Battle of Iyanden - The Fated Prince: As Yvraine's old comrades took their toll, Iyanden's own Corsair allies joined the fight. With the smaller of the two Nurgle-infested space hulks destroyed by Amharoc's Corsairs, both the armada of Iyanden and the warships of the Eldritch Raiders concentrated their firepower upon the larger vessel -- codified by Prince Yriel himself as the Spawn of Oghanothir.Like nimble star-sharks tearing chunks from a void whale, the Corsair ships closed in, levelled their devastating attacks, and slipped away. The crater-pitted behemoth's main defence was not guns, however, but its sheer bulk. It could be hammered by the guns of the Eldar for solar days and still have enough mass to destroy Iyanden should it collide.The hulk had drifted long in the haunted tides of the Warp, even passing through the sickly green-grey skies of Nurgle's Garden in the Realm of Chaos for a time. The daemon infestation that had claimed it riddled its labyrinthine innards right to the core, and thousands of winged daemons wound from every new crater like ribbons of smoke.The truth was becoming clear. If the hulk's exterior was inviolable, it would have to be destroyed from the inside out by a strike force of Eldar -- who would be risking the most hideous deaths imaginable.Prince Yriel, as ever, was quick to answer the call to action. In collusion with his fellow Corsair princes in Yvraine's ﬂeet, he organised a three-stage assault on the Spawn of Oghanothir. The plan was ambitious in the extreme, but necessarily so, for to approach the hulk in a boarding craft would be to become swamped by daemonic Rot Flies before ever reaching its sides.The gamble was so daring that it appealed to Yriel's fellow captains' sense of pride and bravado, and within a matter of solar hours, it was well underway.Virtually unnoticed by the combatants at large, Yriel and his captains left their starships aboard sleek Attack Craft and made for the Webway portal at the rear of Craftworld Iyanden. En route, Yriel used his rank as the Craftworld's High Admiral to convince the world-ship's steersmen to adopt a specific course.Slowly, the beleaguered Craftworld came about upon the designated coordinates. Prince Yriel's insertion craft were nimble and swift enough to bypass the daemon invaders that harassed Iyanden's exterior, and they passed through the stern Webway portal with acceptable losses.Using Yriel's uncanny hunter's instincts in conjunction with ancient Ulthanashi maps of the nearspace Webway labyrinth, they located the spar of that insane dimension that corresponded to the Spawn of Oghanothir’s course. It was a heading Yriel had all but dictated by offering Iyanden as the bait.As the Spawn drifted through space towards the Craftworld, intent on ramming its prey, Yriel and his captains activated their personal Webway portal devices and walked through the shimmering discs, crossing from the labyrinthine dimension into the foetid heart of the enemy space hulk.The Eldar strike force stepped cautiously from the emerald portals they had opened into the cavernous interior of the infested enemy ﬂagship. It was near pitch black inside, and a drizzle of foul ﬂuids spotted down from a vaulted ceiling high above.The Corsairs, anxious to avoid the patter of stinking liquids, darted to the cover of the nearest corridors and gingerly made their way further in. The faint sound of engines, pulsing regular as a heartbeat, could be heard in the distance.Having come this far, the Corsairs were not keen to turn back without completing their mission, even if the slime-slicked innards they were forced to navigate were more like the winding insides of a diseased sea monster than the ordered corridors of a spacecraft.Yriel and his fellow captains took comfort from the fact they wore sophisticated air reservoirs and hermetically sealed armour, the finest that Terran centuries of reaving could afford.It was well they did. Puffy balls of fungus, each formerly the head of an earlier trespasser, wheezed spores in billowing streams. For the intruders to breathe even a single lungful of that blighted air would have resulted in a truly disgusting death.Though the Corsair princes had to cut their way through thickets of grasping, tentacle-like cilia and leap over bubbling pools of acidic slime, they proved dextrous enough to penetrate to the thrumming heart of the foul ship's enginarium.Thus far they had encountered little fiercer a foe than the giggling daemon mites known as Nurglings, for their vector of attack had bypassed the daemon hordes on the warpath at the outer edge of the hulk.When they reached the engines, however, they found a more daunting sight -- the slime-slicked cocoons of sulking Beasts of Nurgle that had sought a warm place in which to make their vile metamorphoses.Perhaps the Corsairs would have swiftly disabled the hulk's mighty plasma engines and escaped without hindrance had the swamp-like inner chamber not also been home to a squatting, sedentary terror. Gurgling at the chamber's heart was the vastly obese Daemon Prince Gara'gugul'gor, whose name can only be pronounced correctly with a throat full of phlegm.Though the monstrosity's tentacle-like arms were whip-thin and dextrous, his abdomen was so engorged that it was impossible for him to move further than a few Terran feet. Still, he laughed with good reason -- for this day the prey had come to him.Whipping tendrils lashed out as Yriel jumped nimbly from one island of solid ground to another, the fabled Spear of Twilight blazing in his hand. One of them brushed the impeccably dressed Corsair Prince Lumino on the heel and immediately hauled him screaming into the air, dangling him within biting range.A gristly snap, and the Eldar pirate was halved at the waist; his severed legs kicked spasmodically as Gara'gugul'gor finished his snack. Yriel grimaced as he leapt closer still, polearm blade slashing at the tentacles whipping towards him to force them back.The damage was already done. Lumino's death scream had disturbed the pupae all around the room, and now many were beginning to shiver and shake, glistening wings and questing proboscises pushing from the foetid sacs.One by one, a swarm of ﬂuid-drizzling Rot Flies emerged prematurely from their transformations, hissing and half-formed as they stirred from their slumber to malevolent wakefulness.Another Corsair prince cried out as something grabbed his ankle. Spurred into action, the Rot Flies took wing as best they could, buzzing angrily as they lurched through the air towards the intruders.The horrifed Eldar abandoned all attempts at stealth, opening fire in all directions. With that, the vaulted space hulk engine room erupted into violence from end to end.The battle that followed saw some of the most inspired displays of swordsmanship, agile footwork and acrobatic poise outside of the troupes of Cegorach's favoured Harlequins. The Corsair princes unleashed every weapon they could bring to bear.Jokaero Digital Weapons, Aeldari Soulknives, Commorrite Slasherprisms and contraband elixirs that tripled the imbiber's physical reaction speed were all employed to ensure the daemonic denizens could not lay a single talon upon the intruders. And for a while, they were enough.At the heart of the battle Yriel fought hardest of all, his spear glittering with killing energies as it slashed, whirled and stabbed at anything foolish enough to come within reach. Running up the wall opposite Gara'gugul'gor, Yriel pushed backwards and away over a grasping tentacle, backﬂipping to spring once more off a gantry with High Admiral's greatcoat billowing.His spear was raised for a killing thrust. Gara'gugul'gor heaved a spray of stringy vomit from the gills in his wattled throat, and though Yriel twisted and arched his spine to avoid it, he turned his back on the black pseudopods that reached out to pluck him from the air.In an instant, Yriel was caught like a ﬂy in a spider's web, sticky tentacles wrapping around him to bind his arms to his sides. The Daemon Prince brought Yriel close, his jaws yawning wide.Suddenly the chamber was lit by a stark white brilliance. Yriel's ocular implant, the Eye of Twilight, ﬂared bright as it released a storm of killing electricity. The energies were so fierce they burned away the daemon's tentacles -- the Corsair prince was free once more.Down came the deadly Spear of Twilight that had claimed so much of Yriel's life, its blade gouging deep -- not into the Daemon Prince, but into the beating heart of the enginarium itself.A hideous shriek was wrenched from the daemon overlord's throat as the unearthly energies of that baleful artefact went to work. Black veins spread out across the hulk's core machinery, necrotising once-living metal into shuddering black rust wherever they spread.Though it had taken every iota of his skill and ingenuity, Yriel had achieved his goal. He smiled momentarily as the spear's deathly energies slew its true target -- the heart of the spacefaring juggernaut itself.A whipping tentacle came around, a broken girder in its grip. Yriel was too exhausted to dodge. The heavy iron bar smashed the life from the Eldar prince with a single blow.Gara'gugul'gor, once he had finished killing the last of the interlopers in as gruesome a fashion as he could devise, slurped and shufﬂed his way to Prince Yriel's cooling corpse. Before his death, the Autarch of Iyanden had effectively becalmed the hulk's only intact enginarium with a single stabbing blow of his eldritch weapon.Without the ability to correct the behemoth's course, the space hulk was reliant on momentum alone, and could likely be avoided by the Eldar craftworld. How could a mere mortal defy the will of Nurgle?Gara'gugul'gor was still high in the favour of Grandfather Nurgle, for he had diligently spread disease for countless standard centuries, and his particularly inventive brand of gallows humour was most amusing to the Plague God.But with his plan to break the necromantic Eldar of Iyanden in tatters, the Daemon Prince would have to find another way to rise in his patron's estimation.Stirring a pool of blood-laced slime with one of his tentacles and reciting the Seven Sickening Psalms, the daemon lord reached out with his psychic abilities into the depths of the Warp. There he had an epiphany.If his theory held true, and this warrior's blade was that which it appeared to be, there was still a chance to help Nurgle's power wax high -- not of its own slow but steady accord, but because one of his chief rivals in the Great Game of Chaos would suddenly find his own star waning fast.At the very least, Gara'gugul'gor could deliver a little gift to the Eldar world-ship, one that would reduce it to ruin as surely as a direct collision from a space hulk.The Daemon Prince frowned once more at Prince Yriel's spear, clutched in its owner's death grip and still glowing gently with baleful energies. Then, as shuddering waves of mirth wobbled Gara'gugul'gor's seven great chins, his consternation turned into a belly laugh that shook rust from the rafters high above.It was not long after Iyanden had left the grotesque space hulk behind that Prince Yriel's body, frozen in a strange milky resin with the Spear of Twilight laid across his chest, was found ﬂoating in space.The entombed corpse was recovered by a team of Hemlock Wraithfighters that had sensed its presence in the stars; by using a remote wraith-construct Familiar on a silver tether, they were able to retrieve the corpse and take it back in safety to the craftworld itself.A great sadness rippled throughout the world-ship at the news, for Yriel was their brightest star, a once-wayward genius who had proven to be Iyanden's saviour more than once.His loss was so profound that many Eldar were seen weeping openly in the Craftworld's streets. What must Iyanden do, they wailed, to escape the cursed fate that haunted its every turn?