Trigger Warning: the following chapter contains some visceral elements. The intent was for a rather horror-y vibe in order to highlight the death-world nature of Tarrghus (among other things), and as such it gets pretty violent, ESPECIALLY towards the end, but the middle part also features some suicidal tendencies.
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++Thought of the Day: Better a million innocent perish than a single guilty go free++
Tarrghus is certainly an interesting specimen. Once, it was, according to official histories, a garden world of incomparable splendor and majesty. So far, I have found no evidence to contradict this. However, its status as a Garden World has long since passed, the result of a decades long occupation by the Hand of the Beast, a greenskin general and servant of the Beast Set Loose.
Of course, I'm not here to discuss history: there is an entirely separate dossier for that. What I am here to discuss is the environment and how it has adapted to its severe infestation...and how the orks have adapted back.
Many presume the greenskin menace to be a monolith. Much like the teeming, glorious masses of humanity, this is not true: greenskins are divided both by klan, which determines their overall culture and philosophy, and waaaagh, which acts as a source of policy for the foul barbarians. No two waaaaghs are the exact same. However, in my studies, I have noticed that even by a planet by planet basis, Ork biology itself is not consistent: for example, on the poison world of Laernaea (an, admittedly, extreme example), the feral ork population have evolved a secondary detoxification organ.
For the most part these modifications, the result of natural selection over generations, aren't notable: the vast majority of the time they give marginal at best advantages to the greenskin race. However, the Orkoids of Tarrghus are more extreme in their mutation.
The most...alarming deviations are largely behavioral (see Dossier: Diggaboyz for the most worrisome element: for brevity, I won't cover the contents here). For instance, the Klans of Tarrghus (not to be confused with the major orkoid philosophical groupings) are statistically 237% more likely compared to the average Ork to develop their own sub-cults venerating non-typical deities.
An unpleasant example is the klan (now exterminated) known as the Shovelboyz, who, while still venerating Gork and Mork, also seem to deify some totemic spirit of the under-earth.
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Down below, in the depth, the greenskins toiled, digging their shovel into the dirt. "Oi, work harder, gitz!" Bellowed the overseer, a feral ork clad in crude iron armor. "Da Boss wants more shiny bitz!"
The giant mine chamber was filled with shovelboyz, all of whom either had failed to impress the boss or slaves taken from rival klans, digging into the walls. On occasion, some grots would wander by, holding a bucket: grots weren't allowed to dig because they were too scrawny to use a shovel good, but they could help in other ways. In the center, a trio of idols, crudely hewn things studded with gems and metal, the largest of which depicted Gork (or was it Mork?), and the smallest, Mork (or perhaps Gork?). The middle one, however, was different, depicting the patron of the Shovelboyz tribe, Da Dark 'n Dank One, an orkoidish figure with long, flat hands, perfect for tunnelling through the dirt, and large, flat teeth, perfect for crushing rocks between.
As the bucket went along, each shovelboy would stop and take a sip of water from it. Dehydration was, next to being eaten, one of the few things the shovelboyz feared, and a very true and real threat it was. To see it, you just had to look down the line. After all, a bucket only held so much water, meaning that the further down you looked, the more shriveled, small, and wilted the shovelboys looked, with those worst off not even being green so much as an unpleasant, unorky brown, the color of a dying plant, their skinny arms stretched out, skin dry and wrinkly.
They didn't die, of course. They just got skinnier and skinnier and drier and drier until they stopped moving, which was worse because they were still aware, still cognizant, but still and unable to dig or fight or win for however long it would take for them to get any more moisture. Those who survived such an experience were inevitably driven mad, stark raving even by greenskin standards, their time as immobile husks having left permanent physical and mental scars on them.
Sure, they could be rehydrated later, but they said the thirst never went away. That the darkness (as such dryboyz were inevitably disposed of by being dumped down a hole) never went away. So each of them toiled, toiled away, never to see the light of the sun again, hoping to secure a good haul so that they weren't put at the end of the line.
After all, sitting in a hole, unable to move at all as your mind rotted inside your skull, it was no life for an ork. It wasn't a life for anyone.
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Of course, the xeno veneration of their false, barbarian gods is of little concern. More alarming is the predilection of Tarrghus greenskins to go mad. Sanity, of course, is relative to these creatures, but even by their esoteric and crude standards, the orks of Tarrghus have a tendency towards mental derangement. The cause of this is unknown: perhaps the result of accumulating in their bodies the various toxins the enviroment produces to inhibit their growth affects the brain, or some genetic quirk unknown to the greater orkish community.
This madness is, however, uniform in one respect: the afflicted uniformly make reference to whispers....
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All around him were corpses.
From the soil, their faces stared up at him: ork. humie. Something else. Something else. And in every shadow, they lurked. Whispering. Begging. Roaring. The Ork stood at the table, bringing his kleaver down, chopping the meat. Hungry. They were also hungry. So hungry. If he fed them, they would stop. They had to stop: he couldn't take it no more. They had to be fed. Or they wouldn't stop whispering.
All around him were corpses. Corpses on the soil. Corpses in the soil. Faces staring up, eyes empty. Groaning below, their visages in the soil showing like death masks as they whispered, as they screamed. The others hadn't understood: they didn't hear the whispers. They had tried to stop him.
The ork giggled, a deranged, strangely high pitched for an ork noise as it chopped more meat, the massive and brutal choppa seperating green flesh from green carcass as its weilder sectioned and divided the corpse of its former Klan Chief into bits, quite literally butchering the former warleader with the skill and grace one would find from a master of the craft even as blood flowed from the remains onto the table and dripped, dripped onto the floor even as what didn't dried into an ugly, brown-black stain on the wood as it became stale in the hot, dry air. And then, once the madboy had butchered his leader, it would move on to the rest of the klan, the rest of its kinfolk who had foolishly tried to prevent the whisperboy from doing its grim quest. Too bad: some of em had been real good mates to go scrap with. But they had tried to stop him. So he made them meat, the entire klan.
Some, he would eat. After all, it wouldn't do to starve before the great work. But the rest would go: otherwise he would have no peace, no sanity until it had been sacrificed up at the cthonic, crude hewn altar it would have to construct, the design filling his mind with the same clarity that a choppa or a shoota would appear unbidden in the mind of a mek looking to make a weapon, with the same fundamental urge of destructive creation accompanying the design.
All around him, the huts burned, the thatch and wood crackling and blackening, smoke, acrid and heavy and
meaty trailing into the air and filling the lungs, but the whisperboy didn't care: the soil was hungry. He would appease it, give to it what it asked for, what it needed. And if it didn't please, it would give and give and give.
And if finally nothing else pleased it, it would give it himself. The boy even had a rope, just for the occasion, in his hut. It just had to find a tall enough tree that it would snap his neck and spine and sever his head from his body in a single go.
After all, it didn't want to climb the Mork damned thing twice to kill himself: too much effort, really.
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Of course, this deviation isn't limited to the psychological, but also biological. One quirk of the Tarrghus orkoid infestation is that, despite having been under the sway of Orks for an entire century and severely over-ran for even longer, it hasn't completely overwhelmed the native biosphere. While to some extent this can be attributed to the ceaseless work of the inhabitants of the world, were this a standard infestation the ecosystem of the garden world would have been overran long ago.
I am myself unsure of the precise cause of this. Part of it may be attributed to the growth inhibitors the vast majority of plant life and some animal life excrete slowing and sabotaging the development of orks. Another factor is that, on average, compared to their kin, the spores produced by orks as part of their natural reproductive cycle have a statistically lower odds of being viable.
However, even taken all together, if one takes the data altogether, this still isn't enough explanation: even if 99% of the spores were non-viable, that still leaves hundreds if not thousands of potential orks. SOMETHING is inhibiting their growth. Should this effect cease, it is likely that Tarrghus will face complete ecological collapse inside a century without extreme measures.
Of course, this goes both ways. Even as the enviroment has altered orks, so have orks altered the enviroment.
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The ork ran, a sheen of sweat on its heavy brow as it trampled the underbrush trying to get away. Furtively, it looked behind it, only to regret the action as it saw, in the darkness of the forest, eyes following it, swift and silent, yellow beads of terror shadowing the ork hungrily, letting it try to tire itself out.
It didn't understand what was going on: every instinct told the ork it should be doing the opposite, but at the same time, this warrior instinct, so deeply engrained into its conscious, was warring with another, equally as primal phobia, the only true terror instinct possessed by the orkish psyche, existing bone and blood deep as any of the many other tendencies that formed the bedrock of its personality.
Something that, on other worlds, was rarely activated, but on the brutal, hungry world of Tarrghus, had been honed to a fine razors edge. The only thing an ork truely feared.
Being devoured. Something the Ork had already seen occur, five times in a row, merely minutes before. It had been a small huntin' party. Out to smash some humies that had been in the area, steal their gubbinz and maybe cook em up in a soup. Then Snotgrimz had been ripped apart by a Bhikku Dragon that had dropped on him from up above, its left-middle claw disemboweling Snotz, leaving his steaming, bloody organs on the forest floor before anyone could react, its teeth biting down on the screaming orks head, both row of teeth bleeding the orks skull as the beasts jaws began to deform the orks slowly cracking skull, bits of brain dripping. The others had gone to pull the dragon off, not having yet had their morale broken, only to be snared by yateveo snap-vines wrapping around their body, slamming them to the ground (in the worst case) and merely trapping them (in the best case) even as the razor sharp thorns (really organic hypodermic needles) bit into their flesh, beginning to drain their blood, causing the now shriveling orks to scream a desperate, horrified death-scream, even as, above them, the plants flower bloomed, releasing the smell of death and decay from its massive, hanging blossom.
Then the rest of the Bhikku Dragons descended.
The now running Ork had only barely freed himself. Now, it desperately tried to avoid becoming another creatures lunch.
As it continued forward, all around it the undergrowth faded away, the bark on the trees changed from a full brown to a darker, yet dark black, the foliage giving away to reveal the pale grey-white light of the sun, as the Orks feet began to crush not leaf and flower and weed, but twig and branch and occasional spiderweb.
Looking back once more, it saw the yellow eyes of the Bhikku Dragons fall back. Grinning, the Ork let out a triumphant whoop as it continued to run. "Ol Zogwort ain't et yet!" He cried, an invisible almost-skip being added into the greenskins step as it felt the adrenalin and terror fade even as the webbing all around him grew more and more dense and the brittle, frail tree limbs snapped when he barged past them.
He never even saw the massive, chitinous leg swing towards his head. It had looked too much like a tree branch at one moment, and the next, Zogwort was unconscious.
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The Ork opened its eyes, bleary, looking around. Struggling, it tried to free itself, only to find its limbs refusing to move. A shot of adrenaline coursed through its body once more, and the ork came to alertness.
Perhaps it would have been merciful had it never woken up, because to the orks dismay, it found itself in a web. Struggling, it tried to free itself from the voluminous white fibers that wrapped around his limb, the silk as hard as steel and even harder to rip. As the orks eyes adjusted to the gloom, it felt itself struggle harder as terror once more filled its veins like the most foul of narcotics.
All around him were bodies. Humie. Ork. Even in one case some sort of strange giant, the remains of its blue and gold trimmed armor some sort of ceramic material. Of the giant, only the torso and head was available, limbs ripped off and discarded likely to make it easier to restrain, the latter covered in a strange, grilled, beak-like helmet, while its torso consisted mostly of a gaping hole of meat, a small few organs remaining even as the ribs and armor had burst outward, revealing the innards of that strange, otherworldy giant.
The other bodies weren't in better condition. Worse, perhaps, because for many of these bodies, it looked like they had
dissolved, green and pale skin sloughing off their bodies as the fluidic remains (that weren't slurped up by the webs maker) dripped to the floor, the mixture of blood and digestive juice filling the air with a pulpy, sickly sweet scent even as the dripping skeletons slowly fell to mush. The remainder looked like meaty chunks, ripped to shreds, only scraps of flesh and viscera remaining on the carcasses which looked less like former people and more like a butcher shop experiment gone horrifically, mind blastingly awry, even as the culprit behind their destruction swarmed across them, large fist sized beetles with foot long probiscuses and hard, spiky carapaces that dripped with the blood of their incubators and first meals.
Indeed, thousands of these horrific creatures swarmed across the massive, chamber sized webbing, some of them even attacking and tearing into their kin with their secondary method of consumption, massive bladed mandibles, each with a variable number of teeth-spikes for ripping flesh and crunching bone and breaking chitin.
And above them all stood the mother, the matriarch, the queen of the chamber, not through divine blood or instinct but through size and strength and instinct, a massive web-beetle, with eleven black, heavily scarred legs, the front ones crude and heavy and blunt and perfect for breaking ork skulls. With its bulbous, glittering multi-faceted dichoptic black eyes, four in numbers, it surveiled its domain, before spotting the struggling ork.
Descending down its web, the beetles probiscus dripped with digestive fluid even as the ork screamed. It was time to feed.
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After all, Tarrghus is the only world I've encountered in which Orkeovores is a valid ecological niche.
