Editing Death Guard (section)

=== Horus Heresy ===
By the time of the Horus Heresy, the Death Guard was known to have had roughly 95,000 Space Marines. One of the most isolated Legions, they tended to take on the most inhospitable warzones of all. They developed a rivalry of sorts with the Iron Hands, priding themselves on their innate resistance whereas the Iron Tenth got theirs from intensive augmentation. Having found their Primarch relatively late, tensions persisted between the Barbaran "true" Death Guard and the old Terran Marines who remembered the Dusk Raider days. Barbarus brought other baggage, including a fanatical hatred of psykers which would lead to Mortarion calling for an end to the Space Marine Librarius.

During the [[Horus Heresy|Galaxy's Greatest Hangover since the]] [[Fall of the Eldar|Fall of the Eldar]], the Death Guard and Mortarion were one of the first traitor legions to rebel against [[Emperor|daddy]]. Within the Heresy, Mortarion's smaller fleet led a [[Fail|failed]] attempt on [[Prospero]] to convince [[Jaghatai Khan]] and the [[White Scars]] to join with them, only for <s>Genghis </s> Jaghatai to tell the psychic-hating bigot to fuck off and thus, the White Scars and Death Guard battled to a stalemate. Some fight scenes later, Mortarion meets up with Typhus (then Calas Typhon), who pulled a dick move and killed off the [[Navigator]]s, but convinced Mortarion that he could lead them to Terra. As you might expect, entering the [[Warp]] without a Navigator's help is just asking for something bad to happen. [[Rape|Then came the Destroyer Plague, and their fate was sealed.]] Their superhuman constitution and grim determination proved worthless against the Destroyer, and so they embraced Papa Nurgle to be freed from the plague and relieved of their suffering, at the cost of, well...

Mortarion also had a personal guard, the speechless and silent [[Deathshroud|Death Shroud]], who had to remain within 49 (Get it? Nurgle's holy number is seven and 49 is seven squared?) paces of their primarch at all times.
Oh, and they enjoyed drinking a cup of foul, poisonous bile to commemorate victory. Mortarion chugged the stuff like water, though his captains had trouble holding their guts inside after drinking.

Once the Heresy was properly underway Mortarion rose quickly in Horus' esteem by not going bugfuck insane and/or turning (his brothers) into a daemon. A few years into the war, Horus charged him to wipe out the White Scars. Mortarion duly pursued them to the Catullus Rift, only to be thwarted by a Webway portal he had no reason to expect and a heroic last stand by the Scars' Sagyar Mazan kill-squads.

The Death Guard were the first Traitor Legion to make landfall on Terra during the Siege and immediately set about turning the entire warzone into a large-scale recreation of Passchendaele circa 1917. True to their natures, old and new, they ground relentlessly forward, absorbing damage without turning aside or wavering. Every advance was heralded by a rancid stew of toxins, chemical weapons, psychic maladies, and warp-borne plagues that decimated the Imperial defenders facing them. They did not relent in the face of unrelenting artillery bombardments, counterattacks by the [[White Scars]] and [[Adeptus Custodes]], or the departures of the [[Emperor's Children]] and the [[Iron Warriors]]. Indeed, their reliability and durability had seen them supplanting the IV Legion as the Siege wore on; Perturabo took this as a monstrous insult and ordered his legion to abandon the battle, leading to the Death Guard taking command of the Lion's Gate Spaceport. Here they faced their greatest engagement of the siege, as the White Scars and the First Terran Armoured Corps stormed the spaceport under cover of the [[Orbital Plate|Skye orbital plate.]] Both sides inflicted and sustained heavy casualties, but the Death Guard did not break until Jaghatai Khan was able to decapitate and banish Mortarion, nearly at the cost of his own life. The resulting eruption of psychic energy staggered and disoriented the Death Guard, forcing them to fall back in the face of the newly enraged White Scars. The survivors regrouped outside the spaceport and rejoined Typhus, who had once again taken a significant portion of the Legion's forces and gone off on his own prior to the battle.

All in all, the Death Guard were stoic, poison-drinking, sour-faced martial warriors before [[Horus]] threw his [[Horus Heresy|surprise birthday bash]], and ended up rotting avatars of <s>[[AIDS]]</s>, Syphilis, and decay by the time the party was finished. Just like [[That Guy|that ONE GUY]] who always shows up.