Nurgle's Rot

Nurgle's Rot is the most potent of the Chaos God Nurgle's daemonic diseases and the greatest of his works of decay. The Lord of Decay’s most infamous accomplishment sets the benchmark for all his other creations. Despite millennia of effort, he has never bettered that disease which bears his name: Nurgle’s Rot. It is the most contagious, most rapacious, and most heinous of all sicknesses, poxes, and fevers he has ever produced. The Imperial authorities have destroyed entire worlds in the flame of Exterminatus at a single instance of Nurgle’s Rot; such is the terror it provokes.

Symptoms vary so wildly that no Imperial medic, physician or even a Space Marine Apothecary can deduce a cure, but the disease incorporates all the worst elements of every plague that has ever afflicted the mortals of the galaxy, slowly rendering the sufferer into a bloated, rotting, living corpse before they succumb to an eventual, agonising demise. Worse, its effects do not stop with death, for the soul of a mortal who succumbs to the infection belongs to Nurgle, doomed to serve forever as a Plaguebearer daemon.

Nurgleite tradition has it that, for each person who contracts Nurgle’s Rot, a seed like a rotten boil sprouts from the boughs of the mouldering willow trees which grow in Nurgle’s garden within his realm in the Warp. As the disease takes hold of the sufferer, that seed is said to swell into a vile, bubonic fruit which feeds off the afflicted person’s soul like a tick gorging itself on its host’s blood. When the bloated victim expires in a mess of bloody phlegm, the final traces of his soul are sucked into the engorged fruit, and the ripe flesh bursts apart as a new Plaguebearer slips, slides and slithers into existence.