Silence (Plague Scythe)

Lore & history

Long before the Emperor of Mankind arrived on the toxic, mist-shrouded mountains of Barbarus, the pale giant Mortarion led his oppressed human kinsfolk against the necromantic xenos Overlords who ruled the poisonous peaks—and in his gauntleted hands he carried a massive, two-handed harvesting scythe named Silence. On Barbarus, the scythe was both an agricultural tool of the lowland peasantry and the grim symbol of the Pale King's promise: that every tyrant who preyed upon mankind would be reaped like diseased grain.

When Mortarion was given command of the Fourteenth Legion—renamed the Death Guard—he refused to trade his austere Barbarun battle scythe for the ornate golden swords and spears favoured by his brother Primarchs. Alongside his holstered archaeotech energy pistol, the Lantern, Silence was carried into a thousand toxic compliance wars of the Great Crusade and through the traitors' rebellion on Isstvan III and Terra.

When First Captain Calas Typhon betrayed the Death Guard fleet inside the Warp and Mortarion surrendered his Legion to Grandfather Nurgle to end their endless agony, Silence transformed alongside its master. Growing to colossal proportions to match Mortarion's moth-winged Daemon Primarch form, its once-clean steel blade became pitted with weeping rust, dripped with the virulent plagues of the Garden of Nurgle, and drank the souls of entire worlds during the Plague Wars of Ultramar.

Design, mechanism & battlefield effect

In its original Great Crusade incarnation, Silence was already a masterpiece of grim functional engineering: a Primarch-scaled two-handed war-scythe over ten feet in length, fitted with a heavy, curved monomolecular blade and a powerful molecular disruption field generator housed along its iron-shod shaft. A single sweeping arc of Silence could cleave three power-armoured Space Marines in two at the waist or shear the leg off an enemy walker.

Following Mortarion's apotheosis into a Daemon Primarch of Nurgle, Silence became one of the deadliest Daemon-blessed plague weapons in the galaxy. Its notched, yard-long blade is encrusted with living alchemical rust, Nurgle's Rot and hyper-virulent phage-toxins that eat straight through ceramite, auramite and energy shields on contact. Even a glancing scratch that draws a single drop of blood introduces sevenfold supernatural diseases that liquefy a Space Marine's genetically enhanced organs inside his armour within heartbeats.

Furthermore, the haft and blade of Silence are tethered by rusted chains and warp-conduits directly to Mortarion's own necrotic aura, allowing him to swing the weapon in wide, hurricane-force arcs that scatter whole squads or bring its point down in a single armor-splitting overhead execution blow.

Patterns, variants & doctrine

Across the Fourteenth Legion, Silence is the revered archetype for the Manreaper—the signature two-handed power scythe carried by Mortarion's silent bodyguard, the Deathshroud Terminators, as well as the Lords of Contagion and Sorcerers of the Death Guard. During the Great Crusade, every Deathshroud Terminator stood permanently within forty-nine paces of the Primarch with a Manreaper in hand, and in the forty-first millennium those same scythes are steeped in the filth of the Plague Planet.

First Captain Typhus, Herald of the Plague God and host of the Destroyer Hive, wields the most famous Manreaper after Silence itself: the Master-Crafted Manreaper Lakrimae, dipped into the foulest cauldron of Nurgle's Manse.

Notable patterns & relic examples

• The Liberation of Barbarus & Great Crusade: Forged on Barbarus and carried by Mortarion as the iconic grim reaper blade of the XIV Legion.
• The Siege of Terra (Lion's Gate Spaceport): Wielded by Daemon Primarch Mortarion in his titanic duel against Jaghatai Khan, Primarch of the White Scars.
• The Plague Wars of Ultramar (Iax & Parmenio): Swung by Mortarion against his resurrected brother Roboute Guilliman and the Ultramarines.

Wielded & Fielded By

Characters (4)

• 
  Mortarion · Primarch of the Death Guard, the Death Lord
• 
  Typhus · Herald of Nurgle, Host of the Destroyer Hive
• 
  Ku'gath Plaguefather · Great Unclean One of Nurgle
• 
  Grandfather Nurgle · Chaos God of Disease, Decay and Despair; the Plague Father

Related weapons & vehicles

Gauntlets of UltramarThe Emperor's SwordThe Black SwordChainaxePlague Knife & BaleswordSonic Blaster & BlastmasterBlade of the LaerDrach'nyen

Primary Faction

Heretic Astartes (Chaos Space Marines)