I Was Liberated
Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor of the Ordo Xenos, born 304.M41, served the Throne for sixty-two years. The greater part of that service was rendered from a suspensor chair, his body unfit to bear him. He left behind nine volumes of philosophical writing, of which The Spheres of Longing is the longest and the most copied. His master, the Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn, set down in his own private papers that Ravenor would never have become the mind he became, had the Throne not first seen fit to break him.
To have faith is to have purpose, and purpose in life is what defines a man, and makes him steadfast and resolute. Faith keeps him true and, even in the darkest hours, illuminates him like a candle flame. Faith guides him surely, from birth to the grave. It shows him the path, and prevents him from straying into the lightless thickets where insanity awaits. To lose faith is to lose purpose, and to be bereft of guidance. For a man without faith will no longer be true, and a mind without purpose will walk in dark places.
The Spheres of Longing, II. ix. 31 · Gideon Ravenor
The great procession of the triumph passed under the Spatian Gate, and I marched with it, into the atrocity. That ceremonial arch, so splendid and massive, forms a threshold in the course of my life. I stepped across it and was remade, transmuted from one form into another. Some have said that I was crippled beyond the measure of a man. I do not see it that way. I believe I was liberated.
Gideon Ravenor, preface to The Mirror of Smoke
The Spatian Gate stood upon Thracian Primaris, raised to honour the closing of the Ophidian Crusade. The atrocity of which the Inquisitor speaks is the matter of the Holy Novena, in 338.M41, when an Imperial Lightning was brought down upon the procession by the hand of the heretic Esarhaddon. He was thirty-four years of age. The Adeptus Medicae record, preserved at Thracian, gives the burns as third-degree across the whole of his person, and judges his survival improbable. From his chair, in the years that followed, he filed forty-three further casework reports, and wrote the books for which he is remembered.