Larkin

Lijah Larkin is a sniper of the Tanith First and Only, an Astra Militarum regiment raised from the destroyed world of Tanith and known as the Ghosts. He is recorded as one of the regiment’s foremost marksmen, serving under Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, and his standing rests on long-range killing and on the concealment that the Tanith woodsman tradition taught its scouts and marksmen alike.

Larkin belongs to the generation of Tanith soldiers who survived the fall of their homeworld only because the regiment had already embarked for Imperial service, so he fights without a world to return to. He fought alongside the regiment on Verghast, where the Ghosts first served as a fully committed regiment, and later throughout the Sabbat Worlds theatre. Accounts consistently portray him as a pessimistic and superstitious man, given to foreboding and to grievance, whose temperament contrasts with the steadier manner of Chief Scout Mkoll and the regiment’s first colonel, Colm Corbec, with whom the Ghosts’ scouts and marksmen operated in close association. Deep-penetration duties of the kind that fell to the regiment’s scouts and snipers are recorded as having weighed heavily on such specialists, Larkin among them.

Larkin’s significance lies in the role he fills within the Ghosts: the marksman who removes an enemy commander, sentry or heavy-weapons team before the regiment’s infantry close, working in the same ground that Mkoll’s scouts have read beforehand. His service is bound to Tanith as the origin of the regiment and to the Sabbat Worlds as the setting of its campaigns, and his contemporaries include Gaunt, Corbec, Mkoll and Major Rawne. The available record does not settle his final fate with confidence, and this entry therefore lists his status as unknown rather than asserting a death or survival that cannot be attributed with certainty.