Eversor Temple

The Eversor Temple is one of the temples of the Officio Assassinorum, the Imperium’s institution for assassins. Where the Callidus Temple trains infiltrators, the Vindicare Temple produces long-range marksmen, and the Culexus Temple raises psychic-null killers, the Eversor Temple exists to loose a single, overwhelming killer against an enemy’s command structure, destroying an entire hierarchy rather than one figure through shock and terror. Its assassins are bio-engineered and driven by combat drugs into a state of directed frenzy, sent to annihilate rather than to infiltrate.

The temple’s principal facility lies beneath one of Terra’s magnetic poles, in a region called the Aktick, and further detail of its bounds is not disclosed beyond the Officio Assassinorum itself. Between missions its operatives are held in cryo-suspension within stasis crypts aboard vessels dispersed across the Imperium, so that an assassin may wake to a new assignment after an interval that, to him, seems only a moment, though years or even centuries may have passed. When summoned, the sleeping Eversor is sealed into a drop pod that delivers mission data by neuro-link while he remains in stasis and reanimates his body during descent, landing already primed for violence. Eversor physiology carries additional adrenal ducts and a secondary heart to sustain drugs such as frenzon, fury, terminus, and destroyer; should the assassin fall, the same chemistry can trigger a bio-meltdown that destroys those nearby with the force of a plasma detonation.

The clade’s founding is attributed to Sire Eversor, one of six individuals who, in the era of the Great Crusade, formed the original clades of the Officio Assassinorum under its first Master of Assassins at Mount Vengeance on Terra; later tradition names Malcador the Sigillite in that founding role. At the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, an Eversor operative known as the Garantine, prematurely woken at the temple’s Aktick facility, was drawn into the Execution Force sent against the Warmaster Horus, a mission recorded as ending in failure and the loss of all involved. Accounts also hold that, in 536.M32, during the crisis known as the Beheading, a hundred Eversor Assassins met Space Marines of the Halo Brethren, the Imperial Fists, and the Sable Swords in battle at an Officio Assassinorum temple, with only a single Astartes recorded to have survived. During the Taros campaign of 998.M41, an Eversor Assassin was committed under the codename Operation Deathblow against the T’au Empire’s Fire Caste commander Shas’O R’myr and the Ethereal Aun’Vre, reflecting the temple’s use against xenos as well as human targets.

The Inquisition draws on the Eversor Temple chiefly through the Ordo Malleus and the Ordo Hereticus, calling on its assassins when the ruling elite of a world or institution is judged wholly corrupted, by Chaos or by heresy, and beyond correction by subtler means. Rather than a single, discreet killing, an Eversor commission is meant to annihilate an entire circle of leadership at once, so that no successor remains, and the terror this leaves behind is itself counted part of the mission’s purpose. Among the constituent temples of the Officio Assassinorum, the Eversor Temple is accordingly regarded as the most direct and least concealed in its methods.