Home › Great Battles › The Plague Wars
1 / 2 · Click to enlargeBackground
The opening of the Great Rift tore the galaxy in half, and in the turmoil that followed, Nurgle — the Plague Father, Grandfather of disease and decay — turned his gaze upon Ultramar. To him, the ordered, prosperous worlds of Roboute Guilliman's realm looked like nothing so much as an untended garden, ripe to be seeded with pestilence. Even before the Rift opened, his cults had been spreading quiet contagions through three systems on Ultramar's northern border. Those worlds, now wholly his, became known as the Scourge Stars, and from them the invasion would come.
The Plague Father entrusted the campaign to his favoured son. Mortarion, Daemon Primarch of the Death Guard, had loathed Guilliman for ten thousand years. Where Guilliman built systems, laws and empires, Mortarion had once fought for freedom from tyranny and ended up the willing slave of the very powers he despised. For him, rotting Ultramar would be both an offering to his god and the most personal revenge imaginable.
Guilliman, newly risen from his long death-sleep, was far away, leading the Indomitus Crusade across the galaxy. The defence of his realm fell to Marneus Calgar, his Ultramarines and the armies of the Five Hundred Worlds. They faced an enemy that did not want to conquer Ultramar so much as to infect it — to turn its cities into plague-pits and its people into shambling, disease-ridden thralls.
The Forces
Three great hosts came out of the Scourge Stars. Mortarion led the main invasion himself, with the bulk of the Death Guard: lumbering Plague Marines in corroded armour, Blight-haulers and Plagueburst Crawlers, Foetid Bloat-drones and endless hordes of Poxwalkers. Typhus, the Herald of Nurgle and the Legion's First Captain, commanded the Plague Fleet, a rotting armada packed with renegades, cultists and his own Death Guard. The third host was a tide of daemons led by Ku'Gath Plaguefather, the Great Unclean One, which ravaged the Tartella System before manifesting on the garden world of Iax.
The defenders were among the best-organised forces in the Imperium. The Ultramarines and their Successor Chapters, the Ultramar Auxilia, the Knight Houses of the realm and the Titan Legions of the Mechanicus stood together under a single command structure that Guilliman had designed ten thousand years earlier. As the war went on, they were reinforced by the new Primaris Space Marines of the Indomitus Crusade, and by Chapters such as the Novamarines, the Silver Eagles, the Howling Griffons and the White Scars.
The Death Guard do not fight like other armies. They do not charge or rush; they advance at a steady, implacable pace, soaking up fire that would destroy any other foe, while their weapons spread infection with every shot. A wound from a plague knife festers in minutes. A single shell from a Plagueburst Crawler can turn a trench into a pit of liquefying flesh. Their victims do not stay dead — they rise as Poxwalkers, shambling into the line against their former comrades. To fight the Death Guard is to fight the disease as much as the enemy.
Phases of the War
The invasion was too large to meet head-on, but not quite strong enough to storm Macragge itself. Mortarion knew this, and fought accordingly. He sent probing raids of Plague Drones and cultists against the capital to drain its resources and morale, while his main forces fell on smaller, weaker worlds and slaughtered their populations to goad Guilliman into battle. Espandor and Ardium were besieged. On Iax, refugee soldiers carrying the Plague Father's taint transformed into Plaguebearers in the middle of the hospital camps, opening the way for Great Unclean Ones to manifest. Meanwhile Typhus's fleet terrorised the realm's outer reaches and destroyed three of the six great star forts guarding Ultramar's shipping lanes.
Then Guilliman returned. His first blow fell on Ardium, a hive world in the Macragge System, where he discovered that Mortarion was using an ancient artefact known as the Hand of Darkness to power Plague Engines — infernal devices that raised the dead as plague zombies. Guilliman destroyed the engine and freed the world. Mortarion tried to trap his brother on Macragge with an invasion of the Konor system, but the defenders held, and the corrupted death world of Loebos — the key to his plan — was destroyed in a near-suicidal Imperial landing.
On Espandor, Guilliman launched the counterattack known as the Spear of Espandor. For the first time, Ultramarines veterans fought alongside their new Primaris brothers, retaking each of the system's worlds and destroying the Plague Engines that fed the tide of walking dead. Guilliman ended the battle personally, killing the Great Unclean One Qaramar with the Emperor's Sword. With Espandor cleansed, the invaders were cut off from the Scourge Stars.
Mortarion and Ku'Gath threw their strength at Parmenio. On the Plains of Hecatone, the largest armoured and Titan battle of the war raged as Imperial Knights and god-engines duelled amid fields of rot. Guilliman struck Ku'Gath's vanguard and slew its lieutenant, Septicus. In orbit, the star fort Galatan tried to support the battle and was boarded by Typhus's Plague Fleet; the slaughter in its corridors was appalling, and among the dead was the Novamarines Chapter Master, Bardan Dovaro.
The horror of the war was not only on the battlefield. Field hospitals became breeding grounds for contagion. Medicae staff worked until the plagues took them too, and soldiers watched their wounded comrades bloat, sprout new mouths and rise again as enemies. On Typhus's boarded star fort, the defenders fought through corridors choked with buzzing flies and rotting dead; whole decks were sealed and vented into space rather than risk the spread. Ultramar's Auxilia regiments, trained to fight a conventional enemy, learned to burn their own dead before the bodies could stand back up.
Typhus's war in the void was a campaign of its own. After seizing the Odyssean starport, the Herald of Nurgle turned on Galatan — one of the great star forts that had guarded Ultramar's lanes since the age of the Primarchs. The fortress was held by Novamarines, Deathwatch kill teams, Grey Knights and regiments of Ultramar Auxilia, and its guns had broken fleets before. But Typhus did not come to besiege it. He came to infect it. Typhus carries the Destroyer Hive within his own body, and its clouds of plague-flies poured through ventilation shafts and cracked hatches, and the fighting inside the station became a slow, choking massacre.
Aftermath
The Death Guard retreated under cover of a virus bombardment. Iax, once the jewel of Ultramar's agri-worlds, was beyond saving. The Custodian Tribune Colquan evacuated Guilliman, Mathieu and many others before the Imperial fleet subjected the blighted world to Exterminatus. Guilliman vowed that the forces of Nurgle would be repaid tenfold for the evils they had wrought.
Ultramar was saved, but at enormous cost. Millions had died of plague or been turned into walking dead. Whole worlds had to be decontaminated. Guilliman oversaw the rebuilding and established new procedures for creating Primaris Marines within the Ultramarines, before new crusades called him away once more. The Ultramarines then launched the Vengeance Campaigns, leading their Successors and Knight Houses into neighbouring systems overrun early in the war; Marneus Calgar himself led efforts to liberate the Tartella System.
For Nurgle, the Plague Wars were a humiliation. His Garden had been wounded, and Mortarion and Ku'Gath fell from favour for defying his command to withdraw. But for Guilliman, the war was a grim reminder that even the heart of his realm was not safe. The Death Guard would return, for in the eyes of the Plague Father nothing is ever truly destroyed — it merely waits to grow again.
