Religion was, at its core, rooted around sacrifice. The faithful gave of themselves - their time, their possessions, their prayers, their lives - to the gods, and in return the gods protected the people and gave unto them their gifts so that they may prosper, and thus in time give the gods yet more. As much as Kritislik and Skrolk held distaste for each other, they both intimately understood this fundamental truth, and they knew it would be this axiom of faith that ushered their design into the world.
From Hell Pit to Scalpel Spire, skaven slaves in their hundreds of thousands were sent out into the tunnels underneath Norsca with only one instruction: dig. Under the direction of cruel-eyed Grey Seers and joyful plague acolytes, they excavated tunnel after tunnel in seemingly random locations, forbidden any tool but their bare claws. They dug until their fingers bled and their wrists snapped, until their arms were turned to naught but bloody stumps scraping against the tunnel walls, and still they dug. The things their overseers did to those who stopped were worse than what they endured. When they dropped dead in their thousands, they were shoved into the tunnel walls and left to rot. The network of passageways under Norsca soon became filled with the smell of corpse rot, and still the slaves were made to push on.
Hell Pit, as the center point of Moulder's operations, kept healthy stockpiles of giant rats within its cavernous halls. The creatures died quickly if they were not fed, their supercharged metabolism eating through them like a wasting disease, but they were of use in disposal of the dead and failed experiments. They were all taken into the tunnels. Even those stray colonies that had escaped their cages long ago and subsisted off unlucky clanrats in the outskirts of the fortress were rounded up with merciless grips and hauled off to the reeking system of passageways worming the earth between Hell Pit and Scalpel Spire. They died there, pissing themselves in terror as their throats were ritually torn out and their guts were pulled from them. They were not the only ones, not by far. Rat ogres by the hundreds were encased alive in the tunnel walls, slowly starving to death as their pitiful wails filled the air. Even those were not the last. The Hell Pit's stocks were emptied out, whimpering beasts and slavering Hellpit Abominations and writhing half-formed creations and more, politically disfavored members of Moulder and all their accomplices, even broods of normally cave-dwelling creatures that nevertheless shrank back from the sheer aura of death emanating from the tunnels were mercilessly herded in and died and died and died. The few living who walked through the network could feel the weight of their dead gazes on them, empty eye sockets staring endlessly out from the corpse-ridden walls, boring into the depths of their being.
The Grey Seers and Plague Priests began their work truly then, clades of each descending into the stench-filled tunnels. Kritislik and Skrolk went along with them, Helkic tagging along behind her master, alert for any sign of Seer interference - or anything untoward the Papus Pestilens might attempt.
Kritislik and a cadre of seers that had mastered the newly attained art of the Burning Ruin flooded the tunnels with black fire. It spewed out of their eyes and hands and gusted off their bodies in great gouts as they ate the life force of massive contingents of slaves to power their spells. They exhaled choking clouds of black smoke that filled the air so much that it was near impossible to breathe and stained their fur a deep black. Kritislik's eyes glowed a fell emerald as he channeled ash-tinged radioactive power into the tunnel walls, causing the hidden mountains of corpses to twitch and shake. Chants imploring the Horned Rat to turn his baleful eyes upon the works of his children, to imbue them with a measure of his frightful essence echoed strangely off the endless twisting angles of the underground labyrinth. The air grew taut and strained, as if about to snap, and the earth shifted under the feet of those who walked on it, as though thousands of small, creeping things were burrowing just under the surface.
The plague monks had not been idle in the meantime. Great vats of pus and glowing rot were brewed, the most malevolent of essences being deposited by the ton. Slimy corpses that had been brewing in stockpiles for decades, strange fungi from southern realms that took residence in the lungs and heart of slave incubators, parasitic insect colonies that infested rat ogre flesh while themselves infected by an exotic rotting disease, all were made to give themselves to the plague cauldrons. The process of brewing such a potent curse was an ecstatic experience for the fanatical priests, and more than one threw themselves into a batch, their death tainting the putrid mixture yet further with their corrupted essence. Helkic herself supervised a majority of the sacred cauldrons, watching over them constantly to see if Skrolk had added any element that would disrupt the overall work. She found nothing, but her anxiety did not abate.
Thirteen sonorously chanting trails of priests descended into the labyrinth of death and corruption, the land boiling in their passage. The air was hot enough to burn and blister exposed skin, but the withered, rotted nerve endings of the priests felt nothing. There was enough smoke filling the air that the attendants of the priests choked and died for lack of breath, but the mucous-filled lungs of the priests merely burbled and took in the smoke without harm. They could subsist off of gases stored in the viscous fluids until they completed their tasks. As they went deeper the air got hotter and hotter, until the metal of the cauldrons fused to the paws of those carrying them and the loose skin of the priests began to run like candle wax and even slough off in places. Coming at last to predetermined places within the impenetrable geometry of the maze, the teams of pestilence monks cast their power into the sacred cauldrons, causing the already smoking mixture to leap up in great clouds of vile smog. It killed them as they stood there, resilient as they were, and they channeled their souls into the fog of blessed pestilence, ballooning it into something more than a mere concoction of death - it was a curse, a seeping thing that sunk into the very architecture of the place, coiling around the countless bodies interred in the walls, drinking in the corrupt power the Seers had invested into the labyrinth and growing, changing into something darker and more malevolent. The sound of skittering claws echoed constantly throughout the darkness within the underground, and unknown things brushed constantly against whosoever would be foolish enough to venture down there. The air itself was cramped and crowded, as though the tunnels were smaller than they actually were, and the feeling of being watched was omnipresent now, a constant feeling of dread imposing itself upon the hapless observer. The dark seemed a hungry thing, and the air rushed through the labyrinth in strange patterns reminiscent of the breaths of an incomprehensibly large being.
The Seerlord and the Papus Pestilens looked upon this and thought it good. The groundwork had been laid. The ritual could now begin.
Helkic quailed inwardly at the look in their eyes.
