Yan Rill

Summary
"A Space Marine fights for peace - peace for humanity, a universe where we have no enemies. Our weapon to make that peace is war; though it sounds paradoxical, it is no contradiction, for the only true peace is a peace you have earned." -Yan Rill.

Yan Rill was a member of the Revenants Space Marine Chapter. He had been promoted to Sergeant by the time of the battle of Ragnarok, during which he lost an eye. By all accounts, he was a courageous and skilled warrior, and he became the Captain of the Fourth Company of the Revenants; unfortunately, he was killed during the 13th Black Crusade, while fighting the forces of Chaos. His body was cremated and its gene-seed recovered.

Essential Information
Name: Yan Rill

Homeworld: Peace

Chapter: The Revenants

Rank: Captain

Status: Deceased.

Youth.
In his youth, Yan was born to Helena and Jobin Rill, a farmer's daughter and a philosopher respectively. The young Rill was athletic and unafriad of danger, often doing the more physical work; in addition, he was intelligent, as befitted the son of a philosopher. As was their wont, the Revenants came recruiting, and of the one hundred and thirty who were accepted into the initial training propgram, only Rill and twenty five others were accepted into the training company.

Training.
As a young Marine, Rill was earmarked for squad command by the man who would be his Captain, Laslo Bane of the Fourth Company. bane was impressed by the rugged dedication Rill demonstrated, as well as his unorthodox methodology. One particular incident caught Bane's eye; during his training, in a combat simulation with live fire rounds, Yan conducted a daring manoeuvre which saw half his unit "destroyed" but the objective captured. His conduct was questioned by some higher ranking members of the training company, who were worried that such conduct would lead to a high cost in Marines should Rill ever be given command, but Bane saw a Marine who would be able to fight when the time came, to make the hard decisions that needed making. He deemed him ready.

Astartes
As a new Marine, Rill proved himself on dozens of fields, earning himself a reputation as a clever, powerful warrior. Eventually, after roughly fifteen years of service, Rill was promoted to Squad Sergeant. It was during this he met Jared Severus, at the time a neophyte on a training exercise, and befriended him.

After fifty years of service with the Fourth Company, it was during the Ragnarok Campaign that he would meet his destiny.

Ragnarok.
"We are Astartes - its our job to fight the battles no others can." -Yan Rill, prior to the first practical application of the Rill Manoeuvre.

During the assault on Ragnarok IV, Bane and many of the Fourth Company's Sergeants were killed; Yan was the only senior Sergeant left. Deeming that the only way to win was to destroy the heart of the enemy force, Yan recreated the tactic he had created in his youth - a tactic since called the Rill Manoeuvre; the remaining Imperial Guard would launch a diversionary assault on the capital settlement of the planet while Rill and the Revenants - together with a handful of elite Guardsmen - would attempt to storm the Ork palace with a lightning assault and kill Grashkar Gitface, the Ork Warlord, themselves, and so end the war.

Almost immediately upon landing, the Storm Troopers were killed, unable to hold their own in the brutal fighting, and the Space Marines took heavy casualties. Yan, however, was determnined to win, and led his Marines against Grashkar himself. Though they suffered horrendous casualties against Grashkar's forces, they looked set to prevail.

Yan Rill was alone by the time he found found Grashkar, having cut through a horde of his bodyguards to get there. Grashkar was a large, hulking Ork with a great power claw, and though he only admitted it afterwards, Yan felt certain he would die. However, as a Space Marine, he knew his duty.

Although outmatched in size, the Sergeant's faith and skill were such that he defeated the foul creature, and cast his body down from a balcony. With Grashkar's death, the remaining Orks had lost their figurehead, and were slaughtered by the victorious Imperial forces

In the aftermath of the battle, with more than half his company dead, Rill - despite those who questioned his tactics as being more akin to the proud Restorers Chapter than to the Revenants - was promoted to Captain, but as punishment for this aforementioned perceived recklessness, once the mop-up campaigns had concluded, he and his company were sent on a crusade to destroy a rogue Tyranid fleet.

Captain Rill.
"Tyranid infestation!" -Yan Rill, insulting the Tyranid's.

Rill comported himself with honour, and his fleet destroyed the Tyranid Splinter fleet with comparatively little damage (compared to how other fleets fared against Tyranids). During this time, he became friends with a young Space Marine named Lon Oppo, who would become his senior Sergeant and accompany him on his battles until his ultimate death. Oppo was a young, impressionable Marine, one of the many Bane had earmarked prior to Ragnarok. Bane had left glowing remarks on Oppo's record, and Rill felt he owed it to the man who had taken a chance on him to guide his last choice of Marine.

Among Rill's successes were the battle of Kirran, a fleet engagement with an Eldar Pirate vessel, and leading a small detachment of Revenants during the Third War for Armageddon, during which he and his squads aided the Black Templars in a clearance mission. Rill was so successful in fact that he was considered for the role of Chapter Master by Marius Tron himself, who voted for him to take over the position when the time came to vote. However, Rill and the other Captains of the Chapter voted Tron to the position instead, Rill later saying he "saw something in that brother Captain I did not possess, and indeed none of us did; the fire of the times."

Rill was voted to be Chapter Master after Marius Tron left on his Tyranid hunting Crusade. However, Rill was away at war when this happened, on Cadia, fighting Abbadon's Thirteenth Black Crusade; his men bogged down in trench warfare against the Black Legion. It was at the Thirteenth Black Crusade that Rill was to meet his fate, dying against a Chaos Dreadnought, attempting to take it down with his power fist; a reckless manoeuvre but one he would entrust to no one else. His friend and by this point senior Sergeant, Oppo, enraged at his demise, destroyed the Dreadnought in a suicide attack, attaching a melts bomb and detonating it in the same instance. Together, Rill and Oppo no doubt saved many Brother's lives. Rill's body was recovered, and his gene seed recovered. He was cremated as the Revenant ritual dictated. He was succeeded as Captain of the Fourth by Jared Severus, who had become a high ranking Sergeant in the Company during their time together.

Personality
Rill was intelligent, reckless, impulsive, radical, zealous... a mass of contradictions, all rolled into one. He barely ever stuck purely to the Codex Astartes, seeing it as dogma, and pointless at that since war had changed. Instead he relied on what he knew of his men and his enemy, and often won the day with radical strategies that no one else would have considered. He is considered by the vast majority of Revenants as the paradigm for what a Captain should be.