A Judgement

[Urauloth]

The Night Lord laughed. 
Beneath the skull faceplate of Krixan's helm, black blood drooled from his mouth. The poisons that were killing him had already stopped his Larraman cells from clotting. He tried to haul himself up off the deck by leaning on the haft of his glaive, but the strength in his limbs was swiftly failing him, and he only made it to his knees. He glowered at his killers as though he might strike them down by the sheer force of his malice and contempt.

This was it. He was going to die here, in the ruin of his ship, for the stupidest reason he could imagine.

Of all the things in the galaxy that might have ended his ten millennia of life, it was going to be moral judgement. Moral judgement from traitors who had murdered worlds and turned planetary populations into shambling corpse-devils. He rejected all notions of morality entirely, but the idea that the Death Guard had any right to judge him was rank hypocrisy.

One of them stepped forwards, rust creeping across the deck like frost under the tread of his hoof-shaped boots. It loomed over the Night lord. The son of Mortarion was barely recognisable as an Astartes legionary; Its ancient plate was buckled and split, with growths of horn and antler and branches of rotten wood competing with necrotic flesh and writhing colonies of insect life to push their way from rents in the corroded steel and pitted ceramite. It was huge. It disgusted him - all soul-sellers and god-thralls did.

"It was working," the Nostroman spat. Something was writhing in his lungs now, some foul life seeded there by the blighted round that had shattered his armour and torn open his flesh. "We killed so many. The weak curs of the False Throne. All you did here was pull a knife from their guts. Pathetic Godslaves. You turned your swords against the Long War. Your soul is so rotten you forget what you fight for."

It was true, they had killed so very many. With the Astronomicon blinded, Imperial ships floundered, desperately seeking any means to navigate the Sea of Souls. Tortured astropaths burned brightly in the warp, and warbands of the Night Lords soon had many siren-ships of screaming psychic captives to lure vessels to the worst fates imaginable. It had taken a long time for the Imperium to attempt to retaliate, and the ships and their attendant ambush fleets were hard to bring to battle. Imperial Navy patrols attempting to chase down Krixan's raiders had soon found themselves becoming prey, and the bodies of hundreds of their crewmen were crucified to the hull of his cruiser.

That cruiser was now holed through and burning in the void, Death Guard kill teams crawling through it like worms in the guts of a corpse, hunting down the last of his brothers.
Their battlegroup had followed the siren signal, of course. When they broke warp, he had initially wondered if they had simply blundered into his hunting grounds intending to do battle with the Imperials his trap drew in - unasked for and unhelpful "allies" whose idiocy would spoil his careful methods. When They lit their shields and ran out batteries of ancient corroded guns, his next assumption had been that they were here to steal the siren-ship.
It had genuinely given him pause when their broadsides gutted it, silencing the signal it had taken so many intricately constructed agonies to create. It was only now, in his last moments, that he understood.

The Death Guard legionary spoke in a voice like rotten timber breaking, like sodden earth giving way to a gravedigger's shovel. It boomed from the rusting grille of his helm beneath the long horn that grew in place of the eye lenses. He answered the Night Lord's accusation.
"We have never forgotten why we fight, orphan of the Haunter. Not since we were first raised from nothing and forged into blades. We fight to free Mankind from tyranny. We have fought for nothing else. We never shall."
There was no anger in that terrible voice. No malice. There was only absolute conviction.

Krixan made a strangled noise, an inarticulate sound of spite and outrage. He made a last attempt to swing his weapon, but his strength fled him and he fell to the deck. The failing systems of his armour's helm display warned him that one of his hearts had stopped beating, before his sight abandoned him. There was only darkness, the gnawing inside him, and the droning voice of Death Guard.

"Your tyranny here is at an end, little lord of the night, and so Mortarion's justice is done; delivered by his Unbroken Blades. You say we have forgotten our purpose, but we alone remember it. The soul of the warrior is the shield of humanity. We alone fight to defend those who cannot defend themselves; from the False Emperor, from the lash of the Xenos," - delirious with fever, Krixan heard the Death Guard lean closer - "and from you."

The last thing he heard was the sound of the legionary lumbering past him, deeper into the ruin of his ship, leaving him to die.