Gregor Eisenhorn

Origin & Recruitment

Gregor Eisenhorn was born into a minor Scarus Sector noble family and recruited into the Ordo Xenos as a young man on the recommendation of his mentor, Inquisitor Hapshant. He came up through the Inquisition the conventional way: theology, weapons, occult studies, and the slow accumulation of the secrets one is permitted to know.

For the first half of his career he was, by his own and the Conclave's assessment, an exemplary Puritan. He hunted xenos, executed heretics, signed the necessary writs without flinching, and never used a forbidden weapon when a sanctioned one would do.

The Slide

The slide into Radicalism began with Pontius Glaw — a long-dead Chaos-tainted aristocrat whose preserved consciousness Eisenhorn captured and interrogated, then kept, then began to consult on subsequent cases. The Conclave never explicitly forbade what he was doing. He never quite asked.

By the time he bound the daemonhost Cherubael into psy-restraints and used her on operations, he had crossed a line that earlier Eisenhorn would have executed himself for crossing. The new Eisenhorn argued, internally, that the work justified the tools. It was an argument he had once been very good at dismantling in others.

I will not concede. I will not yield. There is a line I have not yet crossed.

— Eisenhorn, attributed late M41

Notable Operations

Eisenhorn's case file across four decades includes the Necroteuch incident, the campaign against the heretic Quixos and his Chaos-bound aspirations, the unmasking of the Pope Cleopas conspiracy, the long sub rosa investigation that uncovered the Cognitae cult, and the recurring pursuit of Pontius Glaw before, during, and after the capture.

He trained Gideon Ravenor as his interrogator. Ravenor became an Inquisitor in his own right and, eventually, an opponent. The two have not spoken in many years.

Status & Legacy

Eisenhorn was last reliably documented active in late M41. The novels of Dan Abnett — the in-universe scribe Gabriel Tonsure, in the meta-narrative — chronicle his career in three volumes plus the late-career retrospective The Magos. He is the most read and most recommended fictional Inquisitor in the Imperial archive.

Whether his slide ends with damnation or with one last act of recanted faith is, in M42, still unresolved.