Yellowed lawns struggled to grow from the fungal mats, their grass blades groaning and snarling like rusted knives in the lazy, stinking breeze. A dream of rot and rebirth, rebirth and rot, distilled constantly into the thick fog that never lifted from this vast garden, carrying disease and plague to every corner of this teeming yet eternally decaying land.
But when the girl's pristine, dust-free feet lightly touched the ground, a patch of pure clarity appeared in the filthy world. Fire erupted, incinerating the creatures of the realm. The corrupt mycelium turned to ash; the Maw-trees were swallowed by flames; howling solar flares tore through the winding paths. A circle of scorched earth expanded from the girl as its center, sweeping out in all directions.
The eternally giggling Nurglings could finally no longer endure the terror; they shrieked and wept. The Garden of Nurgle began to quake. The rivers of filth that never ran dry began to evaporate. The never-dying shamblers found eternal rest. For the first time, hatred appeared in this realm of eternal unity, harmony, and symbiosis.
It was hatred born of disease. Every soul ravaged by sickness wailed in agony. Bacteria sowed themselves in their bodies; viruses tore through their cells; cancer cells plundered the nutrients of their frames. Blood boiled, nerves burned, muscle rotted, and skin sloughed off. Pain stretched every moment into an eternity; every second of torture felt like forever. Even death became a precious liberation.
The brown-haired girl slowly raised an arm. That hatred transformed into bright solar prominences that surged forth, lashing like whips against the very fabric of the Garden's existence. A rift of interwoven black and red instantly tore the sky of Nurgle's Garden, and a boundless rain of fire poured from the crack, landing in every corner.
The Garden was burning.
The branches of the Boxwood trees shook violently. Gratitude for abundance surged from the sustenance supporting the Garden. Floods of nutrients erupted; rice sprouted from the ground out of nothing; torrential rain manifested as the Boxwood branches swayed. A Great Unclean One known as the Rain-Father murmured rain-calling spells, prayers, and incantations gathered from countless races and beings since antiquity. Countless Nurgle daemons followed suit, performing various rain-dances and chanting similar mantras. Those most earnest desires for harvest, fertility, and rainfall were unleashed, attempting to seal the rift in the heavens.
The Plague God's immense, nearly infinite power was summoned. One of the Seven Facets of the Plague Father manifested through the Rain-Father. Multi-headed livestock wailed in labor; deformed offspring were birthed only to melt into the black, viscous earth. The entire land twitched like a newborn beast. Thick, syrupy rain fell on the earth, slick as a layer of caul. Wheat and grain grew infinitely, stitching everything back together into an idol of bounty, generosity, and harvest, nested within the Rain-Father. He raised the Boxwood branches high, surging toward the torn sky.
But the girl simply raised her other arm. It was still hatred—hatred for corruption. Every being suffering under decay wept. The grain grew fungus; toxins eroded the food; roof beams became loose and damp. Under the boundless rain of corruption, life itself seemed to rot. The abundance of yesterday was turned into barrenness by the passage of time; the stored harvest became foul-smelling sludge. Livestock died during birth, their bodies riddled with maggots.
The Rain-Father's Boxwood branches were ignited. The prolific livestock wailed in their death throes. The wheat was burned to ash, leaving the fertile earth a vast expanse of white. That facet of the Grandfather abruptly collapsed. The Rain-Father's body fell back into the Garden, landing in the viscous mire. The fires of hatred coiled around him, crawling over his body, igniting him. He slapped at his form in terror, but the flames clung to him, refusing to be smothered or dissipated. This fire spread to the daemons following him; they shrieked and fled in panic, but the embers of hatred would not die.
Just then, thick water surged from the earth, instantly drowning the daemons. They decomposed and shattered within it, merging back into the Garden of Nurgle to await resurrection.
Simultaneously, an angry roar echoed from the black manor deep within the Garden. A profound, silent darkness surged. The soil of the Garden rose of its own accord, coalescing into massive facets. Rusted metal piled up in layers; decayed cables entwined with broken ceramite; corroded screws fell like rain. Various hideous weapons extended from the mass, resembling the horns of a wild beast.
Decayed corpses crawled out of the earth—flesh festering, bones loose, returned from the dead. They clustered together like millions of worms upon a larger carcass, taking shape amidst the stench of death.
The bell of Silence tolled. The stagnant sunlight of dusk fell upon a great brass bell. Countless weary prayers praising stagnation, obsolescence, and the eternal twilight rang out, coiling around the bell.
Alchemical apparatuses were overturned with a bang. Thick, virulent plagues, parasitic bacteriophages, and toxic slimes erupted, coalescing with broken glass and clusters of pustules, suspended in mid-air.
The swamp churned and bubbled. Bizarre parasites, worms, flies, and leeches crawled out, merging with dead wood and rotten branches to form a massive, bloated white leech, which hissed as it emerged from the mire.
Semi-coagulated pus and flakes of black-red scabs appeared out of thin air, stacking together to form blood-colored armor, manifesting as a dark-red, wounded, swollen warrior.
At this moment, the Plague God displayed the full extent of his domain before the girl, manifesting every facet and authority. The girl's only weapon, however, was hatred. The Warp is the dimension of will; in this dimension, will is everything. And no will is more dangerous or lethal than extreme hatred. Neither rust nor resurrection, neither bounty nor twilight, neither parasitism nor symbiosis, neither plague nor endurance could withstand pure hatred.
In these ten thousand years, many humans, abhumans, and even mutants under Nurgle's rule had secretly turned to the Emperor, the Reaper, or other variants. They possessed nothing but raw hatred, loathing the disease, stagnation, corruption, and torture the Plague God brought them, longing for the pain to end. The girl responded to their pleas, granting them an end, taking the hatred they had accumulated over millennia, and using it to trigger the even deeper hatred directed at Nurgle within the husk of the Dark King.
These were her weapons, her power, her blades.
Hatred for stagnation surfaced. Today is like yesterday; tomorrow will be like today. Year after year, day after day, perfectly identical, a cycle. Life itself seemed sticky, incapable of moving up even a fraction, incapable of change. Development, progress, and vitality seemed like distant concepts only for nostalgia. There was only twilight, only silence, only long stagnation. It wasn't a sharp loathing, but a dull, thickening despair that grew with time, eventually turning from a longing for day into a longing for night.
In a single instant, those facets turned to ash and vanished, as if dissolved in a faint despair, neutralized within the falling night of twilight.
The girl simply continued walking toward the black manor, toward that deep, sorcerous mansion.
From the dark rooms came a sigh of sorrow and pain. He could understand despair, pain, and death, but hatred alone was difficult to grasp. All things interact: sometimes life, sometimes death, sometimes corruption, sometimes rebirth—a cycle, all as one. The deer are hunted by the wolves, but without the wolves, the deer would expand infinitely, eat all the vegetation, and eventually starve themselves. The virus fights the human, yet the viral genetic sequence quietly merges into the human frame; they hone each other, merge with each other. Every day life dies, every day life is born. Macroscopically, life is a constant process of rot and renewal, and it is precisely because of this that it expands to every corner of the stars. All life rots, all things are eternal. If so, what is there to hate?
Why not accept it all with a more comfortable, peaceful heart?
Every window of the Black Manor was blown open by a slow wind. The Grandfather began to ascend, showing his true form. Every divinity is a collection of contradictions, a combination of infinite facets. Their domains essentially encompass everything in existence; they simply manifest one side due to their inherent contradictions.
The "Eternal King" chose self-hypnosis to soothe his contradictions; Tzeentch chose repeated self-fragmentation to curb his; the Blood God chose to bear his upon a brazen throne. And the Grandfather... the Grandfather never resisted contradiction. He let things take their course, allowing his domain to spread along the concept that all things eventually return to rot and decay. Thus, in a sense, the Grandfather is the Lord of All Things.
Mortarion looked on in shock and dread as the presence rose from the Black Manor. It was a living swamp made of black stars, dying worlds, and billions of rotting nebulae. It was the woodworm eating all things, the plague infecting the universe, the malicious mirror of life, and the sweet reverse of death. Hope perished in his presence; all things stagnated in his murmur. He was within all things, and he crawled out from all things, like an infinitely bloated black tumor parasitizing existence. He was formless and multi-faceted, fat and thin, like smoke, like oil, yet with clearly visible eyes and a mouth. Those eyes... like cold, dead suns. That mouth... like the horizon called Death at the end of the world.
The Lord of All Things crawled out from the Black Manor, ascending to a higher, more complete level. His hand swept through the void, and stars were extinguished only to be reborn. Mortarion saw life; He is the Lord of Rebirth. Mortarion saw rot; He is the Lord of Corruption. Mortarion saw death; He is the Lord of Death.
Death.
But death is not the end. After death comes rebirth; after rebirth, corruption; after corruption, death again. A cycle, germinating and expanding. An elk let out a soft cry of new life, flowers blooming on its antlers. A fly buzzed, laying pearly maggots on a rotting carcass. A pale mare came from the horizon, announcing the arrival of death.
Triple cycle, sevenfold corruption.
The girl fully opened her arms. Blazing hatred burned fiercely, reaching the depths of the Immaterium. Even the husk of the black sun at the very bottom of the Warp shimmered faintly upon the girl's facet. Slowly, she drew the final hatred directed at the Grandfather from her chest.
+Why?+
The Lord of All Things looked at that hatred. He could not believe, could not understand this final hatred.
It was the hatred for birth. Countless voices, voices He should have heard but had refused to hear, came flooding in. Countless beings were cursing and hating the one thing they should never curse or hate: their own birth. They denied the very meaning of their arrival; they preferred eternal death over being born into this world.
+Why?+
The Lord of All Things asked. Tears actually flowed from his eye-sockets. If life denies its own birth...
Then does nothing remain but corruption and absolute death?
That final hatred pierced the chest of the Lord of All Things. The triple cycle shattered and snapped in an instant. Most of Nurgle's domain was bathed in scorching fire. The Black Manor began to collapse and disintegrate. The girl reached out, grasping toward the deepest part of the Black Manor, toward the thing the Grandfather had guarded with all his heart.
It was life—a drooping lily.