[Gaunt]

The villagers were frozen in fear as the Warg-a-tron towered over their small settlement. A few hardy men walked slowly from their homes bearing old and battered swords, useless for true battle, and positioned themselves between the Warg-a-tron and their families.

The Warg-a-tron shuddered to a halt, it's joints creaking violently, like a chorus of death screeches. It's huge snouted head looked right and and left, then suddenly its jaws flew open and let out a deafening roar. The terrifying cry of the mechanical painbringer blasted the villagers to the ground and tore strips of thatch from the roofs of their homes. Eventually it ceased, but the Warg-a-tron opened its jaws once more and the villagers cowered to the ground, preparing for another sonic blast.

But this time there came not sound, but metal. The beast spat forth a dense shower of razor sharp metal shards. The brave men and the other vilagers standing out in the open were ripped to pieces. After a few seconds the Warg-a-tron's kill storm halted, and all the open ground in the village was covered in a thick bed of twisted, deadly, blood-soaked metal.

All at once, the surviving villagers left their homes and began to run, hopping this way and that to avoid impaling their limbs on the metal shards. The Warg-a-tron reared up on its hind legs and prepared to crush the people with one mighty, crashing lunge.

In this moment of mortal peril, as they ran like they never had before, the thought flashed through the minds of some of the villagers that this was as bad as their lives could possibly get. Then their hearts filled with black despair as they saw an army of living wargs hurtling towards them, and their last slim hopes of survival were extinguished. They closed their eyes and waited for the end.

But it didn't come. The wargs filtered through the fleeing villagers and onwards, towards the Warg-a-tron. As the villagers stood in amazement, wargs gently swept them iup n their jaws and bore them away from the village, out of reach of the Warg-a-tron's violence. When they were laid down on the top of a small hill, they caught their breath and looked back to the village. What they saw was unforgettable.

Wargs were leaping onto the Warg-a-tron and clambering all over its hulking metal frame as it thrashed around trying to shake of its assailants. Many wargs were crushed by this devastating mockery of their own noble form, but they never flinched and threw themslves again and again at their foe every time they were thrown to the ground.

The wargs swarmed over the Warg-a-tron, and, bit by bit, they tore it apart, gnashing and hacking with their teeth and claws. As the battle raged more and more pieces of the Warg-a-tron fell away, but even these pieces fought the wargs, animated by the magician's dark magic as they were.

After three hours of this mighty combat between warg and machine, the War-a-tron was no more. Hundreds of wargs lay dead among the shattered remnants of the village, but the Warg-a-tron had been reduced to a pile of scrap. But these metal pieces, almost as soon as they hit the ground, were reanimated and flew up to fight the wargs. The wargs had no way of stopping the metal. They ripped it into smaller pieces but by doing so only created many foes instead of one. So the wargs ran.

But they did not flee, They ran to the source of the evil - the magician. He had been directing the Warg-a-tron with a staff of black wood from a craggy hill that overlooked the village. The wargs saw his silhouette against the first flash of lightning from an approaching thunderstorm, and they raced to put an end him and his lifeless army. All the way the metal shards chased them and cut down wargs with their sharp edges.

When the wargs crested the outcrop where the magician stood, he did not flee, but with a look of maniacal glee waited till hundreds of wargs surrounded him, blocking all escape routes. The thunder and lightning grew ferocious as the eye of the storm centred on the crag. The wargs crept closer as the magician continued to madly grin. One warg could hold back no longer and leaped at the magician.

Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck down on the spot where the magician stood, a split second before the warg's jaws landed a fatal blow. The leaping warg burst into flame and crashed into the ground. The magician was nowhere to be seen. The wargs searched the hill and the forest on one of its slopes, but there was no sign of him. Then the wargs left, moving back into the shadows as the storm subsided.

The villagers wept with joy at being alive. But sadness scarred them as they went back the village to clear the metal and the bodies of their families and their saviours, the wargs. In the weeks and months that followed they set about rebuilding their village. Once it was completed, they pooled all the money they could scrape together and hired a great craftsman. Under the villagers' instructions he created a wondrous monument - a towering bronze statue of a noble warg, gazing wistfully to the north, whence his kind had left when the villagers last saw them, after the mighty battle of the Warg-a-tron.