The green skinned Orks that plague the galaxy in Warhammer 40,000 are a relentless and belligerent threat, a horde of bestial warriors that have no greater purpose in life than to wage war and wreak havoc. But they are pale echoes of the ancient and terrible Krork species that once fought during the War in Heaven.
As with all Warhammer 40k lore, much of this is mysterious, and what information we do have comes from sources that should be – within the 40k universe itself – considered unreliable narrators. This may help to reconcile some of the apparent inconsistencies in the lore. Of all the Warhammer 40k factions, only the Necrons have any members that were ‘alive’ at the same time as the Krork, and they notoriously suffer from mental illness, amnesia, and possibly even memory alteration by the C’tan.
What were the Krork?
The Krork were the original form of the Orks. In the novel Fabius Bile: Clonelord, when the Emperor’s Children are exploring the great gallery of the eccentric Necron Trazyn the Infinite, they encounter a Krork specimen trapped in stasis. It’s twelve metres tall, wearing an “exoskeleton far in advance of anything the Orks might now conceive of”, perhaps even more advanced than the power armor of the Space Marine chapters.
Fabius Bile names it as a Krork, claiming to have read about them in Aeldari texts. He states “I have long theorized that the Orks are a form of organic weapons system… unleashed during some ancient apocalyptic event”, because “there’s too much about their internal workings that seems designed”.
Bile is right: the Krork were created during the War in Heaven, the ancient conflict fought by the Old Ones and the Young Races they’d created, against the Necrons and their C’tan overlords.
What were the Krork created to fight?
The Krork were created during the war in heaven, but their specific role is ill-defined. It’s generally assumed that they were one among many races intended to battle the Necrons.
According to the Necron’s third edition Warhammer 40k Codex, at the very end of the War in Heaven, the psychic powers of the Young Races enabled the denizens of the warp to break through into reality. It was at this stage that the Old Ones created the “hardy, green-skinned Krork” to “defend their last strongholds” – not from the Necrons, which had more or less been defeated by the psychic Young Races, but daemons of Chaos and the warp-borne entities known as Enslavers.
The events of the War in Heaven were retconned in the fifth edition Necron Codex: the current version of the history is that the C’tan were victorious over the Old Ones, and then destroyed in turn by the rebel Necrons: the breakdown of reality and Enslaver incursions aren’t a key focus.
According to the Necron lord Oltyx in the novel Twice Dead King: Ruin, the Orks “had been designed during the old wars as a counter to Necron supremacy”. This is a character who has edited his own memories, and is extremely prideful, but it’s not a big change overall.
How did the Orks become the Krork?
60 million years have passed since the end of the War in Heaven and the current 40k timpleine. Simple evolution could have resulted in the Krork becoming the Orks. But and there are reasons to believe that the current Orks are still the same species as the Krorks – the conditions just haven’t been right for them to return to their ancestral form.
The Imperium of Man knows that the more Orks fight, the larger they become. It does not know just how large they can actually get, nor that the more Orks there are and the more stable their civilization, the more advanced they can become both culturally and technologically.
In M32, during the galaxy spanning War of the Beast, the Orks demonstrated advanced and reliable gravity manipulation and subspace tunnelling technology, which allowed them to teleport planet sized warships from system to system. They also evolved a new form of Ork specialist: diplomats.
When the forces of the Imperium finally encounter the Warlord at the head of the great Waaagh!, the Beast itself, in the novel ‘The Beast Must Die’, it is described as “at least ten metres tall”, with claws “each the size of a Space Marine”. It’s so big that the Imperials actually mistake it for a statue.
In the novel ‘Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh!’, the gretchin Makari receives a psyschic vision of the Orks’ origins through the Prophet. “The orks kept coming, and they kept getting bigger, until even the runts among ’em were as big as the warbosses… Huge orks, perfect orks, every one bigger than a clan chief, and rippling with green light… orks as they was meant to be”.
The passage describes what may be the end of the War in Heaven; “It was a big, big, big fight [that] kept getting bigger… I think the orks won”. But as “the noises of the fight faded away, the presence of the gods did too…”. With nothing to focus on, the Orks in the vision turn on one another, until after much slaughter “there were orks, still, but they were nothing like the colossal fighters who’d been there before”.
The vision ends with a new Ork leader battering the Orks into line and ascending as a huge avatar of their collective brutality. The implication is that the Krorks could return, if only there was a conflict – and a leader – that could sustain such a level of focused violence. It’s quite likely this is what occurred during the War of the Beast.
Ghazghkull Thraka may also be on the road to becoming a full Krork. Every new version of his miniature has been larger than previous ones, and (unlike a lot of other 40k miniatures) this isn’t scale creep, it’s part of his lore.
Advanced Ork technology last seen during the War of the Beast has also begun to appear in the current Imperium. In the novel ‘Dawn of Fire: The Wolf Time’, an Imperial sailor rescued from slavery under the Orks tells a member of the Logos Historica Veritas of an advanced Ork space station. Primarch Roboute Guilliman confirms to the incredulous Historitor that the man is not delusional, and that such advanced Ork engineering is possible.
Interested in other deep cuts of 40k lore? Check out our guides exploring whether the Emperor is really a God – and whether the Emperor is an idiot.
Source: Wargamer
