66. A Game of Chess

Mist swirled everywhere.

Lean armored boots stepped into the mud. The fog rose and fell with his breathing. The forest was silent; the insects that had once buzzed and crashed about now fell to the ground with soft patters.

He walked in silence.

The Garden was falling apart. The Death God, artificially established, had seized its authority. His wings hung low, and death clung to him.

He... had been wrong.

He could not completely replace Nurgle. He could not completely kill Him. The Pool of Decay dwelled above the High Heavens; he could not kill an entire Garden.

But even so... Mortarion let out a deep sigh. Bony hands reached into the gaps in his armor, tore out fungi resembling the growths that sprouted from Greenskins, and threw them to the ground.

The emerald fungi quickly bent and withered in the white mist. The roars of distant Greenskins were also growing fainter. They were leaving.

He did not have much time left.

The Pale Lord walked alone through the silent woods.

He passed the corpses of dead Eldar and heard faint sobbing. The crying flowed through the forest like a babbling stream.

The woods remained shrouded in deathly mist.

Mortarion followed that stream upstream.

Fresh shoots sprouted from the dead grassland. Their tender green was unlike Nurgle's color. Sparse shadows of trees fell across a clearing drenched in sunlight, where white roses bloomed in abundance.

Isha was there—the Eldar Mother Goddess of Life. Draped in plain gauze, she knelt amid Isha's rose bushes. Shackles still clung to her wrists and ankles, while her last children huddled tightly around her tall, voluptuous form as she sobbed.

Mortarion strode over without hesitation. Wherever he stepped, the pure white roses immediately withered.

"So you never escaped," Death said calmly. He revealed his scythe,