The Nurglings
| The Nurglings | |
| |
| Abbreviation: | Nurglings |
| Group Numbers: | 24 as of 04/30/13. |
| Leadership: | Ephraim Pitman |
| Goals: | Barhah is the path to freedom. Barhah is the way of meaningfulness. |
| Recruitment Policy: | Stand in line for the bathroom |
| Contact: | We'll call you |
The Nurglings are a horde dedicated to threatening the increasingly complacent masses of harmanz plaguing Malton.
Although not Barhah Fundamentalists in the traditional religious sense of that word, the Nurglings do favor dedication to the undead lifestyle as means of achieving freedom. Freedom in this context is understood in more of a political and emotional than necessarily spiritual sense.
The Nurglings have been most active lately in the vicinity of Vinetown. Several attacks (mostly unsuccessful) have been made on Shyar Cinema.
Origins of the Nurglings
The Nurglings were called to action by Ephraim Pitman so that zombies who actively seek the spirit of barhah might come together and fight against the intolerance of humans who continue to infringe upon their rights. Zombies responded to a passionate call to action by Pitman whose speech remains one of the best examples of the spirit that drives this group.
Those who followed Pitman made the trek north from Kenefie Lane Police Department in Chudleyton, where he quietly delivered his speech to a chosen few companions, back to Quarlesbank. Some died on the way there while others began banging down the barricades of Quarlesbank as living men. What few survivors haunted that suburb lashed out in revulsion at the distubance, unkowingly guiding the Nurglings to their desired destiny: the embrace of barhah.
The nascent Nurglings tore their way through the empty blocks of Quarlesbank to little avail. As Pitman had told them, much of Malton was boarded up and abandoned by the ungrateful breathers. Feeling the pangs of hunger, both in their rotting guts and within their otherwise stoic spirits, the Nurglings turned south.
Ephraim's Speech
Dear Friends:
You have known me as Ephraim Pitman, the dissolute and obsequious heir of the Pitman family fortune. In this persona, I have encouraged you all to stand up against the restless corpses writhing through the bowels of Malton. And from our earliest days together, you have risen to the bloodiest challenges. Nearly six months ago, we abandoned dull, secure Augarde Street in Quarlesbank for the eternal battleground of Chudleyton. For nearly six months, we've been up to our armpits in an endless, cyclic tide of rotting gore.
Has it been glorious? Hardly. Caiger Mall is one of the last bastions of balance in Malton. Life and death have struck an ageless bargain here. It wears on me, my brothers, and let me tell you why. This little island of clockwork stagnation is a sign of the times. The trouble is not that Zack shambles forth again and again. This balance here belies a greater imbalance. Look out across the city and you'll see safe, boarded-up neighborhoods abandoned by the living with nary a rotter to tear it apart. The sad truth is that the quick outnumber the dead almost 2-to-1 and yet Caiger is ruined time after time. We survivors have not forgotten how to fight. We have forgotten why.
So today, I won't speak to you as Ephraim Pitman but with an older voice, the voice of Issachar Ward. I was once a man of mercy, once a troubadour of the apocalypse, and am now fallen. But what I found in falling was how to rise. Perhaps you have heard a strange word whispered in the dark or glimpsed it in the blood-smeared graffiti: barhah. It is a word from the other side; Zack brought it back with him. How can I give you a taste of barhah? Many if not all of you have slept the restless sleep and yet you never knew barhah. You clung to the slippery warmth leaking from your brains and knew nothing of barhah or else forgot. But I have died so many times, following the drone of humming generators back to the world of the living until the weariness of it became crushing.
In the coiled depths of my moribund cortex, it occurred to me at last: what if I didn't go back? This was my first inkling of barhah. Perhaps some of you have been tested by this same doubt, felt it sitting like a lump of human flesh in the pit of your guilty stomach. Ask yourself -- where does this doubt come from? Malton is a ceaselessly turning wheel, spinning an illusion of change. Perched upon a spoke, we pretend to have direction and goals. But look down at the wheel from above: the motion blurs the spokes and the wheel becomes a smooth, forever-featureless disc. The barricades go up, the barricades go down. Supplies are found and spent. The people are born and die and rise again and again in this meaningless prison. But they do not truly rise.
What makes this slavery possible? It is such a simple thing, a thing you have spent so much time thinking about but really you have never thought about it at all. The needle. The needle pins us to the whirling illusion, the endless cycle of punishment. The needle will not let you die nor will it give you more than a fleeting whiff of life. The needle is hypodermic despair, a vaccination against choice. Revivification dissolves the consequences of our actions, reducing everything we do to dumb vanity.
Barhah is the path to freedom. Barhah is the way of meaningfulness. But I'll warn you, there are rotters who are just as much prisoners as those caught in the turning of the wheel. You cannot rise without falling. And you who have labored in Chudleyton, fighting on the spokes of the wheel of punishment, you are ripe for falling. There are some of you who can be free. Who has the courage to start down the road towards Barhah? Any of you who do, come to Ridleybank. That is your homeland and there is great work to be done there.
Beliefs
The basic goals of the Nurglings are driven by three tenants of belief, symbolized by the three-lobed pockmark of Nurgle.
First, Life is Delusion: every beat of the heart, every breath drawn is a delusional denial of the natural destiny of all things, which is freely-chosen, permanent undeath.
Second, Delusion Proceeds From The Needle: the delusion supporting the denial of freedom, whether imposed on oneself or by others, is perpetuated by and only possible because of revivification.
Third, Barhah Is Freedom: barhah means overcoming the delusion but is not merely the renunciation of revivification.
While the Nurglings venerate brain rot as an act of the most significant commitment to barhah they do not hold that it is a reliable path to barhah. As Pitman warned, it can also be a prison that prevents the realization of barhah. Furthermore, the Nurglings do not view barhah as the discrete endpoint of a spiritual journey or even a philosophical position so much as an experience of freedom from the illusion of life. In this sense, it is analogous to political activism: the meeting of ideology and action.
The Nurglings are therefore not Barhah Fundamentalists in the traditional religious meaning of that term. Although they reject the sedentary proclivities of harmanz as part of the delusional survivor mindset (and indeed one of its chief expressions), they harbor no necessary opposition to trans-mortal tactics excluding dedicated death cultism. A revivified Nurgling will pursue the same goals as an undead one, proceeding according to whatever options his current state allows, but without any concern for whether he lives or dies. In this same vein, revivified Nurglings take no offense to being attacked by other zombies. The Nurglings do strongly reject, however, the tenants of dual naturism as an obstacle to barhah and yet another neurosis of the delusional survivor mindset.
