Every soul in the Imperium fears the Eye of Terror. That churning wound in reality, where the veil between the material and the immaterial has been torn wide, is a place from which no sane creature returns. Whole Crusades have been swallowed by it. Saints have gone mad merely gazing upon it. And into this daemon-haunted abyss, the archives record, a single Ork Warboss chose to march — grinning, laughing, and spoiling for the biggest scrap the galaxy could offer.
His name was Tuska. History would grant him a title no other greenskin has ever claimed: the Daemon-Killa. What follows is his saga, drawn from the Ork codices and the Index Chaotica, and it is unlike any other tale of damnation this scriptorium has transcribed — for it ends not in defeat, but in something the Blood God himself found worthy of reward.
The Warboss Who Sought a Better Fight
To understand Tuska, one must first understand the creatures he led. An Ork Warboss is the biggest, greenest and meanest brute in a klan, rising to power by winning battles and beating down every challenger foolish enough to test him. These monsters can tower ten Terran feet in height, broader at the shoulder than an armoured Space Marine, and they command the great migratory tides of violence the Orks themselves call a WAAAGH! — part holy crusade, part pub brawl, with a measure of genocide thrown in for good measure.
Orks need battle as men need food and drink. But Tuska, the codices tell us, hungered for more than the ordinary slaughter of the material galaxy. He wanted an enemy that would never run, never break, and never end. There was only one place in all creation where such an enemy could be found.
Breaching the Cadian Gate
The Eye of Terror is guarded by the fortress-world of Cadia, the great bulwark upon which the Imperium’s defence against Chaos has stood for ten thousand years. Nothing crosses that threshold unopposed. Yet the sagas say Tuska managed precisely that — aided by a great many Weirdboyz, the crackling psychic conduits of the greenskin race, whose raw Waaagh!-energy somehow bypassed the defences arrayed around Cadia.
How exactly a rabble of Orks slipped past the most watched border in the galaxy, no record adequately explains. But slip past they did, and Tuska led his horde willingly into the one region every other commander in the galaxy spends their life keeping out. He was not fleeing into the Eye. He was invading it.
Triumph Upon the Daemon Worlds
What the Daemons made of this green tide crashing onto their shores can only be imagined. The archives record that Tuska made his mark swiftly and bloodily, defeating Daemon hordes across several Daemon Worlds. To fight a Daemon is no small thing. The novels that survive in this scriptorium speak with dread of such creatures — of sundered flesh that knits seamlessly together, of wounds that would be instantly fatal to any mortal shrugged off as though they were nothing, of husks that catch a descending blade in skinless hands and simply say ‘No.’
Against such horrors, mortal armies wither. Yet Tuska’s WAAAGH! ploughed onward, and for a time the Daemon-Killa seemed genuinely unstoppable. In the shadow-realms behind the veil, the Orks found the endless enemy they had crossed the galaxy to meet.
The Flesh Planet and the Blood Prince
The Ork’s fortune turned when his WAAAGH! crash-landed upon a planet of living flesh. This grisly world belonged to a mighty Daemon Prince of Khorne — a being the records name the Blood Prince — and he did not suffer the intrusion gladly. His daemonic hordes surged against the invaders, and the battle that followed was ruinous.
Tuska took many deep wounds. His Boyz were slaughtered in droves. And at the last, with the Warboss broken and the Blood Prince poised to deliver the killing stroke, it was the Weirdboyz who bought their leader one final moment. The sagas say they lashed out with their psychic powers to distract the towering Daemon — and in that heartbeat’s opening, Tuska drove his Power Klaw up between the creature’s legs and impaled it. It was a last, spiteful, gloriously Orky blow. Moments later, Tuska fell. His entire horde was hunted down to the last greenskin by the wrathful Daemon Prince and his minions.
The Reward of the Blood God
Here every other tale of the Eye would end — with annihilation, with a horde erased and a name forgotten. But Tuska’s story took a turn no mortal could have foreseen. Khorne, the Blood God himself, had watched the whole murderous spectacle with such savage delight that he refused to let it finish.
The Index Chaotica records that the very next dawn, Tuska’s WAAAGH! rose again. And again. And again. So impressed was the Lord of Skulls by the Orks’ limitless battlelust that he took them into his own domain, there to fight the eternal war they had always craved. In the shadow of the Brass Citadel, Khorne’s elite Bloodletter generals march out to battle the Daemon-Killa’s undying horde every single day.
The Fight That Never Ends
Consider what this means. For nearly every soul that Chaos claims, damnation is torment — an eternity of suffering, corruption or oblivion. For Tuska, damnation is paradise. He wanted a good fight that would never end, and by dying magnificently he earned exactly that. Each dawn brings fresh slaughter; each dusk, death; each new dawn, resurrection and another glorious scrap.
It is one of the darkest jokes in all the grim archives: that the Blood God’s greatest gift and his cruellest punishment can be the very same thing, and that an Ork — of all the galaxy’s creatures — should be the one to be perfectly, eternally content within the Realm of Chaos. Tuska sought the biggest fight there was. The sagas say he found it. And he is fighting it still.