The Dark Ages [Dark Data]

[Okor]

The plagued Paladin knelt down over the ashen remains of the liberator's most recent adversary, sifting through the dust with his tainted talons, prying a gently pulsing purple chip from the remains. A word was emblazoned across its slate surface, veins of amethyst energy running through the circuit board. It whispered to him, the beast forged of binaric code and malevolent sapience lurking within his armour recognizing it for what it was: FIRESTORM. He gave a grunt and a nod, wedging the chip into an ancient fissure in his armour.

He turned his lone eye to his companions, rising to his feet, towering over his mortal wards. "Rest. I'll take watch," he said, hefting his corroded cleaver over his pestilential pauldron, effluence and rot dripping down the pitted and scarred surface of his armour.

"Don't you ever have to rest?" Asked the armoured figure of Samus, lying against the cool green grass, the medicinal gel Madotsuki applied slowly mending the wounds and rents that had penetrated the sleek steel suit surrounding their lithe form.

"I was not designed for... indolence," Okor replied, a single crimson orb gazing over the horizon.

"Designed?" Queried the hunter, slightly raising a helmeted head.

Okor sighed slightly. It seemed like another life now, another world. He could almost pretend that it was someone else who had stained their hands with innocent blood, that all of his pacts and oaths could be abandoned and allowed to lie forgotten, his end of the infernal bargain lying unfulfilled.

Almost.

"The Corpse-Emperor. He stole us from our home, and shaped us to be weapons. We traded... our lives for secondary hearts and acidic spit, our homes for prisons of ceramite and iron. We carved him an Imperium that would last for an eternity, and our reward..." He paused for a moment, racked by a coughing fit, indicative of the rot that had settled into his four blackened lungs. Corruption ate away at every inch of his being, an eternal cycle of consumption and renewal. He looked towards a gash on his arm, a gift from the Centaur's coruscating blade. It remained unhealed, the dessicated flesh beneath his leathery skin remaining torn and split, the maggots writhing within slowly but surely destroying him. Not so eternal after all.

"Corpse-Emperor? I guess that explains your, well, affliction, then." Replied the hunter, trying their best to tread carefully around the all-too obvious taint embodied in the ever-rotting body of Okor.

He laughed, the sound rendered demonic through the corrupted vox set into his helmet, echoing around the empty plains. "No, no. He made us to be perfect, flawless angels of wrath and beauty. He cast his... creations aside, leaving us to bleed and die for a distant lord, while he remained seated upon a golden throne." He idly kicked a stone, sending it flying towards the horizon. Did this truly happen? The scars were faded, almost forgotten. With each passing day, it seemed progressively less concrete. The hatred and zeal that had once kept his deadened hearts beating was starting to dissipate.

Say it again. Remember the fallen. Remember the slain. Remember the blood on your hands.

"So our King turned on him. He led us into the maws of hell itself, and we found truth within," Okor said, blinking a crimson eye. "We became slaves to darkness, and in that moment, we broke our chains." He flexed a festering claw. There was power in pestilence, salvation in damnation. This much he knew to be true.

"We built an empire of a million worlds. All we had to show for it was the corpses of our... brothers."

"Tearing it apart... I'll miss it. My worlds were blood-soaked and shrouded in darkness, but they were mine. They were flawed, fragile, and at the verge of breaking, but Nurgle-dammit, they were mine."

Taking the firestorm battle chip.