An Abbysal Abscond

[Okor]

Okor’s harrowed head shook from side to side, sullied ceramite scraping against itself with every motion, flakes of rust falling from his titanic form. Infected lids slowly slid over his infested iris, smearing tears of pus and blood across the aqueous humours. Claws clenched into fists, twitching and trembling as he silently cursed himself for his weakened will. Any alliance with mortals ended the same, whether in reality or this demented purgatory: They slipped away into the stygian sepulchral realms of the dead, while Nurgle’s blessed Grandchildren endured the trials of the millenia.

Why would tragedy be any different in this demented dream?

At last, he found the strength to speak, the faceless facade of the blood-drenched Legionnaire momentarily fading, a glimmer of the exhausted ancient beneath the sanguine-stained warplate showing through. ”No such… luck. For far too long, we believed ourselves to be nigh-invincible.”  It was the truth. Cannibals, mutants, and roaming revenants had all fallen before them, a seemingly inexhaustible source of ammunition and righteous anger propelling them through horde after horde.

But perhaps, there was something he had salvaged from the shattered storm of battle, a morbid memento torn from the pulverized remains of the phoenix.

He could still taste the grey matter lodged between his fangs, the stolen thoughts within the mouth-watering morsel beckoning to him, the memories begging to be released and regurgitated, to be reborn.

His rotting tongue worried it free, pilfered perceptions pulsing through his nervous system as they reached the decaying architecture of his mind, a fragment of Fiara’s psyche being recreated for a mercifully short time within the hellscape within his head.

Terror. Anger. Pain. Pride. Despair.

And the worst of all sins in this world of hurt:

Hope.

”But I remember. Gods spare my blasted soul, I… remember.” A rattling breath through his rusted helmet, a tortured intake of tainted oxygen.

”She feared me. I was a plague-ridden revenant from her nightmares, a damned demon brought forth to spread Chaos.”

“And instead, I enforced Order. I built a… sanctuary of sanity in a sea of madness, and I kept it afloat. When the ravenous reavers came for our flesh, I rallied the survivors. When the earth itself fell to our ferocity and claimed what little life remained in that camp, I turned our tormentors into… Torches, to light our path through the darkness..” He coughed and hacked, as if the disintegrated dead had rested within his lungs, seeking some form of petty vengeance from beyond the grave.

”But that all matters little now.” His gauntlets reached up, pressing themselves against the corroded carapace of his helmet, prying it off of his horned head with a hiss, the toxic atmosphere he immersed himself in flowing over his gorget, a murderous miasma only one as blessed as himself could breathe. Worms writhed within his eye as it blinked in the harsh, sourceless sun of the Nexus, the gangrenous flesh that clung tightly to his fossilized bones shifting as his parasites feasted upon him.

”She died. I… Survived. In the end, all people will remember is one more failure. One more soul I let slip into the stygian abyss.” His tusks dripped with tainted ichor, staining his scarred breastplate as he struggled to find the words. The ruined remnants of his nostrils flared as he breathed in the unfamiliar fresh air.

”All I can do, Goddess, is bring death. If you were a divinity half as worthy of the prayers Fiara proffered to you in the darkness, then you can make this right. The Phoenix set herself aflame in the long night. It is time you had her… Rise from the ashes.”