The Befouled

Where other legions of the Grandfather set out to conquer peoples, the Befouled set out to conquer places. To them a defending army is merely an obstacle between their censers and the soil they have truly come for. Wells fouled, rivers turned to sludge, fields sown with rot and the black spores of the Garden: this is their campaign, waged not against flesh but against the ground beneath it.

Theirs is a methodical, almost agricultural desecration. The Befouled do not sack a valley and move on; they tend it, working its ruin season by season until the rot sinks past the topsoil and into the roots of the world. Only then, where the boundary between realms has been worn thin and sick, does Nurgle's Garden begin to push through: a new province of the daemon-realm annexed from the mortal one, one blighted spring at a time. To fight them is to defend not a city or a people but the health of the earth, a war that cannot be won by victory in the field alone. A host may be driven off; the poison already worked into the ground remains, spreading long after the last censer-bearer has gone. The Befouled measure their triumphs not in years but in geography, and every valley they leave behind is a little less the world's, and a little more the Garden's, forever.