The Archivist

"Knowledge is power, and power corrupts. In the case of the knowledge I protect, I mean that both figuratively and literally."

- The Archivist

An ancient Lord Inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus, the man only known as the Archivist is not a daemonhunter, but rather is a collector of knowledge of the daemonic. He presides over the Arce Secretorum, a secret Inquisitorial facility used to store extremely dangerous Chaos artifacts, daemonic apocrypha, and other such devises and knowledge related to the Warp and it's denizens. The fifth Warden of this vault of the forbidden, the Archivist is a reclusive and altogether mysterious Inqusitor who has been within the ranks of the Ordo Malleus for quite some time, yet is not very well known due to the fact that he rarely leaves the Secretorum.

First Appearance
Even within the ranks of the Inquisition, the Archivist is somewhat of an enigma, mostly due to the fact that very little of his early life is unknown. No one knows where he was born, how he became an Inquisitor in the first place, or even what his real name is. Mention of the Archivist is even missing from many Inquisitorial records, making him unknown to most save the more senior members of his Ordo, most of whom are aware of his existence and little else. Why exactly there is such a lack of information on the Archivist is still up to speculation, although the general consensus is that all information on the Archivist was eradicated by the Inquisition prior to his stationing within the Arce Secretorum, although this is only a rumor.

The earliest mentions of the Archivist exist within an acount to the event known as the Purging of Pax Mora, a prosperous Shrine World beset by a daemonic scourge. According to the official records of the Inqusition, Pax Mora was plagued by the onset of a sudden shift within the Warp that led to the barrier between the Materium and Imaterium upon the Shrine World becoming paper-thin. As a result, the mutant population trippled overnight, Chaos Cults began to form, and Daemonic entities began appearing in the streets of the once peaceful planet. It seemed that an Daemonic Incursion would be inevitable, if not for the arrival of a strange figure.

According to the records and the acounts of various Pax Morans, this figure was an Inquisitor clad in a rune-scribed stormcoat and eerie respirator mask, and claimed that he could free the Shrine World of it's plight in a single night. To their shock and awe made good on his promise by identifying and locating the source of the warp-disturbances, a pre-Imperial daemonic artifact known as the Heart of Bael'Kora, located in the catacombs beneath the ruins of a once-prominent cathedral. What exactly the Heart of Bael'Kora was and how it functioned was deleted from the compiled records, but they all go on to describe the mysterious Inquisitor storming the daemon-infested cathedral with the assistance of a battalion of Inquisitorial Storm Troopers and a cadre of Ecclessiarchy Banishers in tow. Lo and behold, as soon as the Inquisitor and his allies emerged from the ruins, the warp shifted once more, the Daemons dissapating back into the Empyrean as their connection to this realm was severed. The Inquisitor then departed the next day, leaving Pax Mora behind to be purged of it's remaining taint.