The Harbingers embody the Death Guard's belief that the deadliest battles are won before a shot is fired. Where the wider Legion advances as an inexorable tide, this Company works in the shadows of that advance, or far ahead of it, poisoning wells and reservoirs, tainting granaries, and loosing curated diseases into unsuspecting populations. They are masters of the slow apocalypse, sowing sickness that may take weeks or years to bloom into full catastrophe.
Warriors of the Harbingers regard themselves as the truest servants of the Grandfather, for they alone perform the sacred first act of sowing. Their champions carry censers and ampoules of prized contagion the way a devout pilgrim carries relics, dispensing them with ritual care. When the greater host finally arrives, it often finds a world already broken, its defenders feverish and demoralised, its infrastructure rotting. The Harbingers linger only to witness the harvest they have made possible, then move on to seed the next world in Nurgle's endless, patient campaign.
Death Guard
Order of battle
The The Harbingers field the units of the Death Guard — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Death Guard formations
The FerrymenAlso called the Brethren of the Fly, the Ferrymen are the Sixth Plague Company and wardens of the Death Guard's rotting armadas. They ply the void between dying worlds, boarding and claiming new vessels for the Plague Fleets even as the parasite they name the Droning festers in their ranks.
The InexorableThe Inexorable are the Death Guard distilled to a single grim principle: advance and never stop. This Company specialises in siege and grinding assault, marching into the teeth of the heaviest defences and simply absorbing everything hurled against it. They are the anvil upon which enemy armies break, an unbreakable tide of rusted plate that arrives slowly and cannot be turned aside.
The Mouth of NurgleA Plague Company defined by voracious, all-consuming appetite, the Mouth of Nurgle exists to devour. Its warriors fall upon besieged worlds like locusts, stripping them of resources, life, and hope, and rendering everything down into raw material for the Grandfather's garden. Where they pass, little is left but ruin, rot, and the buzzing of flies.
The PoxmongersThe Poxmongers are the Fifth Plague Company of the Death Guard, artificers of ruin who march to war behind a groaning host of daemon engines. Where they pass, the sky chokes with exhaust and the ground trembles beneath rusting tracks, every machine a shrine to Nurgle's ceaseless labour.