The Shriven - Battle of Dessah: The Shriven seers wailed of not one but two foes drawing closer with every passing solar hour. In desperation, some amongst the warband beseeched Fabius Bile to aid them, while others muttered darkly that the Spider had already done more than enough.For his part, Bile was satisfied with events. He had not predicted Corian's fall upon Bairsten Prime and had some grave suspicions about its authors, but he had been quick to capitalise upon this unexpected boon. Bile had made great strides behind the sealed doors of his laboratory. Now he sought to make good his escape.Bile gathered the Shriven within the Enlightener's grand throne room on Dessah and addressed them. He spoke of his desire to see these invaders crushed, both the filth-ridden Death Guard and the presumptuous corpse-worshippers. He could do it, he said, but not without the complete loyalty of the remaining Shriven. This was at last too much for Argento Corian's surviving Chosen.Tempers flared as they accused the rest of their warband of being duped. They called Bile an opportunist ghoul, cursed the day he had come to Dessah, and laid the Enlightener's death firmly at Bile’s feet. At this, the Spider merely smiled and signalled his surgeon-acolytes to unveil his latest masterpiece.Argento Corian was much changed. The parts of his brain not destroyed by the round passing through his skull had been scooped out by Bile's Chirurgeon. The altered golem that stalked into the throne room was the Enlightener in name only.Bulging red eyes stared from a face riven with stitch marks, scarified runes and wires. His armour strained to contain his muscle-bulked physique. Pipes and tubes gurgled with weird fluids, flushing them through Corian's armour and body alike.Unbridled psychic potential crackled around the Enlightener, though with his skull emptied of its contents all but Fabius Bile wondered how such a thing could be.Incensed, those loyal to Corian's former incarnation went for their blades. The Enlightener annihilated them with beams of psychic fire. Bile asked again for the loyalty of the Shriven, and this time, standing over the blackened and mangled remains of their former comrades, they agreed to a warrior.Bile planned to augment every remaining Shriven Chaos Space Marine. He ordered all defenders concentrated within Dessah's Primary Bastion, which was partially built into a towering mountain. He commanded that the outer defences be demolished and laced with booby traps, ensuring his enemies would have to come at him through a lethal killing zone.When the foe attacked, the Enlightener and the Shriven were to stand firm in the fortress' defence, drawing the foe in and pinning them before the walls. Only then would Bile unleash his master stroke. A flight of modified Heldrakes would belch neurotoxin fumes over the battle.Bile assured his followers this would leave them untouched while driving the Death Guard and Imperial warriors into a murderous frenzy. With their enemies lost to madness and tearing one another apart, Bile and the remaining Shriven could flee aboard a swift frigate and slip away into the Warp.The surviving Shriven warships attempted to use Bile's night shields to ambush the Death Guard again. This time Typhus was ready. He had spread tracker entities across his fleet and given each of them the Warp-scent of the Shriven. Thus, even as the Black Legion cruisers pounced, they found gun batteries primed and pointed right at them. Explosive carnage filled Dessah's orbital envelope.Wreckage rained down as flaming meteors through the planet's atmosphere. When the Battle Barge Drake Rampant attempted a desperate and horribly misjudged boarding assault against the Terminus Est, the battle swung in Typhus' favour.Soon enough the rusting, plague-riddled hulk of the Drake Rampant was tumbling away while Death Guard landers swept down upon the Primary Bastion.As one, the Heldrakes swept from their perches atop the mountain's peak. They screamed down upon the warriors battling furiously in the breach.The Enlightener was hammering the enemy hordes with one psychic blast after another, his Shriven laying down fusillades of fire as the last of their tanks fired again and again.Still the Death Guard pressed forward, Poxwalkers in their hundreds clambering over their own fallen to totter into the fight. The undead buried the altered warriors with their numbers while Plague Marines raked the Black Legion lines with fire.Further back, out amongst the ruins, the Imperial forces were cutting a gory swathe towards the breach, but their momentum was slowing in the face of the relentless servants of Nurgle.Now it was time to trigger yet more anarchy and bloodshed. One at a time the Heldrakes opened their jaws wide and, as they swooped low over the battle, breathed roiling clouds of mauve gasses across the combatants. Bile had possessed neither time nor inclination to tailor his toxins to his foes, but he had ample data concerning the altered biochemistry of his augmented Shriven.Thus, as the clouds drifted down and flowed into rebreathers and open mouths, it was the Enlightener and his warriors who were driven to new heights of berserk fury, not their foes.One last betrayal of his ill-fated allies by Fabius Bile; one last trick to ensure that they kept his pursuers busy long enough to cover his escape.