Tona Criid

Tona Criid is a Verghastite sergeant of the Tanith First-and-Only, the Astra Militarum regiment known as the Ghosts, serving during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. She did not come from Tanith itself but from Vervunhive, on Verghast, and entered the regiment through the mass levy raised after the hive world’s civil war brought Vervunhive and Ferrozoica into open conflict. When the Tanith survivors, already reduced to a fragment of their original strength after the destruction of their homeworld, were reinforced by Verghastite volunteers to keep the regiment at fighting numbers, Criid was among those absorbed into its ranks, alongside other former hivers such as Gol Kolea.

Criid’s service began amid the ruin of her own hive. During the fighting for Vervunhive she found two orphaned children, Dalin and Yoncy, in the aftermath of a massacre and took them into her own care, an act the regiment came to recognise as consistent with the Ghosts’ own habit of gathering in the displaced and the orphaned. She subsequently formed a lasting partnership with fellow trooper Caffran, and the household the three of them built within the regiment’s ranks became, in later accounts, a point of reference for how thoroughly the Verghastite intake had been absorbed into a regiment once defined solely by its Tanith origin. Criid brought with her the close-quarters, rubble-and-corridor fighting discipline of hive warfare, a skillset distinct from the woodcraft and infiltration doctrine the Tanith-born favoured, and the regiment’s officers drew on both traditions as its campaigns moved from world to world. She rose steadily through the ranks, earning her sergeant’s file despite the doubts of Tanith-born veterans who had not expected the hive intake, or Criid in particular, to last.

Her service placed her alongside the regiment’s established figures: Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, under whose command the First-and-Only fought across the Sabbat Worlds; Commissar Viktor Hark, who oversaw discipline among the Verghastite and Tanith troopers alike; and Major Rawne, whose scepticism of the hive volunteers she had to overcome. During a clandestine insertion onto the world of Gereon, Criid served as part of the small cadre operating behind enemy lines alongside the defector Mabbon Etogaur, an episode that tested the regiment’s cohesion far from the support of the wider Crusade. Through campaigns on Hagia, Phantine, Ancreon Sextus, Jago and Herodor, and into the Crusade’s later, harder battles, she remained one of the Ghosts’ most consistent Verghastite soldiers.

Verghastite members of the First-and-Only invoke Criid’s record when the regiment’s identity is challenged as belonging only to those who lost Tanith itself; her survival and promotion stand as evidence that the Ghosts’ fellowship extends to those who joined the ranks by circumstance rather than by birthworld. She remains active in Astra Militarum service into the Crusade’s later years, with Dalin, the boy she rescued at Vervunhive, himself going on to serve within the regiment she raised him in.