The Wars for Armageddon: Yarrick vs Ghazghkull

The greatest ork warlord of the age once held the Imperium’s most famous commissar in his power, and let him go. Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, who has drowned two wars in blood on Armageddon, had Sebastian Yarrick at his mercy on the world of Golgotha, and chose to release him. Yarrick himself, in the records attributed to him, called that mercy more frightening than the defeat that preceded it. Why would a beast spare the one man who had ever truly beaten him? The answer lies in a rivalry that has spanned more than half a century, two invasions, a ruined hive and a hunt that has never ended. This is its chronicle.

A World Worth Burning

First, the prize. Armageddon is a hive world roughly ten thousand light years to the galactic north-east of Terra, a vital node in the navigational channels of its sector, and its countless manufactorums arm Imperial Guard regiments thousands of light years away. It is a world of ash wastes, choking equatorial jungles and vast fortified hive cities, and it had been bled before: the archives record a Chaos invasion in the mid-forty-first millennium, a war so terrible that the survivors were purged by the Inquisition and the world quietly resettled by people who knew nothing of what had happened there. Lose Armageddon, and the Imperium’s grip on that whole region of the galaxy slips. Its name has since become a byword for war on a scale the mind refuses to hold, and that is the doing of two individuals: one ork, and one man.

The Prophet with the Iron Skull

Ghazghkull began as nothing: a young Goff warrior on the ork-infested world of Urk, taking part in a raid on a hidden monitoring station. Its automated defences put a bolter shell through his head, pulverising much of his skull and a sizeable portion of his brain. Most orks would have been left for the carrion birds. Ghazghkull stood back up, and was hauled off to a notoriously addled Painboy, Mad Dok Grotsnik, who replaced the ruined bone and brain with bionics, wires and squig sinew, and riveted adamantium plate over the lot.

What woke from that operation was something new. Ghazghkull believed himself the chosen voice of Gork and Mork, the brutal twin gods of the orks, and set about proving it. He broke the Deathskull warlord Dregmek with his bare hands and his new armoured skull, declared himself the Prophet of Gork and Mork, and united the scrapheap tribes of Urk. What followed was not the formless rampage that most Waaaghs become. The Codex records name him that rarest of ork leaders, one with drive and ability in equal abundance; his sub-commanders had enough tactics beaten into their skulls for some of it to stick. The Imperium was about to learn the difference.

The Second War: A Governor’s Folly

In 941.M41, Ghazghkull’s space hulk tore out of the warp and crashed onto Armageddon. The world was ruled at the time by Overlord Herman von Strab, whom Princeps Kurtiz Mannheim of the Iron Skulls Titan Legion called ‘the greatest waste of flesh and bone born in the last five hundred years’. The judgement was earned. Von Strab had ignored the sighting of a vast hulk in the system and reported it to no one; when the orks landed, he fed his defence regiments into the grinder piecemeal, and they were smashed. Armageddon Prime capitulated. The ork columns rolled on, encircling Imperial armies on the ash wastes and pounding the shrinking pockets.

In the ruin, one officer refused to break. The records credit Commissar Yarrick with ordering the defence of Hades Hive, and it was Yarrick, not the Overlord, around whom the war would turn. Von Strab was later arrested for his crimes, though he escaped; Armageddon’s commanders ultimately set his authority aside to follow the Blood Angels’ Commander Dante. But by then the siege of Hades had become something more than a battle.

Hades Hive: The Claw and the Evil Eye

The first great ork assault on Hades was led by Warlord Ugulhard, who glimpsed Yarrick across the battle lines and drove straight for him. His snapping battle claw severed the commissar’s right arm at the elbow. Ugulhard’s victory bellow was cut short: Yarrick killed him, tore the claw from the corpse and held it aloft. The Imperial troops charged, the leaderless orks broke, and only when they had been driven back did Yarrick allow himself to lose consciousness. The story spread through the ork horde like fire. Yarrick, they said, could not be killed, and his gaze was death to even the mightiest ork.

Yarrick understood the ork mind and exploited it without mercy. He had Ugulhard’s claw fitted as a prosthetic in place of his lost arm. Then there is the Bale Eye, the bionic implant that fires a pulse of laser light, and here, reader, the archives disagree. One account says he lost his left eye to a laser splinter and had the implant made afterwards; another insists he had his own eye plucked out on purpose, so that the orks’ superstition would become literally true. If they thought he had the evil eye, he would give them one. I record both; the second is certainly the more Yarrick of the two.

The siege ground on. Frustrated beyond measure, Ghazghkull joined the assault himself and unleashed a season of colossal bombardment. Yarrick countered every ploy: sabotage parties against the siege engines, flank counter-attacks, feigned retreats into ambushes. When Ghazghkull massed his Kommandos to infiltrate the hive, Yarrick sent former duct workers into the dark after them, and it is said that not one Kommando came out alive.

The Obsession That Saved a World

Here is the hinge of the whole war. While Ghazghkull hurled himself at Hades, the Ultramarines, Salamanders and Blood Angels arrived and began to break the orks elsewhere. Had the Warlord turned to face that counter-attack, the chronicles agree, Armageddon might still have fallen. He did not. Yarrick’s resistance had become a challenge to Ghazghkull’s standing as a warlord, one he could not walk away from, and he gathered every warband he could reach and fell on the hive with the hatred an ork reserves for his greatest enemy.

Hades fell. Its supplies were exhausted; Yarrick evacuated whom he could by shuttle and fought on. The Space Marines arrived too late, and the defenders were massacred nearly to a man. Yet rescuers found the commissar alive among the ruins, dozens of ork corpses heaped around him. By the time he had recovered, the war was over. At Tartarus Hive, Ghazghkull and his bodyguard had vanished in the middle of a counter-attack; the leaderless orks broke, and the survivors fled into the jungles. Some orks claim the hand of Gork plucked his prophet away. His detractors say he ran. Either way, he escaped. Yarrick lasted only a few months in honourable retirement before he strapped the claw back on and vowed not to rest until Ghazghkull was destroyed.

Golgotha and the Long Game

The Imperium’s great mistake, one Codex chronicle warns, was to believe Ghazghkull defeated. He withdrew to a stronghold in the ork-held Golgotha region and, by his own account, carried on with the plan his gods had shown him: to destroy your enemy, you must first know him. The Second War, in this reading, had been a test of how the Imperium responds to invasion. Between 945 and 959.M41 came a string of small raids led by Ghazghkull personally, each an experiment in the tactics he meant to use next time.

Yarrick went after him, and on Golgotha the hunter met ruin. In Yarrick’s own recorded words, Ghazghkull annihilated the Imperial forces there, and then released him. The novels have Yarrick chained in ork slave pens before that release. Why the Warlord let him go, no archive I hold can say with certainty. Some see a warrior’s respect for the one foe worth fighting; the ork chronicles do call Yarrick the most respected ‘umie’ Waaagh! Ghazghkull ever met. Yarrick feared something colder: that Ghazghkull wanted his rival alive, because a war without him would be a lesser war.

The Third War: Fifty-Seven Years to the Day

Armageddon rebuilt. Monitor stations named for Mannheim, Dante and Yarrick watched the system’s edge; a military council under General Kurov ruled the world. It was not enough. Ork pirates strangled the sector’s shipping, then raids became invasions, and on the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, fifty-seven years to the day after the first landing, Ghazghkull’s fleet tore back into reality. The last transport to reach Armageddon before the storm carried the Old Man himself, home for the first time in twenty years. Kurov asked him to lead the military council for the duration of the crisis, and to the relief of all, Yarrick agreed.

Ghazghkull’s first act was a message. He did not besiege Hades again. He dropped asteroids on it from orbit, and the ruined hive and everyone in it were smashed flat. Then the true war began: ork drop legions, Roks hurled down from the hulks, treachery opening Acheron Hive from within, with von Strab himself returned to proclaim himself Overlord, ork brute squads at his back. Space Marines of more than twenty Chapters fought across the ash wastes, and billions died.

The Hunt Without End

And then, in the middle of it all, the Warlord left. Tormented by a vision he could not decipher, knowing only that what he sought was not on Armageddon, Ghazghkull gathered a handful of ships around his flagship, Kill Wrecka, and departed, leaving the greater part of his horde to fight on. Yarrick had let him slip away once before and vowed it would not happen again. With High Marshal Helbrecht of the Black Templars he gave chase, and weeks later their warships trapped the ork flotilla in a barren void called the Haunted Gulf. Ghazghkull turned and charged straight into them, as Yarrick had warned he would. The scrap fleet was shot apart; Kill Wrecka was left crippled and listing.

As Yarrick and Helbrecht prepared to board and finish it, the ork flagship was wreathed in green energy, blinked once, and was gone. The chronicle records that Yarrick slumped, knowing what that escape meant for the galaxy. Ghazghkull reappeared among a distant ork fleet and marched on to new wars; the Black Templars’ own records say Helbrecht hunts him still, and so, the whispers say, does the Old Man.

I have set down many feuds in this scriptorium, reader, but few so strangely bound. The commissar built his legend on the orks’ belief that he could not die; the Warlord built his on the belief that the gods spoke through a hole in his head. Each has made the other greater, and neither will rest until the other falls. When that day comes, I suspect the survivor will find the galaxy a little quieter, and a good deal smaller.

Questions from the Archive

Who is Commissar Yarrick?

Sebastian Yarrick is the most celebrated commissar in the Imperium, known as the Hero or Saviour of Armageddon and simply ‘the Old Man’. He led the defence of Hades Hive against Ghazghkull Thraka in the Second War for Armageddon, lost his arm to the Warboss Ugulhard and wore the ork’s claw ever after, and returned to lead the planet’s military council in the Third War.

Who is Ghazghkull Thraka?

Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka is the most dangerous ork warlord of the age. Shot through the head on the world of Urk, he was rebuilt with bionics and adamantium plate by the Painboy Grotsnik and awoke convinced he spoke for the ork gods Gork and Mork. He has invaded Armageddon twice and remains at large.

What happened at Hades Hive?

Hades Hive was where Yarrick held out against Ghazghkull during the Second War for Armageddon in 941.M41. His defiance became the Warlord’s obsession, drawing ork strength away from the rest of the planet while the Space Marines counter-attacked. The hive finally fell and its defenders were nearly all killed, but Yarrick was found alive in the ruins. In the Third War, Ghazghkull flattened what remained with asteroids from orbit.

What is Yarrick’s Bale Eye?

The Bale Eye is Yarrick’s bionic eye, fitted with a laser that the orks believe lets him kill with a look. Accounts differ on how he came to need it: one record says he lost the eye to a laser splinter, while another claims he had it removed on purpose, so that the orks’ belief in his evil eye would become literally true.

Where should I start reading about Yarrick and Ghazghkull?

Start with David Annandale’s Yarrick: Imperial Creed, which follows a young Yarrick long before Armageddon, then read Nate Crowley’s Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh!, which tells the Warlord’s rise through the testimony of a captive greenskin. Annandale’s Chains of Golgotha and The Pyres of Armageddon continue Yarrick’s side of the feud.