The green thread was about to burn through.
But once it had shrunk to a certain point, it suddenly stopped, quivered, and began growing again.
Grandfather had noticed that things here had slipped out of his control.
His power poured in from the depths of the Warp, swelling the green thread again and beginning a tug-of-war with the golden light.
Still, the Purification had worked.
Its main effect was on Mortarion.
Mortarion suddenly regained his sight.
For the thousands upon thousands of years since he had fallen to Chaos, he had been unable to see anything.
Nurgle's corruption had filled his eyes, its surging power flooding his retinas and his consciousness.
He could not see himself, the sons around him, or the Warp.
He could see nothing but an eternally churning expanse of rotten green.
The instant the green thread thinned, the corruption clouding his perceptions receded with it.
Mortarion's consciousness rose from the mire in the deepest reaches of the Warp, drifting up through layer after layer of thick green sludge until, for the first time in ages, it broke the surface.
Then he lowered his head and saw his hands.
Huge, pale, rotten, and tipped with black claws.
Before he could recover from the shock, a white maggot suddenly dropped out of his gas mask.
The plump, wriggling little white thing squeezed out through the connection on his respirator, fell onto his breastplate, and began squirming merrily across his chest.
Mortarion felt that his respirator was crammed with those things.
His lungs were crammed with them too.
His blood, flesh, bones... they were everywhere.
Mortarion suddenly let out an agonized, heartrending scream.
He was certainly not someone who cared much about his appearance, but seeing what he had become still filled him with unbearable anguish.
*How had he