Sebastian Thor

Sebastian Thor is the preacher who became Ecclesiarch after ending Goge Vandire’s tyranny in the Age of Apostasy.

Thor rose to prominence as a confessor within the Ecclesiarchy during the closing years of Goge Vandire’s rule as High Lord Ecclesiarch, when Vandire’s Reign of Blood turned the Ecclesiarchy’s own Frateris Militia and corrupted elements of the Adeptus Arbites against the population of Terra and beyond. Denounced by Vandire as a heretic and false prophet, and the target of repeated assassination attempts, Thor gathered support among clergy who rejected Vandire’s excesses, sympathetic Battle Sisters of the Orders Militant, and outside powers including the Adeptus Custodes and the Space Wolves under Logan Grimnar. The uprising he led culminated in the storming of the Ecclesiarchal Palace on Terra, where Vandire was killed by his own bodyguard, Sister Alicia Dominica of the Order of the Valorous Heart, bringing the Age of Apostasy to its end.

Raised to Ecclesiarch in Vandire’s place, Thor is credited with the Decree Passive, the ruling of the Senatorum Imperialis that stripped the Ecclesiarchy of its standing armies and curtailed the Ecclesiarch’s political authority so that no future holder of the office could repeat Vandire’s tyranny. The Orders Militant that had turned against Vandire were retained and formalised as the Adepta Sororitas, the Ecclesiarchy’s sole sanctioned armed force ever since. Thor’s confrontation with Vandire and Alicia Dominica remains the defining episode of the Age of Apostasy, fixing his tenure to Terra and the Ecclesiarchal Palace in the early 36th millennium.