Vorx

Vorx numbers among the oldest living sons of Mortarion, one of the first aspirants raised from the poison-shrouded slopes of Barbarus when the Emperor restored the primarch to his Legion at the dawn of the Great Crusade. He has thus witnessed the whole arc of the Death Guard's history: their glory as warriors of the Imperium, their fall to the Warmaster's cause, and their long descent into the service of the Plague God. Where many of his brothers were broken or driven mad by that passage, Vorx endured, hardening into the very image of the patient, immovable warrior the Death Guard prize above all others.

He rose through the Legion to hold the rank of Siegemaster, a commander of fleets and a master of the slow, grinding warfare of the void and the wall. In the aftermath of the great rent that split the galaxy, it is the warband called the Lords of Silence that he leads, a vectorium numbering more than six hundred Heretic Astartes alongside teeming multitudes of cultists and Nurgle-blessed mutants. Their home and hunting-ground is the Solace, a vast and repulsive grand cruiser whose corroded holds and stilled decks bear the warband from one condemned system to the next.

For all the horror of what he has become, Vorx is no raving berserker. He is thoughtful, even philosophical, a warrior who contemplates the gifts of the Grandfather with something close to serenity, and who regards the spreading of plague as solemn and necessary work rather than mere slaughter. This measured devotion makes him no less deadly. At the head of the Lords of Silence he has fallen upon world after world, and among his triumphs stands the ruin of Sabatine, home of the White Consuls, where he broke that Chapter in battle and slew its master, Cymar Xydias, with his own hand before scattering the survivors to the void.

In Vorx the essential character of the Death Guard is distilled: not the hot fury of Khorne's servants nor the preening of Slaanesh's, but a cold, contented patience, the certainty of the terminal disease that knows it has all the time in the world. He fights on across the millennia without haste and without doubt, ferrying the Grandfather's gifts to the living whether they would receive them or not, and finding in each new plague-blessed world a small confirmation of a truth he settled upon long ago: that all things, in the end, belong to Nurgle.