5k views... and the Death Lord has come to thank you

I've just hit 5,000 views on this blog, which I'm really happy about! I've been working digital advertising for years, so I know that this number of views in six months isn't, in a general sense, that impressive. But I'm happy because it's the first time I've managed to maintain my own interest in a blog for most than a few posts. And I'm really happy that some people have taken some inspiration or ideas from what I've done. Thanks everyone!

Lord Eiterfex stood on the Calcifon Bridge, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. His ancient Cataphractii plate coughed as he moved, and the bridge's components moaned and sobbed in pain. Eiterfex didn't pay any attention to that. The Calcifon Bridge drooled stale blood and pus constantly into the black abyss below, but he didn't fear for his footing. He would fall only if he fell to the belief that he would. The Calciphon Bridge existed between the here and the there. The rules were different.

He was alone, of course. He had dismissed Thrombax, Maladax, even Doomhark. Even his palanquin bearers. No Plague Lord would offer the insult of walking the Calcifon Bridge with retainers. 

The muffled sound of screams billowing through the dark rose in pitch and volume. He looked up and saw the Gate of Faces ripping open, strings of matter hemorrhaging away, great rusted gears lubricated by the living tears of the gate's components. 

Two Deathshroud terminators stamped through the Gate of Faces in lockstep. They came to a halt amid the bloody loam before the Gate. They did not step onto the bridge. Instead, both slammed their Manreapers into the oozing ground seven times in ritual warning. 

Eiterfex sank to one knee in a scream of unwilling, corroded mechanisms. It was not easy or pleasant. It wasn't supposed to be. Eiterfex bowed his head. 

Then He came.

It was always more subtle than Eiterfex remembered. The footfalls of a spider. No... the trickle of sweat in a fever dream. The Death Lord did not come stamping with pomp and pageantry, like a king or general. He slipped in unnoted, until suddenly he was there, inevitable and unavoidable. Yet when he had come, that coming seemed unavoidable, the alternative unthinkable. The Death Lord was a fact, an immovable truth of creation. 

"Rise, my son," he said softly. The words did not come from a voice box. They whispered in the sound of moans, the buzz of insect wings. Eiterfex lumbered to his feet immediately.  

There was a shadow, a deeper patch of blackness in that abyss. Eiterfex inclined his head towards it, but did not look directly at it. 

"You have done well, my son," the Death Lord's voice buzzed and clicked, "I have been impressed."

The deeper patch of darkness wafted, shifted. For a moment, it seemed like a vast cloud of rotting locusts filled the world around Eiterfex. He felt unclean things crawling over and into him. He endured it. And then the cloud was gone. 

"And yet," the Death Lord went on, "I find myself unnerved by you. I find myself wondering about your ambition."

Eiterfex finally looked up. 

"You fear me a traitor, father?"

The Death Lord's laughter came, a sickly coughing susurrus. The darkness shifted again and Eiterfex felt billowing, cloying clouds swirl around him. The hopelessness of painful lives lived in stale, recycled air, yearning for blue skies that would never come. 

"We are all traitors, my son. I betrayed my father, who gave me life. Would it be strange if I feared my own sons would do the same?"

Eiterfex chuckled.

"I suppose not."

The darkness oozed around, somewhere behind him, and for a moment he thought he could hear uneven, gasping breaths pulled through a corroded rebreather. Affectation, of course: the Death Lord had not answered the quailing demands of biology for millennia. 

"But I do not fear your betrayal, Eiterfex. I fear your ambition. I fear that your brilliance will outpace our great design. And there are new players in this game."

Eiterfex remained still.

"You have seen it as well, father?"

There was a swishing, the sound of slime dribbling from a plague corpse. Something vast rustled and fluttered all around.

"I have seen. There is no counterfeit. It is him. I do not yet know how. But it is him. I sense my father's invisible hand at work."

Eiterfex released a bubbling expression of dark mirth.

"Nathaniel Garro," he said, shaking his head, "he never did know when to give up."

There was a strange sense of increasing tension, of the stomach pain that warns of the rising gorge. And the Death Lord became manifest before him. What hovered in the air above the Calcifon Bridge was a giant, monstrous caricature of the primarch who had once led the Death Guard to battle. The terrifying figure stayed aloft on soaring, dust-coloured moth wings, and every movement he made forced protesting screams and gouts of mouldering plague-spore from his pockmarked armour.

But the face...

The face was almost identical to what it had once been, the saturnine features and the pupilless white eyes, the expression ever-cryptic behind the ancient rebreather mask.

"My lord," Eiterfex said, bowing his head, "we know how dangerous he could be. He could destroy us."

Mortarion chuckled in wet, hellish glee.

"Which is why, my son, we will destroy him first."