Whatever magic held it aloft in Nurgle’s kingdom did not work upon Iax yet, and the plague ark fell as soon as it was through. Bloated belly met shallow water, sending up a flat wave of mud. It slithered forwards, carried by momentum over the fringes of the marsh and onto the green meadows of the garden world. Away from the empyrean, the meatship’s rotting accelerated. The greening skin of its flanks split, spilling amid a wave of noisome fluids a host of daemons into Ultramar.

The most numerous were the flies, shiny black with the triple ring of Nurgle’s blessing blood red upon their backs. The great number who escorted the craft were increased by more issuing from the whale’s insides in droning blizzards, bringing with them a stink of rotting flesh. Upon leaving their host’s presence, they rose up into Iax’s quiet night air, flooding skywards in unending swarms so that the moon was blotted out and the promise of day broken. From there, they set out to spread to the four corners of the world, bearing their cargoes of disease.

Giggling nurglings vied with the flies in number. The vicious imps of the Plague God poured in tittering avalanches from the flanks of the void whale. Upon the ground, they plucked at the mud and drew out the smaller lifeforms of Iax, those creatures that work beneath man’s notice but which are necessary to a world’s survival. With nimble figures, the nurglings twisted these terrestrial beasts into agents of decay and set them free with coos of encouragement to do Nurgle’s work.

From inside the void whale, gangplanks of rotten wood poked through the curtains of flesh and landed with wet cracks on the dying ground. Down these bridges walked plaguebearers, lesser daemons of Nurgle, the tallymen who were damned for all eternity to enumerate whatever caught their god’s attention. One-horned and doleful, they came mumbling their litanies of diseases gifted to the mortal universe by their generous father, or else counting the flies, or the nurglings, or the plagues that were turning the blades of the dying grass black. For them, the impossible task of keeping order in Nurgle’s unruly hordes was an eternal torment. Their heralds led them in sonorous war-tallying, encouraging them into battle with drones of maddening repetitiveness.

The plaguebearers kicked and squelched their way through the nurgling tide, arranging themselves into muttering cohorts. Standards were lifted up and shrill music played, and they began their advance. In a great parade, seven hundred and seventy-seven strong, the daemons marched, more of them spilling from the carcass ship onto the clean earth of Iax like maggots from a corpse’s belly, dull bells knelling, broken pipes wheezing, all the while counting and counting and counting their war tallies.