#40klore

Asleep within the sarcophagus, cut off from the world. The body is dead, the will endures. It is cold. But when they wake me, I remember only one thing: war.

(Now With 30% Less Mutagenic Horror! No, We’re Lying. It’s Worse Than Ever.)

Ahhh, it’s that time of year again in Hive Gristmill 23-A—the Sump Sludge has thickened, the bioluminescent tumors are ripe for the picking, and the air smells like boiling metal and half-digested despair! That’s right, it’s time for THE SUMP HARVEST, where the bravest (or dumbest) of the underhive gather for a once-a-year feast of things that probably shouldn’t be consumed by anything with DNA.

Are you ready to choke down some industrial effluents, hallucinate violently, and maybe wake up with an extra lung growing out of your forehead? Then grab your rancid bib, pray to whatever grotesque mockery of the Emperor you still believe in, and let’s f*ing go.**

🔪 A CULINARY NIGHTMARE, SERVED BOILING HOT 🔪

Sump Harvest isn't just about "eating." It’s about proving your genetic resilience to the gods of mutation and poor life choices. Every year, as the chemical waste pools reach peak saturation, the hive's most desperate (or utterly insane) descend into the depths of the sump pits to drag out "food."

By Imperial decree, we are legally obligated to refer to it as "food," despite the fact that many of these creatures are capable of whispering, visibly resent their own existence, or attempt to fight their way back out of your stomach hours after ingestion.

🚨 WHAT’S ON THE MENU? 🚨

🍽️ SUMP CRAWLERS – The Classic Favorite!

What are they? Imagine a shrimp. Now give it 14 extra legs, a face like a melting skull, and a genetic history best described as "war crimes in motion."

How do you eat them? Well, normally you’d boil them. But boiling them makes them release a paralytic neurotoxin that permanently locks your muscles in place.

Solution? Eat them raw, while they’re still twitching. The movement aids digestion.

🦠 TUMOR-RIDDEN FISH – Freshly Gasping for Air!

Sourced from the most stagnant, nightmare-inducing sump pools, these fish are caught just before their own cells collapse into self-replicating sludge.

If the fish you eat starts convulsing inside your mouth, don’t worry—it’s normal. That’s just its "survival instinct." Ignore it. Chew harder.

🦑 BIOLUMINESCENT SLUDGE-BLOATERS – Because Who Needs Organs?

These mysterious gelatinous things grow wherever chemical waste meets failed Adeptus Mechanicus experiments.

Eat them raw and your vision gets "enhanced" (translation: your eyeballs melt but your brain starts "seeing" through the warp).

Fun fact: Their glow remains in your digestive tract for up to 48 hours, making your excrement visible in complete darkness!

👑 THE KING OF THE SUMP – EAT HIM, OR HE EATS YOU

And then there’s the main event. The absolute crown jewel of this disgusting affair.

A creature so loathsome, so profoundly unnatural, that even the sump itself tries to reject it.

🔥 THE KING OF THE SUMP 🔥 A man-sized parasite. Fleshy, pulsing, riddled with rudimentary eyes and human-like appendages.

"Born" in the depths of industrial runoff, the King of the Sump absorbs the genetic material of everything it touches. That includes rats, fish, lost servitors, and the occasional unlucky scavenger.

Its flesh is riddled with tumor-clusters that pulse in sickly, hypnotic rhythms. Some say if you listen closely, you can hear it whispering in Binary.

And once a year, it is captured, dragged to the surface, and ritually consumed… alive.

Why? Because fortune favors the insane.

The honor of the first bite goes to whichever brave soul can wrestle the thing down without being absorbed into its biomass.

Its flesh is said to "bless" the eater—granting unnatural strength, heightened perception, and, in some cases, rapid-onset metamorphosis.

Survive the night without your bones liquefying? Congratulations, you’re officially a legend.

🍵 DEEP ROT BROTH – THE FINAL TEST

Still hungry? F* you, drink this.**

The final event of the Sump Harvest is the drinking of the Deep Rot Broth. A fermented slurry of industrial runoff, psychotropic mold, and whatever the hell is still moving at the bottom of the vats.

The broth smells like burning metal and old blood.

The texture is comparable to chewing on a bag full of tumors.

The aftertaste lingers for days. Some say it leaves behind "memories that aren’t yours."

RULES:

Drink the whole thing.

Don’t throw up.

Survive until morning without screaming, convulsing, or bursting into spontaneous mutations.

If you succeed, you get a prize!

The prize? No one knows. No one has ever won.

🔥 FINAL THOUGHTS: THE TRUE SPIRIT OF THE HARVEST 🔥

The Sump Harvest isn’t just a festival. It’s a f*ing test.**

It’s a celebration of resilience, of survival, of the absolute refusal to die despite the universe doing everything in its power to crush you.

In Hive Gristmill 23-A, you don’t get the luxury of a clean meal, a safe life, or even basic human dignity. But you do get one day a year to prove you’re stronger than the filth, the sickness, and the sheer f*ing horror of existence itself.**

So raise your sludge-filled goblets, take a bite of something that still twitches, and savor the pure, unfiltered, industrial-strength nightmare of being alive in the Imperium of Man.

Because if you can survive this?

You can survive anything.

So our boy, the very first demon prince seeking to rival the gods had some lore recently where he allied with the Dark Angels to dunk on Vashtor mostly because he sees him as a rival on his path to godhood - at least, that's the official reason, how Belakor figured out where the Rock was located when even Vashtor had to go through extra trouble of locating it we still do not know.

But the thing about the gods in this setting is, you can't just BECOME a chaos god. The gods are essentially self-sustaining patterns emerging from the emotional runoff of the Materium. To be a god means to be linked to a fundamental aspect of the percieved reality shared by countless different species and entities. The stronger the emotion concerning a specific aspect, the stronger the effect in the realm beyond.

They are patterns formed from specific emotional bits, and to become a god Belakor needs also an aspect of reality that he would be linked to and that would also for better or worse define him. So what is Belakor all about? Looking at his lore, mostly ambition. He wants to surpass the gods themselves, and that is a pretty tall order. In fact, I doubt you can get any more ambitious than that within the setting. So if anything, he'd be the "Chaos God of Ambition".

But there is a problem with that divine domain. The gods as patterns are more or less static. They do not change unless the perception of mortals of their divine domains changes, and that is resulting less in the change of said pattern and more in the emergence of a new one, replacing the old. Generally this problem of fleeting human concepts meeting timeless divinity is a lot of the reason why the Chaos Gods are how they are.

The thing is, when you reach your goal, that's a change of status. So if Belakor reached his ambition, he would no longer be the most ambitious entity in the universe, therefore no longer linked to the very thing that would sustain him. The static nature of divinity does not mix with his goals.

He wants to become a god, but the part of the warp he'd draw from will forever prevent him from ever getting where he wants to be. One could not be sure if he would even realize if he had become a god already, because that'd go against the nature of his supposed divine domain.

Doctrine. Discipline. Rock.

We paint single models and full armies.

"Hidden in the shadow of the stars, he waits patiently for his moment. Death comes with the silence of the cosmos..."