Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable People (section)

== Commisssar Yarrick ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Hero of Armageddon: '''''

The legend that is Commissar Sebastian Yarrick began as all commissars in the Schola Progenium as an orphaned child of the Imperial Army on the world named for the end of days. As all such children he was raised by the state to find purpose in the state. Even at an early age he was ear marked for the commissairant due to his ability to memorize the codes of conduct used by the Steel Legion and the rules imposed upon it and was adept at their interpretation and implementation to changing circumstances. Normally this would have had him booked down for officer training but for his dry wit and ability to motivate by both fear and fervour.

His first real assignment outside the classroom at the tender age of 15, apprenticed to aging regimental commissar Lenert Górecki, was the 97th “Kill Krazii” Outriders. They were the most vicious bunch of lunatics as you could ever hope to avoid feared more by their neighbours than by the feral orks they hunted for reasons of typically never leaving enough orks for their name to spread. They were a leathery skinned and gaunt breed that made their home deep in the Great Fire Wastes of the northern continent. Much of their culture and attitudes of war sank into the young commissar’s impressionable mind, certainly their ancestor worship did.

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

He was never accepted as one of them, but like old man Górecki he was eventually held in some measure of esteem. As Old Man Lenert retired his last apprentice seamlessly took over and the wild ork hunts continued uninterrupted. It says something of the man that the Kill Krazii gave him a traditional sky burial and when next the tribe were reunited with those returning for a tour in the Imperial Army his name was mentioned at the gathering as one of the lost.

In time young Yarrick was reassigned, it was suspected by those above that he was going native. They probably weren’t wrong. When Yarrick had left him he had been an erudite and mildly urbane student, straight capped the very model of all an aspiring young commissar should be. When he came back to them he was half feral and far more experienced, not actually any wiser but with a highly refined animal cunning that was almost as good. He was also extremely experienced in matters of orkish psychology, physiology and language; the hunting had definitely been a learning experience for him.

For all that he was no longer in any way orthodox in his technique none could deny his effectiveness. His training and apprenticeship was well and truly over and his scarlet sash earned.

As a young man Yarrick found himself appointed to many regiment of Armageddon, though only ever sadly the more numerous Steel Legions. Typically he would serve for a campaign, maybe two, before someone called in enough favours or kicked up enough of a fuss and got him transferred to be someone else’s problem. It was usually the officers that had a problem with him and his “disruptive” methods and “barbaric” tendencies, among them men he was usually tolerated, certainly feared, and often much liked. Yarrick typically moved from unit to unit seemingly almost totally at random more than he spent his time in any stationary or central position of control. He would then observe and participate in the thickest of the action whilst sifting through comm. bead chatter.

It was many, many years before he would again see the world he had grown up on. He was biologically maybe in a good light in his mid 60s when he came home (though given the time distortions of warp travel was closer to 110), grey haired, scarred and hardened like old oak. His last assignment was to take a more sedate teaching position in the Schola he had once come from and spend his last few years trying to impart some wisdom to children too young to appreciate it. He had a pension to look forward to and a retirement with only some light advisory work for the PDF to occupy him. He could relax, for him the war was over. Part of him, he was ashamed to admit, was looking forward to it. The rest of him saw it as some alien and hellish existence he wanted no part of.

He was saved from such a fate by one far worse. Ghazghkull, at the time a much inexperienced Warboss, had just warped into the system aboard a renovated Space Hulk.

One Space Hulk against a hive world like Armageddon, with it’s trillions strong PDF, was a threat but not an insurmountable one. And so, the Overlord of Armageddon. Herman von Strab claimed the Imperium need not know. If the Imperium knew then they would send their Imperial Guard and associated riff raff and undoubtedly put the tithe up for a few years afterwards to cover the debt. No, better to deal with this quietly, in house.

Yarrick anger was pretty incandescent when he heard of this. Had the man not seen the reports? The legions of feral orks in the wilderness and wastelands and jungles? Had he any clue what would happen if they were bolstered and united under an outside authority? He didn’t. He didn’t typically read military reports or concern himself with such drab minutiae.

Rather than retire Sebastian Yarrick started to kick up a fuss in the halls of the nobility and the hierarchy of the PDF. In his time he had acquired some small measure of a reputation among the military and even a little in the mindset of the civilian population. As the orks started to assault the inter-hive roads and rail systems and raid the farmlands his words were given weight of evidence. Overlord von Strab, after several failed arrests where the police officers tasked resigned on the spot, decided to go about silencing the old warmonger and worry spreader more subtly. He gave Commissar Yarrick the position of Senior Advisor to the PDF of Hive Hades. To the public it looked as though von Strab had promoted the old soldier to a useful position and was doing something about the situation, which relieved the growing panic, but also removed public sympathy as any further protests would look like a selfish power grab.

Yarrick was not blind to what had just been done but neither could he do much about it beyond make the best of bad situation. Thankfully the head of the Hades Hive PDF and the Hive Governor, Hartmut Frucht and Gertraud Rösch respectively, were followers of his and wise enough to defer to his extensive experience on the subject of all thing regarding the Orks.

First order of business was to sever public communications with the rest of the world, if the corpulent Overlord could give them orders and it be publicly known he had done so then disobedience would be classed as treason in times of war. Secondly was the introduction of conscription and rationing as well as the issuing of orders for the citizenry to abandon the outlying settlements and farmland near the city before the orks could reach them. Hades was digging in for as long a siege as it could hope for.

But it was to be a hopeless siege. Or at least it would have been had it not been for an old hubworld trader by the name of Unwerth who owed him a favour and had been in the system when the Hulk arrived. Yarrick had no way of knowing if the high gravity spacefarer, on his little trader boat, had survived the orks and made it to the systems edge. All they could do was dig in and hope and survive long enough for rescue to arrive.

It was a grim watch as the storm clouds gathered on the horizon and the low rumble of alien aggression got closer. Grimmer still was the news as the other hives fell, overrun and butchered. Infernus was the first to fall, it’s poorly prepared walls breached in less than a week and it’s famous forges put to darker work. Next was Death Mire Hive barely a month later as feral orks of the jungle and wastelands bolstered the ranks of the off-worlder orks and swelled their forces to obscene scale. Then the others, seemingly in no pattern or order until only Helsreach and Hades remained, the former as the capital had always possessed formidable defences as befitted it’s position and the latter only by the illegal actions of it’s rulers.

All the while, for the months that followed, men and women died on the walls and in the body-strewn mud and ash about them. They were PDF, well beneath the standards of the Imperial Army for the most part, but Yarrick and his officers knew that in those days and in their dying moments they were Guardsmen one and all.

But no siege can continue eternally, no great wall endures the storm forever. Adamantium and ferrocrete began to crumble under the weight of artillery and malice thrown against it and sapper teams of grots and to the horror of all enslaved citizens undermined once thought sturdy foundations. The Orks were in winding and tangled three-dimensional maze of Hive Hades. It was then that the real fighting began. Workers in the effected areas were told to either retreat to the safe districts or grab a weapon and report to the Citizens Militia stations. In the months of the siege and in preparation for it’s failing the outlying districts had been seeded with all manner of traps and snares and these were out into good use.

Once more Old Man Yarrick was abroad in the hives among his soldiers. Where he stood victory was stolen from defeat, lines held, trembling hearts became firm, weapons held steady and the whimpers of animal fear turned to the roar of something fierce and primal. For those moments, and they were just moments, Yarrick could believe he was young again among his friends in the Kill Krazii people. He could not deny that they were loosing ground but they were making the green bastards pay for every inch and if this was to be an end it would be an end remembered for a thousand years in infamy.

For a further six months they held out like this. Loosing ground street by blood swimming street, building by corpse chocked building. They fought not like lions but like cornered dogs left with nowhere to run and still they would not give in to despair. By fire and passion the men and women sold their lives at a high price for those they loved in the diminishing safe zones. They just had to hold out they were reassured.

Time was bought for another few months as the green tide abruptly stopped. What had first appeared to be additional reinforcements approaching from the north were discovered to be outlanders and nomads on their clattering war machines in great number, headed by the warrior priests of the Kill Krazii screaming an unending curse of Death as they mowed down all in their path, circling the city once and scattering the few orks that survived their sudden savagery. Then they too dived into the city. Though they loved the open spaces and they were more than slightly insane they weren’t stupid. They knew that they would return in greater numbers and would be prepared for them this time.

The Hades soldiery were immensely grateful for their brief relief and unexpected reinforcements and wasted no time in repairing the barricades and hastily erecting new defences alongside these strange tribals from the north.

It was a bittersweet reunion for Yarrick. At last he would see his old friends one last time before the end. The eldest of the eldest of the war-priests, indeed the last one left who had met Yarrick in his youth, was unconcerned; “We are witnessed” he informed the old Commissar “and it is a good day for glory”. At these words in his gnarled and shrivelled up soul the old soldier felt some strange and pleasant emotion he had longs since forgotten; belonging. His ancestor gods (by adoption) had not abandoned him.

The next day the old war-priest died with a weapon in his hand and a smile on his lips manning the barricades.

The day after that a most cunning ambush from the storm drains beneath one of the fortifications saw Warboss Ugulhard in mortal combat with Sebastian Yarrick and although the old man won he didn’t land the killing blow before having his right arm taken off at the elbow. Bleeding arterial blood most alarmingly he continued to oversee the defences until the greenskins were beaten back into their tunnels and sealed down their to scurry away or be buried alive and starve in the darkness. Only then did Commissar Yarrick allow the darkness to take him.

When the old man next opened his eyes it was in a triage centre eight days later, ashen pale and grim as death he awoke to the chatter of comm. traffic buzzing in his ear and a mood of celebration. Drop pods had been sighted falling behind the orkish lines, Unwerth had gotten through. The Imperium had learned of their desperation and presumably the incompetence of the Overlord. The mere thought of von Strab brought Yarrick back to a state of Full Commissar, ignoring the lights flashing before and behind his eyes, heedless of the shaking in his legs and the sudden and terrible weight of his coat and sash he stomped out of that improvised hab-block hospital.

Governor Rösch of Hades was more than a little surprised to see him and given his darkened eyes, paled face and her last news of him having been cut down by a warboss for a moment assumed he was some spectre of the unhappy dead. But it was not so as the dead, at least in her mind, did not swear quite so colourfully.

By those final days of the 4th Great War the name of Yarrick was becoming something of a legend. When the common men heard of his fall they began falter for if one so great as he could fall so abruptly then what hope was there for lesser men? Had relief from the Imperium not arrived when it did there would only have been corpses to be rescued.

Caught between hammer and anvil the orks were quickly minced and as the Space Marines cleared landing fields and the main body of the Imperial Army arrived the line was pushed back and pushed back hard. It was commonly shown in the years that followed a one armed Commissar leading the retribution; it was a symbol of Armageddon resilience and dogged determination. The truth of the matter was that for most of the Retribution March Yarrick was in a state of bloodloss and fever.

One thing that is certain is that he was there at the breaking of Helsreach siege, he absolutely did march into the Overlords office, he absolutely issued an execution order for gross criminal incompetence and it was witnessed by several individuals including Chaplain Grimaldus that the execution was issued via kicking him out of a window nearly two miles high.

Then came the long drudge of rebuilding and the tally of the dead.

In the confusion of the last days of the war Ghazghkull mag Uruk Thraka, architect and instigator of a world of sorrows, had shown uncommon Kunnin' and Taktikul thinking and was not counted among the slain. The Beast reborn had escaped. The knowledge of it burned in the commissar's veins and he one thing and one thing only; his life now was for one thing and one thing only, he would hunt down and take Ghazghkull's head. (Light years away an alien mind was reaching a similar conclusion).

From his time among the Kill Krazii he also knew that to hunt you could chase or you could wait. Yarrick didn't know where Ghazghkull was but he knew where he would be. Armageddon had bested him and to the orkish mind that was intolerable and Yarrick knew it would only gnaw at him. He would be back and so Yarrick blew his entire pension and the good will of the Imperium on the best Rejuvenents he could afford. He would ensure that The New Beast got the welcome he deserved and he would be there to greet him.

</div>
</div>