Warhammer

20/09/25 - Continuing with the 2001 reprint of the Deathwing Anthology.

Pestilence

By Dan Abnett

This was a neat little story about an extrenely lethal Chaos plague killed in four days and in your last hours you would be sent into a berserk fury and kill everyone around you.

The main character was just a medical researcher researching an old plague similar to a new sector wide pandemic and went to interview one of the few survivors of the last outbreak. The whole of the drama was those interviews and the stories in them because when he gets the info out, the story wraps up the current pandemic in a couple paragraphs.

The interview lead to the interviewee saying either Nurgles name or some other plague-daemons, the lead did not record it(well, technically his artificer did, but the name was smoking through the parchemnt), but saying it caused the entire asylum to go lose their shit and riot and a bunch of patients and orderlies died. Not really much else to say about this story.

I CRANED IN at the dark doorway. ‘What word? What word was it, colonel?’ With great reluctance, he spoke it. It wasn’t a word at all. It was an obscene gurgle dignified by consonants. The glyph-name of the plague-daemon itself, one of the ninety-seven Blasphemies that May Not Be Written Down. At its utterance, I fell back off my stool, nausea writhing in my belly and throat. Kalibane shrieked. The sister collapsed in a faint and the novitiate fled. Baptrice took four steps back from the doorway, turned, and vomited spectacularly.

The temperature in the corridor dropped by fifteen degrees.

Unsteady, I attempted to straighten my overturned stool and pick up the artificer that the novitiate had knocked over. Where it had recorded the word, I saw, the machine’s parchment tape had begun to smoulder.

Screaming and wailing echoed down the hall from various cells.

The twist it that the plague apparently was sapient and capable of brainwashing medics and shit and even a space marine apothecary into intentionally spreading it, even as they think they're trying to create vaccines and treatments to cure it. It also doesn't kill them or drive them mad, so they're free to try curing it but in so doing, spread it via those very vaccines and treatments.

16/09/2025 9:58pm - I finished reading Tanith Lee's Birthgrave trilogy, so... I decided to see how far I could go with reading Warhammer 40k fiction for no other reason other than morbid curiousity.

Deathwing

By William King and Bryan Ansell

A space marine captain called Cloud Runner is upset about his home village being destroyed and three sentences in we get hit with this:

Weasel-Fierce had just descended from the ramp. He gazed round ferally at what once had been Cloud Runner’s village and brought his storm bolter into attack position. A grin split his skull-like face.

‘Dark Angels, be wary. Death has walked here,’ he said. The sun glistened off Weasel-Fierce’s black Terminator armour.

A Dark Angel Terminator named Weasel-Fierce is very funny to me, and so is 'gazed round ferally.' There's also a space marine named Lame Bear and he has a limp. Did he somehow make it as a space marine with a limp??? How??? Or did he earn the name Lame Bear later?? Anyway whoever burnt down the village also descerated the village. And then, holy shit, there's a slur on the second page. That was fast.

TWO HEADS TALKING studied the desiccated bodies within the lodge. One had been an old warrior. His shrivelled hand still clutched a stone axe inscribed with the thunderbird rune. The other had been a squaw. Between her skeletal fingers was the neck of an infant.

Ahaha... I guess that's 1990 tabletop game fiction for you...

Anyway, Two Heads Talking is the Librarian and Bloody Moon calls him Lord-Shaman as he used to be his bodyguard before they became space marines. All these guys were recruited from various clans on this world.

Two Heads Talking can sense something tainting the place that's NOT QUITE demons but its something. They all pile back into the dropship and see a horrible walled city of factories and decide to investigate it, or rather Cloud Runner decides to let Two Heads Talking investigate it alone!! Why alone???

The Librarian can manage though I guess because he gets high and goes to the spirit realm to ask spirits to cast a 'I'm Actually Meant To Be Here' spell on him so no guards will challenge him. Giving a part of his strength to spirits for this sounds very heretical but it might just be a weird understanding and visualisation of psyker powers.

He stood in a cold shadowy place. He sensed chill white presences at the edge of his perception, clammy as mist and cold as the gravemound. Above him he could hear the beating of mighty pinions from where Deathwing, the Emperor’s steed and bearer of the souls of the slain, hovered.

The shaman talked with the presences, made pacts that bound them to his service and rewarded them with a portion of his strength. He sensed the hungry spirits surge around him, ready to shield him from sight, to cloud the eyes of any who might look upon him, causing them to see only a friendly being.

Meanwhile the rest of the dudes are trying to find other surviving clans and arent having any luck and Lame Bear gets so upset that he runs off to find his people ahead of everyone. They find a lot of mutilated and crushed bodies as they go through cave tunnels. Everyone's dead and they find a painting of a genestealer. Normally space marines virus bomb this sort of shit, but Lame Bear and Weasel-Fierce are all like 'Could you truly wipe out the last chance our world has?' Also the Dark Angels only recruit from this world, so unless they break tradition, they're done. So...

Two Heads Talking just walks around and looks at a whole bunch of maimed people who have been harmed in the industrial work and bullied by the Genestealer elite and their thugs.

The rest of the space marines hold a Mofference. Two Heads Talking accidentally attracts the attention of the genestealer elder and flees.

At the Mofference, The Terminators take turns telling stories to argue their view and Lame Bear tells a story of nasty past encounter with genestealers and yes he lost the full use of his leg in it so... funny concidence or did he just change his name to Lame Bear after that?

Two Heads Talking gets owned by a horde of genestealers (but psychically drags the patriarchs soul into death with him) just as the terminators finally resolve to actually go and fight, and then it cuts to Cloud Runner telling the story to some new arrived Dark Angels ten years later, who have come looking for 30 suits of Terminator Armour that this lot took off with and never returned. The 5 marines that survived the genestealer battle (Cloud Runner, Lame Bear and three unnamed) split up the untainted populace of the city into five groups and took them off in different directions to teach them how the clans once lived.

This story was alright. It had some stuff going on like Cloud Runner often thinking of and regretting ditching the girlfriend he'd had long ago. His rival won her hand, as we find out when Two Heads Talking meets one of his still loyal-to-the-Imperial-Faith descendants (who then dies.)

What a weird story. Clearly from the early days too. The terminators basically desert to raise the non-genestealer people of the city in the traditional ways. When more Dark Angels come looking for them, ten years later, being all "WE COULD HAVE USED YOU DURING AN ORK WAR WE JUST HAD!" Cloud Runner just tells them "Well we had to secure our heritage."

The investigating Dark Angels are like, "Okay, peace out, we'll take the armour with us." and let the surviving terminators, who were all like 300 years old and worried about dying of old age (this doesnt happen in space marine lore anymore IIRC) stay to continue mentoring the new clans in their last few years of life.

Also, only recruiting more guys once every 100 years is excessively infrequent by space marine standards. This story was about the supposed actual founding of Deathwing, who you can play as in the L4D style game that the E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy people made, Space Hulk: Deathwing. Though this story is treated as apocryphal folklore in current canon for lots of reasons.

The Devil's Marauders

By William King

This was a nice little story about an ex-hiver ganger Imperial Guardsman and his company being run ragged by mysterious rebels on an artificial jungle planet of some sort. I liked it, but it was very simple. Commissar Borski only mercy-killed one man and did not execute any cowardly guardsmen and then this happened:

Suddenly a shadow passed over him. He cringed with fear, forced himself to look up. It was Borski. He looked calm and unafraid.

‘Get up, soldier,’ he said, ignoring the hail of darts which blurred by him. Nipper shook his head. Borski raised his pistol and snapped a shot off into the distance. Nipper heard a ricochet, saw Borski grimace with annoyance, like a man who had just missed a target on a practice range. He fired again and something close by groaned.

‘You can die like a cringing dog or like a soldier of the Imperium,’ Borski said. His calm voice carried clearly over the noise of battle. He fired again. The noise of his pistol seemed impossibly loud. ‘Be quick, your soul is in peril.’

Momentarily the noise of battle seemed to recede. Nipper looked up at the face of the commissar. Borski was strong and certain. His faith seemed to shield him as he stood amid the hail of enemy fire. Nipper knew his own hopelessness and lack of faith and felt diminished. He was filled with terror at the certainty of his own death. It turned his limbs to liquid.

He tried to make himself move. We all die in the end, he told himself. It is the manner of our dying that counts. Insight filled him. He knew as Borski knew that they were going to die here. That being the case, he had nothing to fear. His fate was already sealed. There was nothing he could do to alter it. His only choice was the way in which he met his end. Borski was setting him an example of how to do it. He smiled up at the commissar and rose to his feet.

Borski nodded, satisfied. ‘The correct decision,’ he said. ‘You are a true guardsman.’

Then his face was blown away by a hail of shuriken. Nipper looked at him and screamed.

The story is rather short over all, as its really just about these guys having a day to run 50km before their sector is bombarded from orbit. They make it in the end and then the darkly comedic ending happens.

‘We’re inside Zone Amber then?’

‘Yes, sir. Five kilometres.’

Nipper felt relief flood through him. He looked forward to getting some sleep in a relatively secure camp.

The sentry spoke again. ‘You just made it in time.’

‘I know,’ Krask said.

‘How could you, sir? We’ve only just got the order. We have to fall back to Zone Grey. The enemy have broken through perimeter Amber. The Divine Retribution is going to bombard this area from orbit in twenty-four hours.’

Nipper felt like screaming. Behind them a curtain of fire descended from the sky and the sector they had just left caught fire. From where Nipper stood it seemed as if the whole world was burning.

the end