Epidemius

Among the seven Proctors of Pestilence who marshal the Plague God's Tallybands, none holds a stranger office than Epidemius, the Tallyman of Nurgle. His unending task is to catalogue the potency of his master's countless diseases, and so he roams without rest through both the daemon worlds and the realms of mortals, seeking out each new strain of virus, each fresh species of rot, and every novel symptom of contagion to be entered into his ledgers.

Epidemius does not travel on foot. He is borne aloft upon a rotting palanquin carried by a swarm of Nurglings, who serve him as guards, scribes and instruments all at once. They secrete the ink for his quill, grow parchment from strips of skin peeled from their own backs, and reckon his running totals upon a death's-head abacus mounted behind him. From this lofty, reeking perch he surveys the spread of filth across a battlefield, noting every bubo, pustule and weeping sore with the diligence of a clerk tallying a great fortune.

There is dread purpose in this bookkeeping. As Epidemius records the mounting toll of infection, Grandfather Nurgle's attention is drawn ever more keenly to the field, and his generosity swells to match. The greater the tally of the diseased and the dying, the more potent grow the blessings that flow to every daemon of Nurgle nearby, so that plaguebearers strike harder, endure longer and spread their gifts more freely the longer the Tallyman is at his work. What begins as a trickle of contagion becomes, under his patient reckoning, an unstoppable tide.

Everything Epidemius sets down is distilled by his master into fresh horrors, new brews and viler experiments to be loosed upon creation in ages to come. He is at once the historian and the herald of every pox, and to hear the scratch of his quill upon a battlefield is to know that Nurgle himself is watching, and that his favour is gathering like a storm.