Silence

The Scythe

Silence is Mortarion's signature weapon — a great curved war-scythe with a long haft, forged by the young Mortarion himself in the underforges of Barbarus, before the Emperor had found him. The blade is, by Legion tradition, the only piece of wargear in any Astartes Legion that pre-dates its primarch's Compliance. The Imperial weapon-historians who first studied Death Guard records during the Crusade found the claim unlikely and treated it as ceremonial myth. Mortarion never corrected them. He did not need to.

The scythe's blade is a single curved length of metallurgically uncategorisable alloy — the Mechanicus has assayed surviving Death Guard fragments and found a base of Barbaran iron interleaved with trace elements that do not match any known Imperial or Mechanicus forge output. The haft is wood from a tree species the Imperial Botanic Register lists as "Barbaran, locality-restricted, samples destroyed in Compliance bombardment." Whether the species existed before Mortarion or whether Mortarion was the species' only seed-keeper is one of the questions Barbarus answered before the Compliance silenced it.

The Underforge

Barbarus before the Emperor was a stratified world where humans lived in the toxic lowlands and an Overlord class — psyker-warlords of disputed origin — ruled from the high peaks above the breathable atmosphere. The lowland humans were chattel, hunted for sport or harvested for warp-rituals. Mortarion was raised by one of the Overlords on the heights and discovered, on his first foray downward, what his foster-father did to the people below.

The scythe was made in those first downward years. The young Mortarion taught himself the metallurgy. He taught himself the geometry of leverage for a weapon that would let a lowlander outreach a stooping Overlord. He taught himself the wood-craft for the haft. By the time the Emperor's Thunderhawks found him, the scythe had killed enough Overlords that Mortarion had stopped counting and the surviving Overlords had stopped sending hunters after him. The Emperor's arrival closed an engagement Mortarion had been running on his own terms for decades.

It made no sound when it took my brother's head. It has made no sound since.

— Death Guard veteran, Heresy era

The Sound

The blade is called Silence because, by Death Guard observation, the wounds it makes are silent. Throats cut by Silence do not gurgle. Lungs pierced by Silence do not gasp. The dying, even those who would otherwise scream, do not scream. The phenomenon is documented across enough independent Death Guard combat logs, in pre-Heresy years when the Legion was still a loyalist instrument, that the Mechanicus' early acoustic monitoring assumed the property was the result of a deliberate Mortarion-designed acoustic damper built into the haft.

Later Mechanicus analysis of recovered Heresy-era Death Guard warband effects has not confirmed the damper hypothesis. The scythe does not appear to contain a conventional acoustic device. The current Mechanicus' restricted reading is that whatever Mortarion did to the metallurgy of the blade produced a property the Imperium does not have language for — the blade does not cancel sound, the way a damper would, but absorbs it: the screams are not silenced, they are taken into the metal. Whether this property is psychological projection by the Death Guard veterans observing it, or whether something inside the blade now carries an accumulation of unscreamed cries, is open.

The Heresy Use

Mortarion carried Silence through the Crusade and into the Heresy. The scythe killed loyalist Astartes at Isstvan III's virus-bombing follow-up engagements, at the Dropsite Massacre, at the Solar System siege engagements where the Death Guard breached the outer defences. The Sanguinary Guard records, in the post-Heresy reconstruction, attribute the deaths of three named Imperial Fists captains at the Palace's wall-engagements specifically to Silence. The wounds were diagnostically distinctive — silent in the body, slow to seal even by Astartes Larraman-blood standards, marked by a chemical signature the Apothecary archive eventually filed as "pre-plague."

What is recorded but not formally interpreted in the Imperial archive is that Mortarion carried Silence into the Final Chamber's outer engagements but was not present at the duel itself. He was on the Vengeful Spirit's bridge when Sanguinius died and when the Emperor was wounded. The scythe did not enter the duel. Whether this was Mortarion's choice or Horus's instruction has not been documented.

The Daemonhood

After the Heresy, Mortarion's ascension to daemonhood transformed Silence in ways that were not catalogued until the M41 Plague Wars produced enough Imperial after-action data to make the changes legible. The scythe now bleeds. Daemonic ichor seeps from the cutting edge at the moment of contact with mortal flesh; the ichor is a vector of Nurgle's diseases, prepared by what theologians cannot decide whether to call Mortarion's will or Nurgle's. The wounds Silence makes are still silent. They are also, now, infectious.

Most beings cut by Silence and not immediately killed die within hours of plague rather than of the cut itself. Astartes constitutions resist the infection for longer — three to five days, depending on Chapter gene-seed — but resist is not the same as defeat. The plague Silence carries is not a single disease but a family of related conditions, each calibrated to break through a different Imperial countermeasure. The Apothecary corps has, after seventy years of M42 engagement, abandoned attempts to develop a unified counter-agent. The current standing instruction is to amputate the limb the cut is on, if the cut is on a limb, within two minutes of contact.

My scythe was a tool for a boy. It is now a sacrament for the god my house entered.

— Mortarion, attributed Plague Planet

The Plague Wars

The Plague Wars in the Era Indomitus saw Silence wielded against Guilliman's personal guard at the Battle of Iax. The scythe was, by Imperial after-action record, the deciding factor in three engagements that the Imperial line should otherwise have held. At Iax's central plaza engagement, Mortarion took down two of the Victrix Guard with successive strikes that the surviving Custodian witness — yes, a Custodian; Guilliman's bodyguard had been augmented — described as "geometrically improper," meaning the scythe's reach exceeded what a primarch's arm-length should permit.

Guilliman engaged Mortarion directly later in the campaign at the Battle of Hera's Crown. The two primarchs duelled. Mortarion withdrew before either was decisive. Silence drew Guilliman's blood, in a glancing strike along the forearm; the Emperor's Sword cracked one of Silence's edge-ribs in return, and a Death Guard repair crew has been working on the rib in Mortarion's personal armoury at the Plague Planet ever since. The duel is the only engagement where Silence has been demonstrably wounded.

The Standing Question

Silence's continued service across ten thousand years is theologically significant for the Death Guard. The scythe is, by their reading, proof that Mortarion was the architect of his own ascension rather than an instrument of Nurgle's will — he carried the same weapon before and after, and the weapon's changes mirror his own changes rather than the god's. Nurglite theological commentary from outside the Death Guard rejects this reading on principle but has been unable to construct a satisfactory counter-argument.

The Inquisition tracks Silence's location through the Plague Wars' engagement logs. The scythe has not left Mortarion's grip in any reported engagement since the Heresy — there is no record of it being placed in custody, sealed in a vault, or handed to a subordinate even for ceremonial purposes. Whatever Silence is now, the Death Guard treats it as inseparable from its primarch. The Ordo Malleus' working hypothesis is that the scythe and Mortarion are no longer cleanly distinct — that they may, in some non-trivial sense, have become a single entity occupying two adjacent bodies.