Necrosius the Undying
Necrosius was once an Apothecary of the Death Guard Legion of Space Marines during the Great Crusade whose original name has long been purged from all Imperial records. During the early days of the Horus Heresy, soon after the Death Guard turned against the Emperor of Mankind, when the Traitor Legion’s fleet was becalmed in the Warp on the way to Terra and assaulted by the infectious corruption of Nurgle, the man who would become Necrosius and his fellow Apothecaries among the Astartes of the Death Guard turned their every art and skill against the strange plagues sweeping their ranks. But it was all to no avail. The decay and disease that ravaged the Death Guard was a daemonic thing of Chaos, and no mortal science or cure could hope to counter it, for the Legion had become the Chosen of Nurgle as soon as they had joined the cause of Horus. Necrosius would not stop trying to find a cure, however, and even as his fellow Astartes died around him, each in turn succumbing to despair and the macabre blessings of Nurgle’s touch, he struggled on against all hope. Necrosius was obsessed with finding an answer, even as the halls of the Death Guard Strike Cruiser on which he was stationed began to unnaturally twist and corrode around him, and in the shadows daemons capered and mocked his efforts. Though his dead comrades staggered back into unholy life through the blessings of Nurgle and his own body had become a bloated and rotted husk of plague, he continued past reason and the bounds of sanity.
When Necrosius heard the voice of his new lord in corruption chortling and whispering to him in the murmerous wings of carrion flies and the sibilant gurgling of rotted, decaying organs, he fully accepted the nightmare truth of what he and his fellows had been damned to become, and embraced the service of his vile God. Necrosius became a true convert to Nurgle’s cause, casting aside his past learning and cherished role as a healer of his Battle-Brothers. He now chose to give himself, blighted soul and rotted body, to the lore of death and the pursuit of daemonic sorcery, and soon excelled as a master of the dark arts of necromancy. With the zealous conviction displayed only by a true convert, Necrosius quickly gathered a following among his fellows with his baleful oratory and vision of granting the “gift” of death to all Mankind. These first disciples among the corrupted Death Guard would eventually become the first members of Necrosius’ new warband, the Apostles of Contagion. His bitter heart would allow him to bend the knee to no master save Grandfather Nurgle, and even his former Primarch Mortarion he obeyed only grudgingly. He long harboured a resentment of Typhus, whose betrayal had sent the once-noble Death Guard Legion to its final damnation after becoming lost in the Warp. It is a resentment that has festered into a deep rivalry and open conflict down the centuries between Necrosius’ warband and the Death Guard faction led by the former First Captain of the Legion.
Soon Necrosius’ Apostles parted company from their fellows and went their own way, spreading disease and the “gift” of the walking death wherever they went, heedless of to whom they brought their blighted contagion, whether they were servants of the Emperor or other followers of the Ruinous Powers. As a result, Necrosius and his Apostles of Contagion have made many enemies and participated in an unknown number of great atrocities through the millennia since the days of the Horus Heresy; from the horrors of the Dorisca Genocides to the blighting of the Eldar Maiden World of Cth’rawl. During these years the power of Necrosius has waxed and waned many times, and indeed sources both Imperial and from within the Forces of Chaos have believed him destroyed on numerous occassions, whether at the blades of Imperial Assassins or in the flames of Ahriman’s sorcerous fires, but always he has returned. This has earned Necrosius the sobriquet “the Undying” among his devotees.
Being one of the most powerful and favoured servants of Nurgle, Necrosius is attended by the tiny, impish Lesser Daemons of Nurgle known as Nurglings. These vicious creatures attack in swarms that bite and claw with infected fangs, their festering bites quickly making a minor wound turn dangerously gangrenous. Necrosius is also adorned with the blasphemous and macabre trappings of a Chaos Sorcerer, including shrunken heads, fetishes, blasphemous glyph-carved icons and a personal banner bearing the foul symbols of Chaos, harvested body parts and the like. These totems are thought to have use in ritual practises providing a psychic focus for the sorcerer’s malign psychic energies as well as fulfilling other symbolic functions. Being a powerful sorcerer, Necrosius has learned many terrible secrets from the suppurating lips of Grandfather Nurgle’s daemon-kin, including the ability to raise the dead as unliving Zombie Plague.
