The Tome of Decay (2014), p86 — The Pestilent Worlds

"Your boasts are empty, little sorcerer. All eventually fall to the Grandfather, no matter how they might scheme or plot."
— Gullivox Arcul, Plaguemeister of the Burrowing Flies

It is easy to believe that the Screaming Vortex exists eternally, for here, time rarely flows in a coherent path. Cyclopean statuaries, carved with unfathomable runes that burn the soul, seem to predate the parched worlds of their residence. Ancient chests wrapped in chains, drifting between blind stars, contain scrolls depicting civilisations thriving beneath stars that are frozen clouds that have yet to ignite. There is only debate as to its beginning, and even the most powerful scryers have not foreseen its cessation. For those who follow the Pestilent Lord, though, such matters are of little concern. With their god there is the certainty that all things have an ending and rebirth, and in both there is only Nurgle.

His foetid influences are most readily felt in areas where the Vortex dips too deeply into the Warp and melds into insane foams of madness. No region is exempt, however, for wherever there is life and purpose there is decay and ruin. His chants echo across the stars, the graven tones thumping like the beating of some vast heart that pumps Nurgle's essence across the Vortex. Tendrils of ætheric rot carry the pealing of his heavy, rusted bells, announcing new plagues for the glory of the God of Decay. Flies cloud the skies, dimming native sunlight beneath the weight of billions of choking insects. He proudly rules his pestilent worlds where there is no life but that which feeds upon decay, and flesh morbidly continues past the point where life should flee screaming from the obscenity it has become.

Nurgle's power waxes and wanes with life and death, always at its height just when life and hope is at its apogee. His greatest plagues emerge in these times, bringing the glories of decay throughout the stars. Loremancers still furtively whisper of the Necrosis, one such event that nearly drowned the Screaming Vortex many millennia ago, when times spoke of the greatest of empires and mightiest of warlords. Appearing from beyond the farthest reaches of the Vortex, it grew in energy as it churned across the Anteciduals. Pestilent waves poured over worlds in noxious showers, leaving only capering Nurglings and sonorous Plaguebearers to tally the dead and the diseases that felled them.

It finally roared through the Frozen Heart and crashed into the centre of this damned realm in a crescendo that reverberated throughout the Vortex. Stars had their burning atmospheres blown into the void, leaving only cold, barren cores of rusted iron. Planets were torn into listless debris, what life that could survive was reduced to base fungi. The befouling wave appeared exhausted, perhaps vented into the space that surrounds the Vortex, and new planets emerged from the receding effects to remake the realm. Yet those left behind, their souls forever touched by Nurgle's mouldering gaze, knew even as they eventually succumbed, that there is no real finality except for their god's inevitable dominion over all.