The Inquisition

The Inquisition is the hidden blade at the heart of the Imperium, a clandestine order sworn to root out anything that might see Mankind extinguished. Its agents answer to no planetary governor, no lord general, and no council of Terra, but only to the memory and will of the Emperor Himself. To bear the Inquisitorial Rosette is to wield near-limitless authority, for an Inquisitor may commandeer fleets, depose rulers, and consign whole worlds to Exterminatus should the danger warrant such a horror.

Born from the ashes of the Horus Heresy, when treachery from within had almost undone the young Imperium, the order exists precisely because trust had proven so fragile. It keeps no single rigid hierarchy. Instead its members gather into loose ideological bodies known as Ordos, each devoted to a category of threat, and convene in conclaves to debate, sanction, or condemn one another as circumstance demands. A lone Inquisitor may work in secrecy for decades, assembling a retinue of specialists, warriors, and stranger allies to serve some private purpose.

Doctrine divides the order as sharply as any foe. Puritans hold that the ancient dogmas must never be compromised, and that corruption is best answered with fire and absolute faith. Radicals argue that only the enemy's own weapons can defeat the enemy, wielding forbidden lore at terrible peril to their souls. Between these poles runs a spectrum along which every Inquisitor must walk, and many have been declared heretic by their own brethren for straying too far.

Feared above nearly all other Imperial Agents, the Inquisition labours in shadow so the common masses need never grasp how close extinction always looms. Its deeper history is set down in the account of the Inquisition, while the sanctioned scope of an agent's power is catalogued in the glossary of the Inquisition.