Reality tore with a sound like the edges of a half-healed wound parting. The sky ripped apart like flimsy projection screen. Either side of the tear, reality remained, but between the yellowing edges of the rift a realm of madness was revealed: a huge garden in the middle of steamy day, riotous in its decay, stretching out of sight into mustard fogs. Shy things with moist skin peeped from the overgrown foliage at Varens and licked their lips.

There appeared to be a skin of energy over this tear, but it was full of holes that were getting wider as Varens watched. Rotten gases began to drift through, and then flies rose up from the sickly plants. They boiled through the holes in fat-bodied multitudes, battering at Varens just like on Espandor. Then they were gone, away over the marshes in buzzing shrouds.

Varens looked to his side at the unconscious woman. He moaned at what he saw.

Her eyes ran to jelly in their sockets. Her tongue went black and fell from jaws disarticulated from her softening skull. Her necrotic flesh sloughed off bones that, now revealed, shone pink-white for only an instant before accelerated decay turned them slimy grey, and the exposed capillaries that fed them dead black.

He clenched his eyes tightly. His face turned from the rift. No one who looked into something like that could survive. The movements under his skin grew wilder. He had to stop his hands from ripping at his own flesh to set the things inside him free and bring himself relief, for he knew it would kill him.

‘Don’t look at it! Don’t look at it!’ he said, but he couldn’t help it. He looked up into the garden of the Plague God Nurgle.

A moment of calm fell. Thunder cracked in the suddenly sweltering air. A ripe scent of putrefaction infiltrated everything. A ripple passed over the marsh – tainting whatever it touched, alive or not – and the grasses blackened in zig-zagging strips. Stones crumbled. The trees contorted into horrific new shapes and grew so large that they collapsed under their own weight into mushy ruin. Water turned thick.

‘Seven!’ bellowed the daemonic voice.

A hot, corrosive wind blasted from the rift. Huge shapes rode it, approaching from the horizon of that infernal landscape.

Varens was wracked with sudden, burning pain. Lesions opened on his skin, allowing the vermin breeding inside him to fall softly to the earth. His belly distended. His fingers twisted; his back hunched. His eyes moistened and became soft as part-cooked eggs. His cheeks melted like wax in a fire, reforming his features. His skull felt like it was trying to burst itself in two. Relief came suddenly, when a rotting, stubby horn emerged slowly through his forehead and twisted upwards.

The pain got worse, but it didn’t bother him any longer. He giggled at it.