Event · M41

Auto-seance Necroteuch inquiry

The Auto Seance Necroteuch Inquiry was an investigation by Eisenhorn and Commodus Voke into Necroteuch fragments, conducted at Gudrun by auto-seance. Its aim was to trace the scattered remnants of the Necroteuch, the proscribed text whose fragments recur throughout Eisenhorn’s career, and to determine what remained of it, where, and in whose keeping. The auto-seance itself was the inquiry’s defining instrument: a ritualised interrogation of psychic residue and testimony, conducted rather than merely recorded, that let its conductors question the dead and the compromised alike in pursuit of the text’s trail. The inquiry did not begin in isolation. It proceeded in the wake of Konrad Molitor, whose own pursuit of the Necroteuch had left a trail of torture across those he had questioned before Eisenhorn and Voke arrived. That trail compromised the evidence available to the auto-seance: testimony already broken by pain is testimony an inquisitor cannot fully trust, and the two investigators were obliged to work through avenues Molitor had already forced open, rather than ones they could open cleanly themselves. Gudrun supplied the institutional setting in which the inquiry’s deeper dispute played out. Within its rooms, radicals and puritans argued over how much truth could be bought with how much pain, a disagreement sharpened by Molitor’s methods and by Commodus Voke’s own radical inclinations, which placed him and Eisenhorn on uneasy common ground even as they pursued a shared target. The auto-seance proceeded as much through this contested doctrine as through the Necroteuch fragments it sought. The inquiry did not remain a matter internal to the Inquisition. Its methods and its debts to Molitor’s prior conduct became a further reason for the Helican sector’s authorities to withdraw their trust in clean hands, deepening the sector’s wariness of inquisitorial intervention. Within the broader chronology of Eisenhorn’s career, the Auto Seance Necroteuch Inquiry stands as one of the episodes at Gudrun where the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and the toleration of radical method were tested together, with consequences that outlasted the inquiry itself.

See where Auto-seance Necroteuch inquiry occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.

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