Origins
Three hundred years ago, the 300-strong Prowler group was setting out to support a neighbouring world of Cadia in it's fight against Chaos. Unfortunately due to erratic Warp Storms, the task force found themselves trapped in the outer edge of the Eye Of Terror.
Two hundred years would pass for the outside world as the Prowler Group faught its way in one battle after another. In the end a mere 57 marines survived their journey to exit (although for them, less than 200 years had passed).
It was a war of desperation that shaped the lives of many of the survivors. It saw a desperate alliance with the Meen Chompas Ork warband who were similarly trapped within the Eye of Terror.
Ork and Space Marine banded together against a common foe, aiming to seek a way out. Orks were ferried within Storm Wolf craft as they saught a way out.
Desperate Measures
As the campaign raged, equipment dwindled, and numbers fell, sometimes catastrophically.
However, Master of the Forge Freidrich Oppenheimer and Chief Apocathary Gerold Muller began to notice the behaviour of their Big Mek and Mad Doc counterparts. The Orks lacked the Storm Wolves reluctance to scavenge parts, and so their number of Looted Wagons and walking wounded never dwindled to the same extent.
Both Oppenheimer and Muller worked closer and closer with their opposite numbers, and with it a change of thinking occured. After battle, Chaos weapons, tanks. armour would be looted for spare parts, never mind it's heretical origins. This was not about purity, it was about pragmatism. Many Storm Wolf vehicles still contain remnants from this looting.
Most famous of all is the looted-wagon-turned-predator that Oppenheimer would call Loki's Guile.
Even after the War Of The Deep Dark, Oppenheimer would refuse to scrap this vehicle, which he considered to have a "strong machine spirit".
Muller, meanwhile, worked to reanimate dead marines into servitors, a practice considered with distaste by other chapters.
These pragmatic practices combined with the alliances with Orks serves as a reminder to many other chapters that the Storm Wolves are borderline heretical, and have potentially been tainted by their time in the Eye of Terror to become more like Chaos than they would accept.
The End Of The War
As the Warp Storm subsided, the task force finally made it back into the real universe some 200 years later. Knowing how quickly their former allies would turn, the Storm Wolves massacred many of the Meen Chompas, with two exceptions.
Their dead allies were treated in death with respect, in line with Storm Wolf culture. With their time as allies, the Storm Wolves recognised the Orks as a brutal and undisciplined tribe, but a warrior race worthy of some measure of respect.
The two Ork survivors are held to this day. The Ork Big Mek code named "Mr Green" is held in Mitguard as a prisoner, and occasionally allowed to build devices from scrap, which Master of the Force Oppenheimer analyses.
The Mad Dok code named "Doctor Jade" is a more willing captive, he is allowed to experiment on captured Ork specimens, and the results analysed by Muller.
As a result, Storm Wolves are considered one of the leading experts of Ork technology and physiology.
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