Editing The 13th Black Crusade (section)

===A Creeping Doom===

In the chaos of the end of the millennium, the first signs that Abby was up to no good was not the appearance of war fleets. Oh no, instead what happened was the sudden jump of sightings of abandoned vessels getting spat out of the warp at in the sectors surrounding Cadia. Though rare, such a large instance hulks showing up at the same time wasn't unheard of either, though their convergence upon the core worlds of the systems merited enough of a response that system defense ships had to be scrambled to deal with them.

Warriors of the Adeptus Astartes were also among those called to intercept these derelicts, but what they found were disease-ridden nightmares filled with toxic filth. When news of this spread to the rest of the Navy, every wreck subsequently encountered were destroyed ASAP with torpedos and macrocannons from afar. However, Abbadon's strategy had already begun to manifest.

Outbreaks of sickness soon broke out among the ranks of the Imperial Navy, which coincided with the sudden sighting of the Chaos warship called the '''Plagueclaw''' in the Urthwart system. With more and more navy personnel in the region fallen ill, the number of intercept-capable ships dropped as well, weakening the overall sector. Despite this the caravan of diseased ships continued to drop from the warp, all in direct course for important worlds. Ad-hoc groupings of ships formed to try and destroy the hulks before they reached those planets, and an unofficial fleet under Admiral Quarren assembled in Belis Corona to hunt down the '''Plagueclaw'''.

What it encountered instead was far, ''far'', worse. In the Frenerax Dust cloud, the battle group was jumped by the infamous '''Terminus Est''', flagship of Typhus, the Herald of Nurgle. Outgunned, the fleet still managed to fight its way free, but for some reason Typhus deigned not to pursue.

The months that would follow would bear out just why.