The swamp dragon plodded its way to the southeast, where most of the populace was, out of the north’s smog haze, on the grassy plains alongside the convoy of Heavy Equipment Transporters on the road. They passed by town depots where HETs deposited tanks for storage and retrofit. They came over village hills where trucks distributed fuel and goods to the houses above and the tunnels below. They pushed through throngs of cattle in barnyards, the ranchers making the sign of the three even as the dragon snatched up their groxes, yoke and all.

  Word spreads faster than they had plodded, likely across the box network, the stations abuzz like fly swarms, ‘he is here, the supreme leader makes a surprise visit!’ So the crowds spill onto the streets from their homes, from the underground colonies, from the apartment blocks. The many humans that make up the southeast, the gors and gnomes that migrated from their origin, the ogres that stood a body tall and gut wide from rest, it was a panoply of Sinui’s people come to see the man that united them all. The impromptu parade slowed their journey, but they had time to spare, and just as seeing him reminded the people that he was with them, seeing the people, taking in their wafting stench, their braying to rival the herds, reminded him that diversity was Sinui’s greatest strength and of what the Imperium sought to take away.

  More than wave, he brought forth the example of what they all had to protect. Now their hooting died down, now they raised their own children aloft. The more fertile families had the juveniles hold up the nubiles, the pubescents shoulder the prepubescents. Life! Life! This is what the ancestors struggled for! This is what we continue to fight for! Our right to life! Our right to live! We defy them with our existence, with our remembrance, with our procreation! But that is not enough. We will fight to live without restraint! We will fight for life unbound! We will fight until the invaders are cast down and this world is ours again!

  The celebrations stopped when they arrived in a city that had suffered an incursion. The people on the street shambled to greet and salute the supreme leader, but their hearts had been crushed with their homes. Sinkhole wounds pooled with bloody rubble where apartments and tunnels had been; the people had been digging through the entrails to recover items of domestic life: blankets from ruined beds, tattered clothes, memorabilia passed down for generations, effigies held for comfort when all else was lost. They also dragged out bodies, many charred and mangled and sooted beyond recognizability to even those closest to them, and laid them out on the soil for the maggots to bury them in His Garden. There was surely more to be excavated, but the attack was recent, none of the HETs carried the equipment for this destination, so they dug out what they could with their hands, raw and muddied.

  What response teams there were focused on salvaging damaged infrastructure. Grain silos had been razed, water tanks phlebotomized, hospitals disemboweled, libraries burnt, even the pavement had crumbled into potholes from the landing of heavy boots.

  The exurban villages fared worse. On the surface, from a distance, they seemed unchanged, preserved, until one noticed the emptiness and the quiet. They one looked closer and saw the burnt out husks that died where they stood without time to realize or scream.

  His sister’s doing. All this was her and her sisters’ doing. They thought to wound us. They thought to keep us in check, contained. They thought to remind us of their place. They thought to destroy, for that was all the solution they could muster from their credo of hatred and ignorance. As much as the suffering of the people embittered him, here they were, not fallen, but they would rebuild to stand again, as they have done for centuries. The day would come when they would no longer live on their knees, and the Verdancy would know no end. Let them play their cruelty; they think it makes them strong despite failing them. When the endless season comes, the debt incurred will be repaid with cruelty infinitely more terrible. Once, long ago, Yun may have longed to free his sister from the Imperium’s bondage; from some point thereon, lost in so many other points across the ages, Yun lost his familial longing, and instead will be there to personally persecute his sister’s sentence.

  For now, Pusbloom hacked up mydas flies, some to scout ahead for more damage along the path of the attack, others to spread word to whoever needed to hear it.

  They finally arrived at a forward operating installation. Attacks like that previously, especially those involving his sister, made gathering precious minds together a precarious endeavour. Behind mildewed walls sufficiently layered in construction by laborers and desecrated in ritual by the canker priests and shamans, the generals of Sinui could commune and teach, protected from danger. Within the installations, rivalries and alliances were hammered out to form logistical chains that fed into grand strategy, the way rivers fed into the ocean. Whatever intrigue and politics gripped Sinui leaders, they would have to figure it out lest the Supreme Leader perceive distraction and send the maggotkin to restore focus. With that looming over their heads, sending Pusbloom to greet the generals with tidings of Verdancy should be enough to get them in order:

  Without those walls, the officers practiced and put into practice the tactics involving the army’s varied assets.

  Conscripts, guided by senior engineers and demolitionists, dug out and built up the emplacements that the soldiers would be sitting in and storming towards on the battlefield. While construction was underway, commsmen set up their station in the tunnels to get used to troubleshooting the problems such conditions would create before heading out above ground with their vox pack weighing them down to jog alongside the soldiers. The soldiers also lugged their equipment with them to get used to moving with it: conscripts with their scrap plate over the clothes they arrived with, bolt actions slung over shoulder, and a pack overstuffed with munitions on their back; the professionals and veterans with brown flak armor, bandoliers of gas grenades, stub rifles in hand.

  Some groups were mixed units joined by gors and gnomes. Otherwise, the monogroup detachments from the other regions stuck to their own tactics and leadership that emphasized their culture and strengths. The wargors were brutish and boisterous tyrants that whipped their band into frenzy and led the charge from the front. The gnome fixers are elected by their team based on the trust in the fixer’s capabilities, and exist more to keep the sharpshooters in communication with the rest of the army than to enforce discipline.

  These groups took a break near the completion of the training course. They stopped by the cages of the forsaken and the bloatspawn to join the canker priest in unholy sermon, all the better that Mogala herself came to join them. Every Sinui citizen bore the gifts of the Ur-Father, be it the subtlety of taeniasis or the proud display of bulbous boils, and though not all had the zealousness to abandon worldliness and give themselves to cancerous proliferation, witnessing the limitless potential of life invigorated the spirit of even the most impious.

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  Still, the blessed were not the most orderly lot, beyond the vague direction of canker priests, and had to remain caged while conscripts took up kitchen utensils to simulate the role. The others swapped their live ammunition for plastic ball bearings.

  Construction complete, the teams filed onto opposing sides of the simulation.

  The Sinui soldiers leaned on the parados as the smoke bombs representing a bombing run on their side rattled their trenches. The opposing force of defense force dogs huddled in their bunker against the barrage of mortars and artillery. As the smoke was still pluming into the air, the Sinui mounted over the parapets and charged across mined ground. The ‘forsaken’ were unchained and sprinted ahead of the pack, the ‘bloatspawn’ shambling behind, absorbing incoming fire, tripping land mines, and crashing into the enemy lines.

  The distraction allowed the soldiers to find a breach point in the enemy lines. Chem spewers unleashed torrents of ‘sludge’ (it was water) to cover the advance of the shielded trench sweepers. The sweepers’ shotguns sent the dogs into cover, but the hand-tossed and tube-launched grenades would either flush them out or solve the problem. The soldiers poured into the breach, aiming for enemy gun emplacements and heavy artillery to clear the way for the tanks. Once the treads rolled through, this ground would be theirs.

  That was the standard template for human mono-regiments. Mixed groups or attached detachments might have their gnomes pick off the heavy weapons for the tanks to go in first, or have the gors ram roughshod over the enemy lines when the terrain was too rough for mechanized armor.

  The bray-shamans and canker priests could call forth the dark powers to empower their forces or debilitate the opposition, though these things could not be planned, given the fickleness of sorcery and daemonology. Some maggotkin may stray from their tallybands to join the mortals, but again, that was up to their impulsive whims.

  In past Verdancies, Pusbloom’s duplicates would lead the cysts that threw themselves headlong at the enemy militarized zone while the army digs in behind them. When the cyst bursts, and while Pusbloom recomposes his forces, the army continues the assault on the depleted Imperials until the maggotkin return. The other regions had their battles—the gor herds raiding Wirye, the gnomes harrying Hanyang—but the fall of Gyeo has been the ultimate goal of all Sinui. They had marched across the piedmont and conquered the epicardium before, but never breached the myocardium. Once the walls of Gyeo are impregnated, the endocardium would not be far ahead, and Yun would be there to tear that convent down, pluck the sororitas and nobles from their eyries, with his bare hands and crush them under barefoot.

  In this coming season, they were bestowed the ram that would topple those walls and finally bring this war to a close.

  The gors, even the Iron-teeth, prided their rustic living and brutish attitude as strengths, virtues over the humans and gnomes, who they saw as tainted by the Imperium’s trapping of civilization. Yet they held begrudging respect for the ogres, whose brawniness eclipsed any gor despite the perceived lassitude of urbia. They tower over others and possess robust constitution that rivals levers and pulleys. They are appealing employees, for civilian and military employers alike, not just for that great strength, but also for their simple-minded obedience. A foreman may have use for them in what would otherwise take a dozen men and a crane. An officer may see them equipped with gear worthy of them, so they may be the most reliable component in the group. A canker priest may offer up their plump bodies to be host to daemonic life forms so that they swell into proverbial maggotaurs.

  The fallen angel was among the ogres at their firing range. The ogres’ ripper guns were some of the only weapons that would not crumple in the fallen angel’s hands, built more like a cannon than a rifle. While even ogres would jerk under the recoil of a ripper blast, the fallen angel did not flinch as he swept a cannonade across the vehicle carcasses that served as targets.

  Sensing Yun’s approach, the ripper gun was slammed into the chest of the ogre it was taken from, sending the ogre staggering.

  “Scorax,” started Yun with something cradled in his arms, “is it to your liking?”

  Scorax had risen from the pus of the great bog rather than sprouting from Pandamecia’s embryonic sacs like the maggotkin. He claimed he was a son of the Anathema that was remolded by the Ur-Father and wandered The Garden to relish its fecundity and be sent where Nurgle willed. Yun found the sudden appearance suspicious, and the story itself unbelievable given how none of the daughters had broken their faith, but the ever-cynical Pusbloom made no objection to the claims, which was evidence enough.

  His black armor was trimmed green, both smeared under layers of patina accreted over time and across dimensions. An unrecognizable melange of stenches wafted from him in a haze, and blow flies perpetually bustled about him. Every movement was articulated by the sloshing of stomached bilge, the groan of rusted metal, the creak of calcified cartilage, the gurgle of a swamped powerpack. His voice bubbled with phlegm and was filtered through the helm’s vox grill.

  “No,” he said as his cloven treads plodded to Yun. The rippers were tools of convenience. Scorax’s chosen weapons were the daemonic blades hitched at his hips, one a cleaver caked in crusted filth, the other a spotted sword pulsating with baleful might. Akin to the blades of the plaguebearer, what was not shattered on impact would be corroded into infirmity. They would never break from use or run dry of ammunition in the midst of slaughter. So far from his warband and suitable facilities, they were his most dependable items.

  “Mogala and I had a daughter.”

  “Mogala had a daughter. You contributed material.”

  “Would you like to hold her?”

  “No. Discuss what you have come for.”

  “The season of Verdancy will be upon us.”

  “I felt the changing winds in my armor. The maggotkin will be ascendant.”

  “We can only make our offensives during the verdancy. We are woefully outnumbered and outgunned otherwise. We can raid, we can sabotage, we can delay, but the war is stagnant.”

  “So I have gathered.”

  “I hoped you would be able to tip the balance, if you are truly Nurgushin’s chosen.”

  “I am one man.”

  “In the past, there have been hardpoints in the enemy’s defences. They could not be overcome without grievous losses and resource diversion, if they were overcome at all. If you are, as you say, I want you to overcome them, swiftly and cheaply.”

  Scorax’s helm slit absorbed all light. Amongst the black armor, it stood out as unnaturally dark. He was still and thinking. After an uncomfortable silence, he chortled and jostled back to life.

  “I think I would like to hold her.”

  One hand was all he needed to envelop he,r but he still used two to scoop her up. The little calf’s ears perked up. Whatever Scorax saw in those twin beads satisfied, and he returned her.

  “Very well. The world for the princess. That seems to be the purpose of the god.”