Gog an Magog Discovva Da Tru Meenin ov Frenship

This is an ork legend. It starts like this: WAAAGH!

It ends like this: WAAAAAAGH!

The extra AAAs are how orks know it is a good and true story.

It is the story of two brothers, which is a good sort of story for orks to have, as it mirrors their ditheistic belief in the gods Gork and Mork, and is thus “triffikly miffic.”

So: Long, long ago (i.e. more than four years ago, which is about as high as most orks can count) on a planet far, far away, there were two ork sorta-brothers. Their names were Gog and Magog. They were not brothers in the human sense of the word, but rather emerged from fungal birthing pods at more or less the same time in more or less the same geographic area, which is about as close as orks get to having a family. Naturally, they despised each other and constantly tried to embarrass, upstage or even kill each other. This was a good and orkilly sort of thing to do.

Gog was the larger and stronger of the two.

“Bet you can’t eat dat,” Magog challenged Gog one day, pointing to a whipsnake.

Gog grabbed the meter-long serpent and lifted it to his jaws, whereupon the whipsnake buried its barbed tail in his left eye socket. Undeterred either by the sudden loss of his eye or the venom the snake was trying to pump into him, Gog promptly bit the snake’s head off, then ate the rest of its thrashing body. He wore a steel patch over the left eye ever after, and was known as Gog Steeleye.

Magog was the more kunnin.

“Bet you can’t lift dat rok,” Gog boasted to Magog one day. The boulder was taller than Magog was.

Magog grinned with all his teef, and his tusks, too. He placed a stikkbomb under the boulder, blasting it into six, easily-lifted fragments. He went about with a dozen stikkbombs at all times ever after, and was known as Magog Da Bomma.

In this way, the two tested each other, honed and sharpened each other, Gog Steeleye growing ever stronger and more brutal, Magog Da Bomma ever smarter and more kunnin.

Until the day when the sky started to rain bugs.

Gog, Magog and the rest of the boyz sat about their campfire, high in the mountains that girdled the planet, and played a fun little game called ‘Catch Da Fire.’ It involved scooping up a fragment of burning fuel from the fire and flinging it at one of the other ork boyz. Points were scored by either burning the target or setting fire to their clothing or equipment.

Play typically continued until the fire went out, somebody got angry enough to grab their choppa, or the sun was blotted out and the sky darkened by the arrival of spores containing billions upon billions of relentless, slavering, carnivorous hive-creatures intent on devouring all life in the galaxy. Which, funnily enough, is what happened.

“Lookit dat,” exclaimed Magog, pointing skywards.

Gog dutifully looked up, whereupon Magog grabbed a flaming brand from the fire and chucked it in Gog’s face with a “hur, hur, hur” of joy. The burning stick hit Gog’s steel eyepatch, and thus did no damage.

“’Ere, lay off, dis is serious,” Gog said, patting embers from his skin. “I never seen weather like dis.”

“Naw, Gog ya git, it’s da swarm.”

“Wot?”

“Swarm.”

“Yah, it is a bit muggy out.”

“Naw, ‘swarm’ as in ‘lotsa buggsez’, what da humies call ‘da Tyranids.’”

“Dat’s a funny name for da weather.”

“Naw, Gog … how can I put dis,” Magog sighed. “It’s like dis: WAAAGH!”

“WAAAGH? We gonna fight dem?” realization slowly crept across Gog’s face.

“Dat’s right.”

“Dere must be, one, two, free … lotsa dem.”

“Dat’s right.”

“Oho.” Gog nodded sagely. “I ged it now: WAAAGH!”

The other ork boyz smiled and looked up at the immeasurable, impossible, inconceivable tide of implacable death hurtling directly towards them. Their faces lit with joy.

Orks were bred for war and war alone (or ‘WAAAGH’ in their language, which is like ‘war’ except louder), and the prospect of an infinite tidal wave of enemies to kill was as close as their tiny little minds could come to a conception of paradise.

At that moment, the quad cannon and flakka-dakka gun positions in the surrounding mountains opened fire on the descending rain of alien spores. They were ork guns, which meant they were about as loud as the broadside of a battleship’s main battery, thus producing an effect a bit like an epoch-ending-climate-altering super-volcano erupting three times per second. Like this: WAAAAA--and then complete silence, because any human would have been permanently deafened by then.

Fighta-Bommers, Stormboyz with jet packs strapped to their backs and Deff Koptas thundered overhead. (The Deff Kopta is a bit like a helicopter, though capable of only going two speeds: Maximum, and slightly faster than maximum, usually on account of something vital having just exploded, like the fuel tank). The sky filled with gunfire from edge to edge, and red-hot spent shells rained down like a metal monsoon.

“I got a great idea!” Gog told the boyz. “Chaaarge!”

“Naw, that’s a stupid idea,” argued Magog. “I got a better idea: Chaaarge!”

The ork boyz looked at one another. A few heads were scratched. Some brows were furrowed. One or two tried jumping up into the air and swinging their choppas experimentally, but discovered this wasn’t quite high enough to reach an enemy still in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. “Charge wot?” one asked. “Dey’re in da sky.”

Gog thought about this, but not very hard, as that made his head hurt. “Ged to da choppa,” he said.

One of the boyz held up his cleaver. “Ok, now wot?”

“Dunno, jes seemed like a gud fing to say,” Gog shrugged.

This deep and insightful philosophical debate was ended by the impact of a Tyranid spore at the edge of their camp. It peeled open, like a fleshy flower blooming, and out slithered a scythe-armed hormagaunt. It was soon joined by another, and then another.

“Dey looks dangerous,” said Magog. “Prolly suicide to attack dem head-on.” He nudged Gog forward. “Wat’r you waitin’ for den?”

Gog screamed and charged, firing from the hip. Needing no further encouragement, dozens of boyz followed close on his heels, shooting with equal enthusiasm and disregard for aim. The snarling hormagaunts were caught in a wall of explosive-tipped bullets and blown to meaty shreds.

“Oh, great,” muttered Magog, who’d hoped the Tyranids would carve Gog to squig-meat and thus save him the bother of having to bump off his brother himself. “Jes remember it was my idea!”

In twos and threes, clutches of ravening, slavering beasts crawled from the sticky slime of their birthing spores and rushed the orks, only to be cut down in a hammering hail of gunfire. The orks fired and fired and fired, and when they ran out of bullets, leaped joyfully into the fray with axes and cleavers and saw-edged blades.  All too soon*, it was over.

(*The ork account makes this sound as though the battle was a matter of minutes, perhaps hours, when it is likely the orks were simply enjoying themselves so much they lost track of time. The initial wave of the Tyranid invasion typically lasts days, if not weeks--it is essentially weaponized ‘survivorship bias’ in which the swarm carpets the entire planet with vanguard creatures, 80-90% of which are expected to die but in so doing reveal strongpoints and weaknesses in the planet’s defenses.)

“Dat it?” said Gog, standing knee-deep in steaming bug-guts. He looked disappointed. “Bit easy, weren’t it?”

The ground began to shake, arrhythmic, uneven, as though caught in the jaws of a leviathan. A minor mountain of earth and stone exploded skywards in the middle of the squad. Several boyz were thrown off their feet. From the maelstrom arose an armored, writhing, six-armed horror, with a maw of diamond fangs and razor-edged spines that crackled with electricity.

It towered over them, screeching like a Deff Kopta engine, flailing, instantly carving several boyz in half and splattering the rest in green blood and fungus-flesh.

“Dat’s more like it!” Gog whooped.

The squad emptied their shootas and sluggas into the thing at point-blank range. Rounds screamed harmlessly off its adamantine scales. Explosive bullets failed to crack its hide. Magog’s stikkbombs detonated without effect. One of the boyz leaped forward with his choppa and swung at a whiplike arm. The blade rang as through it had struck stone, sparks flew, and the blade snapped. A second later the ork was bisected from skull to groin with a slash of the arm.

The thing hissed. Electricity writhed and sparkled along its body. A whip of blue lightning lashed through the orks, and blasted them all except for Gog and Magog to ash.

This would have been the quick, messy and quite unremarkable end of Gog and Magog, save that a stricken and crippled Fighta-Bommer, its engines trailing fire, at that moment chose their valley for its final, terminal-velocity descent. As the great Tyranid hive creature reared up to rend the last two orks, the ork aircraft came screaming down like a rusty, oily meteorite and plowed directly into its side. It being an ork aircraft and thus designed with neither survivability nor safe ammunition storage in mind, the Fighta-Bommer’s remaining stores of rokkits and bombs promptly detonated.

Blossoming fireworks consumed the creature in a steadily escalating crescendo--first one bomb exploded, which set off five more, which caused another twenty to explode, until a great roiling pillar of flame and smoke was blasted into the sky.

It was a Trygon though, one of the hardiest and strongest of all Tyranid creatures, and even the impact of a flying bomb-rack traveling at Mach 2 did no more than wound it. Oozing blood, shedding cracked scales, shrieking, snarling, hissing with pain, it slithered back into the hole it had emerged from, leaving the ork brothers miraculously whole and unhurt.

“Crikey,” said Gog.

“You’z can sey dat again,” agreed Magog.

“Crikey.”

“Fanks, Gog,” Magog gave a lime-green thumbs up. “Well done.”

They sat for a moment in silence, listening to the sounds of combat all around, the screaming and hissing of the Tyranids, the war cries and shouts of the orks, the explosions, the thundering guns, they sat in a lumpy, viridian puddle that was all that was left of their squad, they listened and smiled happily. It had been a good fight, all the better for having nearly killed them (Orks reproduce asexually by shedding spores, most noticeably when killed, and thus are hard-wired with a death urge which makes even the most Nietzschean of nihilistic humans seem irrationally optimistic by comparison).

“Well, wat do we do now?” asked Gog.

“Best tell da Nobz, or one of da Bossiz,” said Magog.

“Wat ‘bout dis?” Gog pointed at the great hole the Trygon had burrowed through the ground, a massive cavern leading down into the stygian depths of the planet.

“Wat ‘bout it?”

“Don’t feel right, jes walkin’ away. Shouldn’t we goze afta it?”

“You wanna go down dere? Inna dark? Jes uz two, when dere’s prolly hunnerds and hunnerds of doze fings down dere?”

“Um … yeah?”

“Oh.” Magog shrugged. “Sure. After you.”

Although they were orks, Gog and Magog were not entirely stupid, and first they gathered as many weapons and as much ammunition as they could feasibly carry, and then a bit more. Gog had crossed shootas strapped to his back, a choppa on each hip, a kombi-shoota in his arms. This was two shootas, one stacked on top of the other and thus produced “moar dakka” as the orks say. Magog carried a brace of sluggas, a handful of stikkbombs, and lashed half a dozen more stikkbombs together to make a somewhat larger, harder-to-throw “mega-stikkbomb”.

Thus armed, the two jumped down into the Tyranid hole. They found the Trygon had burrowed a long, rough and uneven cavern, which descended at a gentle slope further into the bowels of the planet. With a shared shrug of utter indifference to their own survival, Gog and Magog set off into the darkness.

They were not scared, for the closest orks ever get to fear is a cunning sort of caution that encourages ambushes or snares when facing stronger opponents, but orks are also social creatures, instinctively gathering into tribes and klans, and thus sudden isolation made the two uncomfortable.

“Our tribe should hav a name,” said Gog as they walked. Calling themselves a tribe felt comforting, reassuring, implying the presence at their backs of an ork horde. “Howz bout Gog’s Grotnecks?”

“Wassa Grotneck?”

“Dunno, but sounds pretty tough, dunnit?”

“No,” sniffed Magog. “I gotz a better one: Magog’s Mobbil Infantry.”

“Mobbil?”

“Yah. Means movin’ about, like dis.” He lifted his feet to demonstrate.

“As opposed to wot?” Gog demanded. “Da standin’ in one place alla time infantry? Da loungin’ about da kamp infantry? Da sittin’ on dere fat arses infantry?”

“Shhh,” snapped Magog. “I fink I hear’s sumfing.”

“Wot sort of sumfing?” asked Gog, unslinging his double-barreled shoota.

“Drums, drums in da deep.”

It was not, in fact, drums, but rather the approaching footsteps of nearly a hundred genestealers. These Tyranid creatures were slightly more humanoid than the hormagaunts, four-armed, with two grasping limbs and two more armed with crushing claws. They flooded the cavern in a spitting, hissing tide of purplish scales and iron talons.

“We cannot ged out!” cried Magog.

“Neider can dey!” Gog strode forward to meet their charge, laying down a withering stream of fire, guns blazing in the dark, sending genestealers tumbling back, bleeding and broken, with each burst. When the first magazine was expended, Gog threw the double-shoota aside, drew the crossed shootas from his back and continued to fire, one in each hand, arms extended in a T, whirling and firing at genestealers on all sides.

Magog stepped back. Then stepped back again. It occurred to him that the genestealers might very well overwhelm and kill Gog, but perhaps not without suffering catastrophic losses themselves. Which would let Magog mop up the rest. There was no malice in this, only ork kunnin. Let Gog do all the hard work, and if he died, well that was just the foam on the fungus-beer: One less rival to worry about.

Magog took another step back, and felt something wet and slippery squish beneath his foot. He looked down. It was a wriggling, slimy thing, like a large, segmented purplish-black worm, with centipede legs, an outsized jaw and gnashing sharp teeth. “Ugh!” he cried, and smashed its head in with his heel.

With a chittering rustle, dozens more emerged from cracks and crevices in the tunnel walls, ceiling and floor. “Behind you!” Magog cried, leaping to Gog’s side, drawing a slugga in each hand, and wildly spraying the tunnel with gunfire.

Back to back the brothers fought, first with stikkbomb and slugga and shoota, and when they stood amid a mound of dead foes, Gog drew his choppas, passed one to Magog and they hacked and hewed at the creatures that crawled over the bodies of the dead and clawed and bit at them. They fought as no two orks had ever fought together, moving as one, fighting like the big blue humies fought, like the pointy-ears fought, a spinning blender of death.

“Jumper!” Magog would cry, and duck, as Gog whirled, choppa passing inches above Magog’s head, to cleave a leaping ripper in two.

“Bunch!” Gog would cry, and go down on one knee, allowing Magog to leap upon his shoulders, and fling a stikkbomb in a high arc towards a cluster of genestealers gathering just out of range for a charge. Heads, arms, legs, tails and claws flew in all directions.

The surviving rippers and genestealers fled, squealing and screeching, into the depths of the caverns.

“Dat was fun,” grinned Gog. He had grown larger and stronger, for as an ork fights and wins, his body responds by putting on muscle and bone mass (thereby violating the principle of conservation of mass, but such is the power of ork belief), ensuring that the best fighters become the biggest and strongest.

“Yes, most invigorating. We fight well as a team, don’t we?” Magog had grown more cunning, for the same biological process applied to ork intellect. Those seen to do smart and cunning things became smarter because other orks believed they were smarter.

“Ya know, I’m … I’m not totally irritated dat you’re ‘ere, Magog.” There, in the dark, Gog’s heart had grown three sizes larger. Not metaphorically, quite literally. Unrelated to this, a slowly rolling pebble thought was gradually building into the avalanche of an idea within his brain. “Itz … itz gud to hav a brudda.”

“Likewise, my dear Gog, I am glad you are here with me to face these perils. Let us make an agreement: Neither of us shall attempt to slay the other until our mission is accomplished.” Magog extended his open hand.

“Wot?”

“No choppy-choppy, until after. Dealsies?”

“Deal,” nodded Gog, and the two shook hands.

Yes, in that magical moment, Gog and Magog had discovered the true meaning of ork friendship--viz, not immediately killing each other when there was something else you could kill.

Buoyed by the spirit of brotherly love … well, brotherly pragmatism, they continued on, and after a short while came upon a larger chamber. It was roughly oval in shape and evidently the recent scene of a battle. Ork weapons lay scattered upon the cavern floor: broken choppas, discarded sluggas and shootas, spent casings, belts of ammunition, even a looted human meltagun. There was a crack in one wall of the cavern, reaching all the way up to the planet’s surface, through which a thin ray of light pierced the gloom, falling upon the silent and broken form of a Killa Kan in the center of the room.

A Killa Kan was a ten-foot tall walking machine, piloted by a Grot (a smaller breed of ork) physically and permanently wired to the controls of its squat, cylindrical body. It was armed with a claw in one arm and a skorcha--a massive flamethrower--in the other. About the thing’s feet lay a dozen grots.

“Wot happened ‘ere, den?” Gog wondered.

Magog shrugged. “Ask them.” He pointed to the grots sprawled about the Kan.

“Dey’re dead, ya git,” snapped Gog.

“No they aren’t. I can see them breathing.”

“Yes we are!” cried one of the bodies indignantly from where it lay. “We’z iz most deffnit’ly dead, so go away.”

“See?” said Gog. “Stone dead, like I seyz.”

“Well, if they’re dead,” Magog said slowly and loudly, “then there’s no harm in me throwing a stikkbomb on top of them, is there?”

At once the grots sprang to their feet. “Oi, leave off!” one cried. “We’z not quite dead yet!”

“Izza miracle!” Gog exclaimed in wide-eyed amazement. “Magog ya brain boy, ya brought dem back from da dead!”

“Gog, you git …” Magog started, and then reconsidered. “Yes, that’s exactly what happened. Well spotted, Gog. Very, wotsit, perspirant, um, perspective, no, perceptual, oh buggerit, very smart of you.”

Gog nodded proudly. Magog and turned to the grots now clustering about the two orks. “What happened here?”

The first grot shrugged. “A big nob told us to follow him down ‘ere, den a great big bug wif lotsa arms cut ‘iz ‘ead off, an den cracked open da Kan. We hid until dey all buggered off.”

“Well, we’re on the right trail then,” Magog nodded. “Do you grots have names?”

“We do,” said the first. “I’m, Bok. These here are Chok, Dok, da medic, Frok, very fashionable dresser, Grok, he’s a smart one, Hok, Jok, a sporty lad, Nok, Thok, Vok, Zhok and over dere is Grotolomew Amadeus Moatzork.”

“Right, follow us!” said Gog.

“Where to?”

“Down dere. We’z gonna kill da bug wot killed your Nob, da biggest bug fing you’z ever saw.”

The grots looked at one another. Looked up at the one, two, yes, definitely just two and no more than two orks standing over them. They looked about the room, in case there were any more orks hidden about which they’d somehow overlooked, and concluded with great reluctance that there weren’t. The thought about that, about what they knew of the Tyranids, of the most likely outcome of such a venture.

“Yeah, no, stuff dat idea,” said Bok at last. “We’z might be fick, but we’z not dat stupid.”

“Lemme explain,” said Gog, and reached down, lifted Bok up by the neck in one hand, and brought his other fist down on the top of Bok’s skull, crushing it quite flat and rendering the grot quite dead. He tossed away the body with a flick of his wrist. “Anybody else got any objektchins? Everybody ‘appy? Quite content wif our li’l plan to hunt da big bug?”

“’es,” mumbled the grots.

“Splendid!” said Magog, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s see if we can get this Kan operational again, shall we? I need a volunteer.”

Several minutes later Gog had ripped the previous dead pilot out of the Killer Kan and stuffed the screaming, wriggling, cursing volunteer (Grok) into the pilot’s seat, whereupon Magog stuck the control wires into the lucky grot’s brain. The rest of the grots picked up discarded sluggas and other weapons from the chamber, while Gog claimed the meltagun.

Now, they had an army: Gog and Magog’s Mobbil Grotnecks.

They came to a narrow ledge, where the Trygon’s tunnel cut across a naturally-occurring fissure, leaving a path just wide enough for the Killa Kan, with a sheer rock face on one side and a steep and probably fatal plunge into a crevasse on the other.

“Izzit safe?” wondered Chok.

“One way to find out,” said Gog. “You go first.”

One by one, the grots edged their way across the ledge, to the far side and the relative safety of the tunnel. Pebbles skittered from under their feet, and went spinning out into the void. If the stones ever hit the bottom, it was too far away to hear. Gog went next, one hand on the stone wall, the other on his meltagun, watched anxiously by the grots who half-hoped he’d make it, half-hoped he’d fall in and give them an excuse to run away again. To their relief/dismay, he made it.

Only the Killa Kan and Magog were left.

“Beauty before brains,” Magog said, for he knew that Grok would run away if left alone on the far side of the narrow path. After some further explanation as to which of them was brains and which beauty, Grok set off across the ledge.

The Killa Kan was somewhat deficient in the delicacy and finesses department. It stomped, because stomping was a good an orkilly thing to do. It shook the narrow path. Larger stones slid down from the cavern roof, cracked into the ledge, splintered and went spinning away. The edge of the path crumbled under the Kan’s feet. It teetered, balanced on edge, righted itself at the last minute. And then, it was across.

“Easy-peasy!” laughed Magog in relief, and started walking along the ledge.

The weakened stone groaned, quaked, and began to give way. Great cracks appeared under Magog’s feet. He looked down, realized what was happening, and began to run. The cracks grew wider. Great slabs of stone began to shift and slide. Head down, Magog was sprinting. The far edge of the ledge grew closer, closer.

He almost made it. With a final sigh, the entire length of the path gave way, and tipped over into the abyss, taking Magog with it.

A mighty hand reached out, and grabbed hold of Magog’s wrist.

“I got ya,” Gog grinned. Growling, straining, sweating, he slowly hauled Magog up, until Magog was sitting safe but mildly disappointed not to have experienced the thrill of plummeting to his death (the ork death urge, again), amid the grinning, clapping and cheering grots.

“You saved my life,” Magog said. “Why?”

Gog thought about this. The truth was, he wasn’t quite sure. Only, he was slowly making the next logical leap forward in the evolution of ork ‘kultur’, building on the initial thought that killing one another right now was not such a great idea.

“Orks togevva strong!” he concluded.

Yes, Gog and Magog were on the cusp of discovering mutual cooperation. We can only shudder when we consider the doom this would have spelled for every other living being in existence: A great WAAAGH! of orks actually working together, even when nobody else was watching.

On the far side of the crevasse, the tunnel opened up again into a large chamber, only many times larger than the one they’d found the Kan in. It was big. Really big. The tunnel mouth sat about a third of the way up one wall, and the far side of the room could only barely be made out. The high, domed ceiling was lost in shadow. In the middle of the cavern floor, a great greenish-purple pool bubbled and slurped and gurgled to itself.

This was a Tyranid reclamation pool, where the swarm breaks down the biomass of the organisms its warriors have killed and consumed, and reconstitutes that raw material into new horrors, new legions of monsters to do the hive-mind’s bidding. Magog took out a spyglass and peered down at the pool. As he watched, lines of wriggling, crawling rippers ambled into the pool, their bellies bloated with grot- and ork-flesh, and then writhed and melted, their exoskeletons sloughing, their flesh dissolving in the pool’s digestive enzymes.

“Here, have a look.” Magog passed the spyglass to Gog.

“Can’t see nuffin, Magog,” Gog complained.

Magog sighed. “Other eye, ya git.”

“Oh, right,” Gog shifted the eyeglass to his non-patched eye. “Ah, dat’s much better.”

“There is plenty of activity below, but I do not see our target.” Magog caught the look of puzzlement on Gog’s face. “No big bug.”

“Tru,” mused Gog. “Mus’ be hidin’ about somewhere. If we go down dere, itz gonna ambush us again, innit?”

Jus then, a grot named Thok crept forward to see what the two orks were talking about. It crawled forward and reached the lip of the tunnel mouth, where it opened out into the great chamber, but was so intent upon the sight of the pool below that it reached too far, its hand met air, and it overbalanced, pitching forward with a startled shriek. A minor avalanche of stones and pebbles went skittering and crashing down the side of the cavern until Gog grabbed hold of the grot’s jerkin and hauled him back into the tunnel.

“Fool of a Thok, frow yaself in next time!” growled Gog.

The Mobbil Infantry tensed and waited. Yet the wriggling mass of Tyranid rippers, after a brief glance at the clattering stones, carried on with their work, mindlessly marching into the pool to be digested and dissolved.

“That gives me an idea: What we need is something to lure the beast into the open.” Magog waved to Grok in his Killa Kan. “Grok, my lad, how would you like to go out in an absolutely hideous blaze of glory?”

Grok, who had understood just ‘blaze’ and ‘glory’, pumped the Kan’s claw-hand into the air. “YAAAH!”

“Go down there and set fire to that pool!”

With another yell of delight, the Killer Kan lurched uncertainly forward, slid down the side of the cavern with a noise like an earthquake, then stomped across the chamber floor, crushing tiny, wriggling rippers under its massive steel feet, until it stood at the edge of the reclamation pool. The skorcha swept out in an arc, spraying a plume of liquid promethium fuel that ignited in midair, became a blistering tongue of blue-white fire, and set the surface of the pool ablaze.

Rippers crackled and popped like sausages on a barbecue, writhing and dancing as the flames consumed them. The hive-mind tried to build hormagaunts and warriors out of the pool’s biomass, but they emerged directly into a furnace, consumed in flame the moment they reared above the surface.

With a roar like a dying sun, the Trygon burst from the ground behind the pool. Before the Killa Kan could turn around, the Trygon’s six claws sheared straight through its armor, effortlessly slicing it into three sections and turning Grok into green paste smeared across the inside of the compartment.

“Dere it is, fire, fire, fire!” Gog yelled, plastering the Trygon’s back with incandescent beams of starfury from his meltagun. The grots screamed and charged, ramshackle weaponry firing, bullets singing from the Trygon’s scales.

It was not enough.

The Trygon spun. Stung, enraged but unwounded, it towered above the grots. It was briefly surrounded in a halo of blue light, then a second later it pulsed outwards, washing over grots and disintegrating them, bursting them and blowing them into expanding balls of green blood and flesh.

Gog and Magog ducked back into the tunnel mouth. They could hear the Trygon approaching, feel the tremors in the ground as it drew closer and closer. Hear its snarling, hissing voice. They knew the end was at hand. They shared a wordless nod, a smile, an acceptance that this was life. They welcomed death.

Yet it is not in ork psychology to give up. In the face of certain death, they do not surrender. There was always time for one last kunnin plan.

“Throw me at the bug, Gog,” said Magog.

“Wot? Frow you?” Gog asked. “It’ll eat you!”

“That’s the whole idea,” Magog explained, holding up his cluster of grenades. “I go down its gullet holding my mega-stikkbomb. It goes off in its tummy. Blam. No more bug.”

“You’ll die, Magog.” It wasn’t quite a protest, more an observation.

“Yep.”

Gog nodded solemnly, and wiped away a happy tear. The two orks shook hands. “Yer da best brudda I ever had,” said Gog. “I’m jes sorry I ain’t gonna have da chance to kill you myself.”

“Same to you Gog,” nodded Magog, as Gog lifted him from the ground and gathered him into his brawny arms. “On three, then.”

“Wun, two, five!”

“Three!”

“Three!” shouted Gog, and leaped up, spinning around and around like a hammer-thrower, faster and faster, and then hurling Magog at the Trygon with all his heroic, orkish might.

As Magog sailed through the air, stikkbombs clutched to his chest, he bellowed final his warcry. Like this: “WAAAAAAGH!” With the extra AAAs.

Slavering jaws snapped around Magog in midair, separating legs from torso, cutting short his cry. The Trygon gulped down the ork hero. Turned upon Gog. Raised its arms to strike.

Then blew apart.

The Trygon’s insides quite suddenly and at high velocity became its outsides. The top half of it, now detached the from the rest of its body, flew the full length of the chamber. Much of the rest of it sprayed across the walls, the floor and the ceiling like a reddish-black upside-down waterfall. Viscera, bones, scales, even tiny bits of Magog rained down on Gog, who spread his arms wide and raised his face and let it wash over him, like a cool summer shower, like a benediction.

Then Tyranid warriors crawling from the pool tore him to pieces.

That’s a happy ending, by ork standards.

The only survivor was the smallest grot, Grotolomew Moatzork, who returned to the surface with the tale of the two brave brothers, and nobody thought it suspicious that the story quite conveniently explained why Grotolomew had missed most of the battle, and nobody questioned how he’d made it back despite being alone in a cavern swarming with Tyranids and his only escape blocked by a yawning crevasse. It sounded like a true story, so it must be.

And true stories were the best kinds of stories of all.