Makari

Makari is the most famous gretchin in the galaxy, the personal banner-bearer of Ghazghkull Thraka and, by reputation, the single luckiest grot ever to draw breath. He first came to his master's side after Ghazghkull, gripped by one of his divine visions, swore the little creature to his service, giving him the name Makari and branding him with a burning claw-mark that is said to come and go. The grot's very first duty was to set that vision down for posterity, scratching Ghazghkull's prophecy onto a sheet of scrap metal in Ork glyphs, using the Warboss's own blood for ink and a finger for a pen, and so creating the relic known as Da Lucky Stikk.

Ever since, Makari has scurried at the forefront of Ghazghkull's mobs, waving his master's banner high with an enthusiasm wildly out of proportion to his size, as the Great Warlord's Waaagh! rolls from world to world. A grot capering at the very tip of an Ork charge should, by any reasonable expectation, survive only seconds. That Makari has instead endured to become a fixture at Ghazghkull's side, held aloft as a mascot of impossible good fortune, has cemented his fame throughout the greenskin race and beyond.

There is, however, a grim secret behind the legend. Makari has in fact died many times over, the first, by some accounts, when Mad Dok Grotsnik hurled him into the void while the Warboss's back was turned. Makari is not truly one grot but a title, a role handed down a succession of nearly identical gretchin, each quietly promoted into the position the instant his predecessor perishes, always before Ghazghkull can notice the substitution. To the Great Warlord, his lucky banner-waver has simply always been there, immortal and unchanging.

The little grot's importance to Ork legend is considerable, for it is largely through Makari that Ghazghkull's story has come down at all; an Inquisitorial interrogation of the banner-bearer forms the frame through which outsiders have pieced together the origins of Mankind's Bane. Whether one small grot or a dynasty of them, Makari endures as proof of a peculiar truth about the Orks: that in a race which worships strength above all else, the humble, disposable gretchin can, with enough luck, march at the very head of the mightiest Waaagh! of all.