Editing The 13th Black Crusade (section)

==Signs of the End==

===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.

===Unbelief===

Despite barely surviving from the encounter with Typhus, it was not yet over for Admiral Quarren's men. Many would sicken and die from disease on the return trip to Belis Corona, but the fleet still managed to return with it ships still usable.

Compared to Belis Corona though, it was pretty bad. Many plague hulks had slipped through the piecemeal blockades arrayed against them, and the same disease that had infected their crew spread like wildfire through the inhabited worlds of the Cadian and Agripinaa sectors. As the plagues killed millions, panic soon spread, and inter-system traffic was halted to contain the pandemic.

As despair and morale among the local populations fell, apocalyptic cults began to appear on every benighted world, and preached that the Emperor's wrath had descended upon everyone as punishment for their wickedness. Only the faithful would be spared the Curse of Unbelief, and masses of self-flagellating devotees began to fill the streets of these worlds, attracted by both their fiery rhetoric as well as their surprising health.

Just at a time when the Imperial Guard forces were begining to have to deal with local mobs killing people left and right, the dead came back as servants of Chaos, the infections of Nurgle clearly serving as a time-delayed invasion tool.

Within months millions of plague zombies clawed themselves out from the makeshift graves they had been buried in among the dozens of worlds in the Belis Corona and Agripinaa sectors, and threw themselves on their still-living relatives. The Guard are pushed to the breaking point trying to contain both the zombie outbreak ''and'' the mobs of zealots running amok, while the Navy was still recovering from the initial plagues, and thus in no position to either defend these worlds or bring in orbital support.

The '''Terminus Est''' at the head of a Chaos fleet entered the sector, to begin running amok against the defenseless Imperial worlds.