This story was written as background for the Kill team doubles at Adepticon 2024 - I was playing warpcoven and my team mate was playing Chaos cults.

Weeping Wisdom

The sterile hum of electromagnetic hovercraft droned through cavernous hangars bringing massive cargo to the escape ships. Hastily gang-pressed workers broke their backs over menial hauls under the watch of Skitarii and Servitor enforcers monitoring performance and surgically removing those that delayed the forecasted transport rates. The radiation levels were so high that most unaugmented humans developed symptoms within six hours and needed be definitively replaced.

The Skitarii were busy.

But not on the Demagogue’s account. Beneath his filthy mameluke and oil stains, swollen tumors quickly devoured the cells failing to radiation. Pain and exhaustion meant little to him for the blessings of the Father of Life had advanced his existence past the frailness inherent to humanity. His crew and him worked diligently, the only ones in that hangar to have lasted into the second day of grueling planet evacuation. So far, no Magus Logis had detected the anomalous lifespan of his team in their abominable Dataspheres - or cared.

Quick movement darted behind shadows at the major crane of his bay. A Glitchling, carrying The Most Benevolent Father’s gift to what passed for aberrant life in the Mechanicus’ machines. Electromechanical disease quickly infected the crane as it mag-locked onto the hull of a void-grade container.

Skitarii foremen froze for a second as they often did when touched by tendrils of their barren Datasphere, and quickly rushed to the broken distribution system to attempt field repairs. The Demagogue’s discharging lips twitched into the vestiges of a smile. O Great Father, he silently prayed, thank You for Every Blessing You Share with us, or with those that share with us, or those that share with them."

As soon as the Skitarii connected a data tether to the machine’s ports, they shrieked like metal gears grinding, their mechanical limbs malfunctioning. Lumens throughout the hangar began to flicker and fail. Servitors stumbled as their metallic components cracked and wept oil and black blood that faintly glowed in the evanescent gloom. Trains’ brakes malfunctioned, quickly derailing them into violent clashes.

The Mechanicus’ self-repairing mechanisms battled the mechanical malaise and the few Skitarii strong enough to partake in the Great Father’s blessing began to regain control with auto-consistency data sent by their masters. I commend your will to heal, the Demagogue thought of the nevertheless loathed servants of the Martian creed. He pulled his cowl back beneath the strobing light, as preconvened. His brethren followed suit, took stolen tools and wrenches out of their mamelukes and fell upon the dazed Skitarii, quickly taking them apart. Sister Horritia became so lost in the desecration of their enemies that her mind was far gone before her body started convulsing and violently changing form. With the Skitarii dead, the rest of the Demagogue’s Cult quickly formed a reverent circle around their Sister, praying for her Advancement.

Their Sister’s clothes quickly ripped as the swells of her formerly small frame broke free. Corroded metal plates blinked into and out of existence throughout her skin, blisters festering and blooming with pus so light it became mist and then burst into tiny sparks under so much static in the air.

“All hail Horritia, now healed of her tuberculosis!” screeched the Demagogue, fighting for the sadness in him not to show. HIs Cult hailed their new Heroine, who stood ecstatic with her head twitching to a side. Another Gellerpox infected. Oh Great Father, are You Mocking me?

“Let us be Blessed in our work, my brethren! We are not yet done!” The Demagogue fumbled for the keys in his apron’s pockets, not so much from his numbed nerves as in anticipation. He opened the void-grade container and went straight for the small refrigerator unit where the boil-ridden head of the Mindwitch, the last remains of its anatomy, battled decay. His skin cracked at the cold metal’s touch, slightly slowing the caress of entropy in his disease-ridden tissue. Do You Like Working this hard to Get to us, oh Great Father? Is the Fruit Born of Your Travails all the sweeter for it?

His Brethren quickly found the rest of their gear. The Blessed Blades donned their habits of worship, the Iconarch assembled her totem. They pulled a lobotomized body out of a plastic bag and connected an oozing tangle of plasteel tubes to the Mindwitch’s head.

“Make haste, my brethren, make haste!” he yelled as he cajoled his devotees into action, praying their brains fought back the parasites gnawing their skulls for just a few more hours - just until their Time of Apoteosis.

The Demagogue ran with a torch in his right hand, the path to the nearby nuclear reactor burning bright in his mind. Minutes went by, and his breath began to run short, and he didn’t think of all the losses he had endured, of all the silence his every prayer had been met by.

Suddenly there was darkness. No Lumen worked and his torch overheated and caught fire, whatever motive force in it finally devoured by the Gellerpox. For a moment the mental map fell out of his mind along with every other thought. What am I doing? Where am I going?

A glow purple like a days-old bruise floated behind him. “Snap out of it,” the Mindwitch grated from a throat gaping open. The Demagogue blinked and hit his own head as a raging migraine flared in his skull. “We’re late,” the Mindwitch insisted. The Demagogue turned and stared at the naked head hanging from a pole, bulbs blooming where it once had had eyes. The stolen, soulless body carrying the Mindwitch swayed slightly, so that the psyker’s head danced in the air casting shadows in fumbling directions that tripped over the rest of the Brethren.

The Demagogue extended his arms. “The Great Father has blessed me!” he yelled, and his Cultists all fell to their knees, even Sister Horrentia with her uneven bones. “The Great Father has blessed me with feverish delirium!”

The Mindwitch simply stared, leering. “Do not question our Father ever again,” the Demagogue snarled. “Follow me to our next Act of Worship!” The Demagogue led again, bile bubbling up his throat. His addled mind had trouble knowing its purpose but persevered anyway. Black spots floated in front of his eyes. Have I failed you, Great Father, that you see fit to take my strength away now? Am I no longer worthy of Your Gifts? Will my path finish here, so far from your contagion vectors?

A blue glow cut across his blurred vision from a vertical line ahead. The Demagogue reached a side aisle and took it, the blue glow growing brighter as he walked, until he crossed an archway into a catedral-shaped chamber. A gargantuan spire with lattices and pipes like flecks of shed snake skin rose in its center, irradiating a blue shimmer that hurt his eyes. Machine Idolaters laid dead all around, the radiation too much even for their augmented bodies. “Now it is your time to serve, Witch,” the Demagogue muttered between coughs, the reactor’s spire siding double before his tired eyes.

And serve the Witch did. It commanded its stolen body forward, and started hacking and spitting light out of his mouth as glitchlings fell off wounds in the fabric of the shimmering light. With gleeful cackles, they swarmed the reactor and started climbing it, fighting each other, consuming the technology like maggots. The Witch’s cants became silent, pure stuttering of lights. The blue shimmer bled darkness through purple tears gaping into the nether realms of the Warp.

The reactor burned bright, first violet like coagulated blood, then orange like a bulbous growth, then yellow like electric pus. Daggers of black lightning shot through, mostly directed towards metal spikes in the wall, but one landing clear on one of his Blessed Blades. The energy coursed through, flash-boiling his blood that in turn burst vessels open.

“Our Father touches us!” the Demagogue screamed through the storm of Warp energy. His cult echoed him, blissful at so much contagion fertilizing the cold machineries of their enemy.

A maelstrom cracked out, tiny willows of the Great Father’s Realm slithering into this world, devouring the reactor and its nuclear wastes. The Demagogue prayed without words as a warp portal opened and squads of hallowed Plague Marines burst through in reeking suits of cracked armor, rotten viscera flopping from deformations in plate joints. His entire cult kowtowed at once, even the Mindwitch commanding its carrier to genuflection.

“Take us to our quarry,” a grave, liquid voice boomed through the chamber. The Demagogue half raised, not daring sully the Father’s Chosen with his unworthy, failing sight and receded out of the reactor’s chamber. Soon, Father, I will stand taller than them upon your esteem.

The Demagogue’s body had consumed too much of itself fighting its disease, and could barely support his faithful actions. Will I stand long enough to stand tall, Father? Despair filled the last shred of self he clinged to. Like in a fevered dream, he crossed thresholds and labyrinthine hallways and hangars with stupor, his ears bleeding from the violent concussions of the Death Guard fighting what little forces could still stand in that Mechanicus’ Forge World.

Just a little bit further, he bitterly thought, and surprised himself of the resentment swimming in the murky depths of what remained of his soul.

He blinked. Clarity cut through his ails. After so many years of patient service, he had fulfilled his purpose. He had brought his superiors to this most holy of crucibles. To this abhorrent site of sterilization that had in spite of itself secretly held a gift of his Great Father.

Level upon levels of gantries and balconies converged into a deep gorge of medical rooms and stasis units, a mechanical prison for struggling life that was the most precious the Demagogue’s heart could even feel for. Magus Biologis and servitors scrambled under faint lumens, lost without their data feeds, struggling to salvage what even their ignorant ways recognized as the greatest prize evolution could ever achieve, even beyond their deranged dreams of dead machines.

The Demagogue pointed to the right wing, recognizing the sector codes writ upon green signs that he had paid for dearly in the coin of his brethren’s souls. “There, oh High One, is the cure to the Gellerpox.”

The Plague Marines trundled into that gantry and opened fire upon the surprised Martian idolaters, quickly snuffing them out, then turned to destroy the fruits of their work.

The Demagogue stared agape at this heresy.

“We are betrayed,” the Mindwitch said. Sister Horritia fell to the ground and began tearing herself apart.

The Demagogue could not believe his eyes as the Plague Marines smashed stasis chambers, gaskets, cogitators, and the human experiments that had been purged of the Gellerpox.

He stumbled a few steps, clutching a handrail as if it were the sheets of a hospice. “Why, my Lords?” the Demagogue coughed between spittles of blood, “Why do you cauterize this?”

One Plague Marine, ten meters away, shut down his flamer and turned slowly, dripping blood and black ichor from a tentacle that once was his intestine and now looped around his ribcage. “We are the Death Guard. It is our prerogative to decree what festers and what rots.” he said, raising his flamer at the Demagogue. A bright spark blinded the Demagogue as air burned his eyelids.

He coughed again. He was panting on all fours, tiny flecks of burnt skin falling into the ground by his fists. He craned his neck upwards, and saw Sister Horritia burning as she fought the Plague Marine. The Marine’s armor failed to the Gellerpox and dragged him down, but his tentacle strangled Horritia as he fell.

The Demagogue’s heart sank. His last Blessed Blade jumped over him and charged into the congested gantry past Sister Horritia, engaging with another Plague Marine further ahead.

“FIGHT!” The Demagogue screamed. “FIGHT THESE AFFRONTS TO OUR FATHER!”

He pushed himself up, blinking tears out of his swollen eyes, as his brethren opened fire on the Marines and spread wide in the gantries, climbing stairs to pressure the Plague Marines from more angles.

How had it come to this? Did the Plague Marines not know that the Great Father Wanted life to fight back His Gifts, so that new strands could emerge from such violent coupling? That the Gellerpox was but a first variant of something far greater than the Galaxy had ever seen?

“They are too many, they’ll scythe through us,” the Mindwitch said at his back with spite, “but somebody sent a calling to me, offering help. Will you take it? Now or never!”

“Yes,” the Demagogue said, in a moment of weakness, barely able to follow tracing fire through strobing lumens.

The darkness of night opened in front of him, a sight of the sky he had not experienced in his long years doing the Father’s work in that Forgeworld. A colossal figure in contours that shone like gold fell through, making the gantry tremble. Another Space Marine, its power armor swirling in crackling Warp energies, plates seemingly flowing like liquid metal, stood in front of the Demagogue, facing the Death Guard with a hand cannon larger than the Demagogue. The new fighter turned methodically and opened fire. The Plague Marines answered to the new threat with heavy bolter fire, although the Demagogue could see none of this, shielded as he was by the armored bulk.

Anger bubbled in his lungs as he yelled, a yell that bled into his cultists, elevating two of them into a mutation with blooming tentacles to match the Plague Marines'.

“You might want to fall back,” a metallic voice said at his back. The Demagogue turned, half dazed, blinking in and out of consciousness, to see an even taller Space Marine with a purple cape billowing behind him.

All was then darkness and silence for the Demagogue. He was drowning in bile. His lungs collapsed under the weight of internal sacs of pus.

The Demagogue was surprised to come to his senses alive. He was covered in vomit, still clutching the handrail. At his feet laid the undone plates of a cobalt and gold power armor, dust swirling in faint rivulets. He took in the state of the Biologis laboratory, the scorched machinery, the dead Martians, and the dead Plague Marines.

Some of his Brethren had survived, now dedicated to consuming the Death Guard’s bulbous growths and tumors.

“A grisly sight,” said the metallic voice. The tall Space Marine with the cloak walk past dead Horritia, swaddling a tiny vase in the crook of an avian appendage where an arm should have been, and came to a stop before the fallen suit of empty power armor.

The Demagogue recognized the symbols on the pauldrons.

A Sorcerer of the Thousand Sons. A conniving schemer and deceiver that ever wanted to elude, instead of embrace, the Gifts of the Father. The Demagogue steeled himself. Dark currents of pain and nausea coursed through him, but he had to remain strong for his brethren.

Because he suspected a trap had sprung upon them.

“What do you want, Sorcerer?” the Demagogue spat.

The Sorcerer flicked the tiny vase to him, which the Demagogue barely caught in hands slimy with yellow fester.

“Why,” the Sorcerer said, kneeling as he carefully gathered the dust in the gantry with a twirl of his avian talons. “Much like you, to find a cure for the disease that ails my brothers.”

***