Literature / Ravenor

A mind without purpose will wander in dark places...

A trilogy of novels set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe featuring the heavily disabled psyker Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor and his retinue, written by Dan Abnett.

The first of the novels, Ravenor, features the team's investigation into a suspicious drug known as Flects on Eustis Majoris. Ravenor Returned leads the heroes deeper into a conspiracy encompassing the whole world, and begins Carl Thonius's fall into Chaos. The third novel, Ravenor Rogue ties the threads together and finishes this particular arc. There are also two short stories, collected along with the three novels in an omnibus edition. The first, Playing Patience, is set between the Eisenhorn trilogy and this one, and the second, Thorn Wishes Talon, is set between Ravenor and Ravenor Returns and fills in some extra backstory. The series is followed by the Bequin trilogy.

Ravenor was first mentioned as an aside in an early Gaunt's Ghosts novel. He was developed as a secondary character in the Eisenhorn books, during which he suffered the horrendous injuries which led to him being confined to his life support chair.

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These books feature examples of the following tropes:

• The Ace: Ravenor's role as Eisenhorn's Interrogator, swiftly becoming a Broken Ace after the incident that sealed him into his force chair for the rest of his life.
• Ambiguously Gay: Thonius. Definitely The Dandy in clothes and manner, and various other characters imply it; still, the setting expects a degree of such behaviour among the upper classes, and he never admits attraction to anyone.
• And I Must Scream: Ravenor has a mild form of this all the time, reliant entirely on his chair for sight and sound and unable to touch anything. The classic example is his default state without the chair - a limbless, blind, deaf, mute lump of burned flesh that the surgeons had to cut a hole in just to feed him.
• Apocalypse Cult: The Divine Fratery is a cult of seers that scry for the worst possible futures and do everything they can to make those potential futures a reality. Their current objective is ensuring that the apocalyptic daemon Slyte manifests on Eustis Majoris as prophesied.
• Astral Projection: Ravenor can project his mind out of his body. Other psykers can do this as well, and he often has to fight them in astral combat.
• Badass Normal: Numerous characters, but Harlon Nayl and Kara Swole stand out the most in Ravenor's retinue. Nayl is one of the few nonpsychic, (relatively) unaugmented characters in the series that can kick some serious ass, but is more than capable of going toe to toe with anyone. Swole is some kind of awesome, for a woman who first joined the Inquisition as a dancer acrobat with absolutely no combat training. Even Ravenor takes notice of this.
  • Other characters like Mathuin and Molotch stand out pretty well, but between augmetics and some incredibly unusual skills, they edge into Badass Abnormal territory.
• Bald of Evil: Lucius Worna (above) is also similarly described.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: Patience bluffs her way through the Carnivora's kitchens by claiming to be one of the lord governor's food inspectors making a random sweep.
• Bittersweet Ending: At the end of the trilogy, Ravenor essentially loses his entire team. Those that survive either leave the team or are arrested by the Inquisition. Ravenor himself has to face a trial to answer for his actions while he went rogue. It would have been pure Downer Ending material if they hadn't actually put a stop to Molotch's plans and saved the Imperium from Slyte.
  • The sequel series, Bequin, reveals that Ravenor, Kys, and Swole were eventually allowed back into the Inquisition.
• Blood from the Mouth: ...and eyes, and ears, and nose... This tends to happen when people are exposed to psychic power and/or the warp.
• Breaking the Fellowship: The trilogy ends with Ravenor's team falling apart. Zeph, Angharad, and Carl are all dead. Nayl and Belknap both walk out. Zael, Frauka, and Iosob are taken away for psychic testing, never to be seen by Ravenor again. Unwerth and Preest have broken off contact with him. And Kara is awaiting trial for the crime of keeping Slyte's existence a secret. Maud and Patience are the only people still standing by Ravenor's side at the end of it all.
• Captain's Log: The first chapter of Ravenor Returned has Ravenor writing a report for his superior Lord Rorken. His report summarizes the events of the first book and explains how he plans to continue his investigation into the conspiracy he uncovered.
• Captured Super-Entity: Ravenor's backstory involves a few, where an arranged tragedy allowed a hundred incredibly powerful psykers to escape Inquisitorial custody, right in the middle of a celebratory parade on one of the main throughfares of an Imperial hive city. The incident, along with killing a vast amount of Imperial citizens and damaging an Imperial hive permanently, left Ravenor extremely handicapped and disfigured, and he remains so in the present.
  • There's also Slyte, but that one happens to be an "Incubating" Super Entity.
• Chekhov's Gun: Partway through the first book, Patience notices some sharp-edged fish scales hanging from a wall and decides to take a few as trophies. At the book's climax, Patience—having lost all her other weapons—uses those scales to slit Madsen's throat.
• Circus of Fear: The Carnivora is a Roman-style circus where gladiators fight to the death as the main event, while acrobats perform death-defying stunts without safety nets (and get casually fired if they're late), and drugged mutant clowns get eaten alive by alien beasts as sideshows for the crowd's amusement. Ravenor's people infiltrate the Carnivora's daily show as part of their investigation into the flect trade, getting into fights with some of the staff and beasts in the process.
• Continuity Nod: Numerous, to Abnett's other novels, among others. Also, much nodded to, by Abnett as well as by Mitchell in the Ciaphas Cain books. Ravenor is a pretty famous writer in that area of the Warhammer 40000 universe.
  • Inquisitor Lillith, a fairly important minor character in Gaunt's Ghosts is encountered late in the series.
  • In another series, flects are sold by a street dealer on Red Corsair-held world during the Skull Harvest.
• Continuity Snarl: The prologue to the first book has Zygmunt Molotch excavating ruins on a world where they had to chase off a Tau Warrior cadre. Given that the books are all set in the Scarus Sector (on the other side of the galaxy to the Tau Empire, who have very limited warp travel), it makes it highly unlikely but not utterly impossible that the Tau could have got so far across the galaxy.
• Converse with the Unconscious: Ravenor holds a one-sided telepathic conversation with the unconscious Zael near the beginning of Ravenor Rogue, bringing him up to speed on the things he missed since he went into a coma.
• Cool Sword: A vampiric one, and a "shivered sword." Ravenor himself can explain the shivered sword best: "Forged so hard by the hammers of master smiths, the blade had been knocked slightly sideways in time, so it resonated and shivered against the mundane now." Apparently that makes it cut better, or something.
  • It's implied the blade is partially phased out of existence, allowing it to bypass physical matter.
• Disability Superpower: Ravenor is crippled in every physical sense of the word. He can't walk, talk, or even breathe without his support chair. This doesn't stop him from being able to read the minds of an entire city at once or being able to telekinetically crush a man though. It's implied that Ravenor's separation from his body made him a more powerful psyker. (Compare Stephen Hawking and his mathematics?)
• Divided We Fall
• Dramatic Irony: Belknap's reactions to them when he did not know Ravenor was an Inquisitor.
  • More seriously, Ravenor spends the entire third book and most of the second believing that Zael is the host of Slyte. The readers have known since at least the climax of Ravenor Returned that it's really Carl Thonius, his second in command.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Zael gives the team a significant lead courtesy of a prophetic dream in Ravenor Returned.
• Early-Bird Cameo: A large brood of Tyranid Hormogaunts appears in Ravenor Rogue, when Ravenor & co. use the tri-portal to travel to another world. This is a few hundred years before their "official" first contact with the Imperium. Suitably, everyone's reaction is some form of "What the hell is that?!"
  • May also be a continuity snarl; Uber Aemos mentions the Tyranids in the Eisenhorn Trilogy, set many years earlier.
• Eldritch Abomination: Slyte. Its first manifestation is as a black skeletal humanoid glowing with a baleful red aura; Molotch claims that this form is only Slyte's "harbinger". When it really arrives, its true form turns out to be a fleshy mass of spines, mouths, and writhing tentacles that rapidly grows to the size of a mountain.
• Enemy Mine: Molotch and Culzean want to recruit Ravenor to stop Slyte. While they are affiliated with Chaos, they make their living off exploiting the Imperium, and if a huge swath of it was destroyed by Slyte, they don't feel it would be in their best self-interest, so they want to keep Slyte from being entering the Materium. Ravenor refuses their offer, but circumstance later forces them all to work together to stop Slyte.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even though they're both irredeemable Chaos cultists, Molotch and Culzean draw the line at summoning high level Daemons since it would cause a level of destruction even they would be uncomfortable with.
• Evil Versus Evil: In Ravenor Returned, the Divine Fratery cult comes into conflict with Jader Trice's Secretists. The Secretists, better trained, better equipped, and having the element of surprise, wipe out the Divine Fratery in a lightning raid on the cult's headquarters.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Molotch and Culzean's reasons for opposing Slyte boil down to this. Culzean himself puts it best:
  Culzean: You don't really understand us, do you, Gideon? You don't really understand our beliefs and our ambitions. We're just evil, an evil to be stopped. And all evil is the same to you. It carries the same weight... me, Zygmunt, Slyte. You're so blinkered. You've been through the door, Gideon. I'll wager it showed you a future or two. Pleasant?
  Ravenor: Inconclusive. But no, not pleasant.
  Culzean: I know what Zygmunt and I saw when we went through the door. A galaxy in flames. An age of apocalypse. Daemon time. No Imperium except a burning shell populated by the last dying dregs of mankind. You don't want that, I know you don't. You've spent your life defending society against just such a doom. We don't want it either. Our ambitions are wildly different to yours, Gideon, and in definite conflict. But Zygmunt and I can only flourish, prosper and achieve our own goals so long as the Imperium persists. The Imperium is our playground, mankind our instrument. We weave our schemes through the complex fabric of Imperial life, to benefit ourselves. I'm not pretending you'd like what we want from our lives, but it would be nothing compared to Daemon time. Slyte must be stopped. The alternative is too awful for any of us to contemplate.
• Eviler than Thou: Jader Trice's Secretists certainly have better tactics and more firepower than the Divine Fratery. The former win their battle with the later handily, but appear to assume that the group they fought was the extent of the cult. However, the Divine Fratery at large outlasts the Secretists.
• Exact Words: In Ravenor Rogue, Ravenor tries to make the tri-portal take him back to his proper time and place by concentrating on the name Arethusa and the year 404. Because he wasn't specific enough, the tri-portal brings him to Listening Post Arethusa rather than the ship Arethusa, in the year 404 of the previous millennium.
• Eye Scream: Members of the Divine Fratery cult are required to put out one of their eyes as part of their initiation, and they are not allowed to receive medical attention for it until they finish making the silver mirrors that are their trademark, which can take years. If they survive, they receive an augmetic replacement and an Eyepatch of Power to cover their real eye, which they use exclusively for scrying.
• Feathered Fiend: The sheen birds of Petropolis seem like a mere curiosity - in a city where the weather can kill, the locals made artificial fauna to enjoy. But with the right skills and equipment, sheen birds can be organized into murderous flocks known as the Unkindness, which claim a number of victims in Ravenor Returned.
• Fantastic Drug: Several. Lho-sticks, a narcotic which are analogous to, and as common as, cigarettes. There are others mentioned, including yellodes, grinweed, baby blues, redlines, and obscura; the exact nature of most isn't exactly known beyond a street name, but obscura can obscure somebody from psychic perception.
  • The most fantastic and most story-relevant are the "hallucinogenic" flects, shards of glass saturated with energy from the Warp, used by looking into them to see a "reflection" of something in the Warp. One addict, who, beside going through a psychological and physical breakdown, had visions of the future while under the influence.
• For the Evulz: At the climax of Ravenor Rogue, Molotch has to invoke an evil, soul-corrupting and warp-infused incantation to enact the spell that has any chance of defeating Slyte. He writes it down and makes Ravenor say it, just because he can and because he knows that the Inquisitor has no choice to refuse.
• Gaia's Lament: Petropolis is a sterling example. Generations of dirty industry left enough air pollution that a slightly ravenous acid rain is a common occurrence, leading exposure-induced cancer to be the biggest killer of the population just behind pollution-related emphysemas. And with some shades of cyberpunk to go with the rest of the Wretched Hive.
• Genius Breeding Act: The Cognitae was partially this. Lilean Chase created the Cognitae school to develop, "by means psychic, eugenic and noetic" an entire generation of highly intelligent and competent heretics, and many of their modern agents are descended from her in one way or another. It was effectively a Super Breeding Program for heretical super geniuses, and they're generally regarded as a severe threat by Inquisition personnel familiar with them.
• Gladiator Games: Carnivora Circus is mainly about blood sports, particularly when they dispose of intruders.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Ravenor Rogue features a brief appearance by the tyranids, after Ravenor and his party are briefly stranded in what looks to them like a Bad Future. Since the Imperium hasn't yet come into regular conflict with the tyranids in Ravenor's native time period, the protagonists don't have a frame of reference for the alien monsters they're suddenly fighting (though a knowledgeable reader will recognize them as a swarm of hormagaunts).
• Human Sacrifice: Orfeo Culzean's ritual to awaken the Brass Thief requires sacrificial offerings to be caged up within the magic circle, so that the daemon can slaughter and feed on them when it manifests. Only then will it be willing to obey its summoner's commands.
• Hungry Weapon: A minor villain in the second books owns a sentient, vampiric sword that thirsts for blood. It can move under its own power when she isn't wielding it, can magically pull blood out of any wound it inflicts, and will gleefully suck up any blood presented to it, even that of its master.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Toros Revoke. If he weren't so inexplicably loyal, Trice would be in trouble.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Belknap. It's what causes him to leave Kara at the end when he finds out that she partly hid Thonius's demonic possession (and was healed by him and not an Emperor-derived miracle as Belknap had hoped.
• Internal Affairs: The Interior Cases department of the Petropolis Magistratum is a villainous example. They have the financial backing of the Big Bad, and they shut down the entire Special Crimes department after one of its members discovers something they shouldn't have.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Used occasionally by Nayl and Kara, particularly when Ravenor isn't around to read a mind or just Mind Rape the information out of somebody.
• Language of Magic: Enuncia, a language that when written or spoken causes reality to sit up, listen, and then be violently warped, which is why it's pursued so relentlessly by heretical groups. When Kys infiltrates a decoding process, even the partially-decoded fragments is enough to make her ill. She's pulled away from the cogitator by two managers and they discover her identity, but she is able to use the phrase that made her sick against her captors, which causes them to be violently ill, giving her a chance to escape.
• Ludicrous Gibs: In Ravenor Returned, a telepathic confrontation between Toros Revoke and another psyker ends with the latter exploding in a shower of blood and gore.
• Malaproper: If Sholto Unwerth is not misusing a word, then he has probably coined a new word without realizing it.

• Man in the Machine: Ravenor, though he's rather less humanoid than most examples of the trope; his life support chair makes him look something like a particularly angular Dalek.

• Mind Rape: Everyday part of the job for Ravenor, and his People Puppets ability, 'waring, is described as exactly this. It's also in the repertoire of other psykers in the trilogy, especially Kinsky. The flects are basically a Mind Rape narcotic with extra dimensional nastiness added.
  • Said word-for-word when Ravenor wares Carthaen warrior-ess Angharad after they're attacked by Tyranids on the un-named planet that the tri-portal takes them to. Angharad is unhappy about this, to say the least.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Similarly to Abnett's previous series, Ravenor's investigation into the flect trade leads to him discovering that a cartel of rogue traders are smuggling Chaos-tainted computers onto Eustis Majoris, which in turn is part of an even larger scheme to reconstruct the dead, reality-warping language of Enuncia (which is so alien and unnatural that normal computers will melt just from trying to process even a few syllables of it), which the villains mean to use as part of a ritual that will make themselves into gods. The flects were just a lucrative way for the cartel to make more money on the side.
• The Mole: A common tactic, since the story is fundamentally about secretive organizations waging war on one another.
• Mythology Gag: In Ravenor Rogue, Sholto Unwerth is explaining why he is so short and bearded to Patrik Belknap, the medicae. "...it is much derailed, in places high and low...that there ever was a race of beings of the name the squats, and many scholams and those of the high mindful claim it's just a myth, a thing that never was..." He goes on to explain that his great grandfather stated that his family has squat-blood in his lineage. The lampshade is on the fact that until the 1990s, the Warhammer 40,000 game included an army of "space dwarves" called Squats. In the interests of removing 40k from her fantasy sister, Games Workshop removed them from the game, and then relentlessly purged any mention of them from canon, on their official forums, or allowed anyone to ask about them in official conventions. Many fans wanted them back, calling it "The Squat Question," and Dan Abnett is likely one of those.
• Never Found the Body: The Divine Fratery never found Eisenhorn's after they "dealt" with him. They were very, very wrong.
• Not So Above It All: For most of the first book (and his prior appearances in Eisenhorn) Ravenor gives every impression of being educated, civil, and pragmatic in personality. His education and study post-internment made him an even more perceptive scholar. Attempting to kill everyone he cares about, rendering him helpless with a psy limiter, trying to break into his armored chair with a boarding axe whilst threatening to kill those he cares about? His first action after being freed will be to reduce you to a fine red paste against a bulkhead with absolutely zero pity, a hint of vindictive pleasure, and no finesse whatsoever.
• Noodle Incident: The previous disastrous encounter with Molotch that cost the lives of some of the few survivors of the Eisenhorn trilogy has yet to be explained, but is frequently referred to. Abnett has recently hinted that one of the short stories in an upcoming Inquisition collection will be this very incident.
• Oh, Crap!: The reaction of Ravenor's entire team when they realise that he is coming down from orbit to oversee their investigation personally. It's a mix both of them realising how serious the situation has become, as well as sheer awe at his power and importance.
• One Bullet Left: At the climax of Ravenor, Mathuin saves Nayl's life by shooting his would-be executioner with one of Kara's nearly-empty guns.
• Orphanage of Fear: Patience grew up in the Kindred Youth Scholam. On the surface it seems like a respectable charitable institution, giving slum orphans a home and an education, but in reality it's a front for laundering children and young adults into the hands of criminals for nefarious purposes. Ravenor shuts the place down as part of an investigation.
• Parrying Bullets: Averted at one point as when one character attempts this and manages to do it once; Harlon Nayl's answer is to switch to full auto and shoot her to bits.
• People Puppets : A commonly used ability by many psykers, such as Revoke and Kinsky. Ravenor instead "wares" the members of his retinue, a subtly different technique, and one that also magnifies their physical capabilities.
• Porn Stash: Frauka's porno slates. Though not much of a hidden stash, as he reads them in plain view and purely for comedic value due to their awful writing.
• Portal Door: The Tri-Portal, a mystical wooden door that sends anyone who walks through it to anywhere in space and time.
• Power Nullifier: The villains clamp a psionic nullifier unit onto Ravenor's chair while his mind is occupied elsewhere. Since he relies on his psychic powers to do everything, including controlling his chair, this renders him helpless until the device is removed.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Even though they're Chaos cultists, Molotch and Culzean want to prevent the summoning of Slyte since they don't actually desire the destruction of the Imperium. They make a fortune exploiting the Imperium's blind spots, and they are smart enough to realize there will be no place in the galaxy for them if the Imperium were to collapse.
• Predecessor Villain: Lilean Chase, a former Inquisitor who went rogue and founded the Cognitae school of heretics. Chase herself is long dead by the time the story takes place, but her legacy lives on in the various Cognitae agents who bedevil the Scarus Sector. Or as very strongly hinted in the Magos, is actually still alive and at large.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The final conclusion of the trilogy. Molotch is dead and Slyte has been vanquished, but Mathuin and Thonius are dead, Nayl and Belknap have left the team, and Ravenor and everyone else are facing the wrath of the Inquisition for their actions.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Like every other Inquisition warband in the history of the Ordos, ever.
• Reality Warper: Enuncia is a language that can rewrite reality, but it causes physical harm to humans who speak it, or even see it. Even attempting to write it down melts computers. The Secretists plan to harness the focusing powers secretly built into Petropolis to avert the harmful effects and create the trope.
• Red Herring: Ravenor, and initially the readers, are led to believe that Zael may be Slyte. However, it's actually Thonius.
  • A twist that would have had considerably more impact if it wasn't given away in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue of Eisenhorn.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: The Inquisition in a nutshell, to the point that Ravenor seriously considers the possibility that flects are possibly the work of a rival Inquisitor.
  • Also the various heretical factions, leading the Secretists and the Divine Fratery developing a deadly rivalry.
• Room Full of Crazy: A flect addict takes to drawing on the walls of a derelict penthouse on a skyscraper entirely exposed to the rampant pollution of his hive city, and basically does not stop until the bodily stress and warp-taint kills him.
• Sealed Badass in a Can: Before his confinement to his force chair, Gideon Ravenor was a prodigy in just about every area of Inquisitorial duties. Occasionally we get small glimpses of what he is capable of when he Wares a member of his warband; extreme acrobatics and Matrix-style martial arts usually ensue.
• Secret Police: The aptly-named Secretists, who work for Jader Trice and make sure that anyone who stumbles upon the secret of what he's up to never live to tell about it. Their known activities include murdering street punks who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, shutting down an entire Magistratum department when one of their officers starts sniffing around the wrong place as part of a case, having the members of this department secretly killed, and launching a raid on the headquarters of a rival cult when their actions threaten their boss' life.
• Sherlock Scan: Molotch while at a restaurant at the beginning of Ravenor Rogue. With the added bonus of using it to identify several different ways they could destroy the government of the entire planet they're currently on, cripple economies across several nearby worlds, etc., with nothing more than a single object or a dose of poison in the right place.
• Show Within a Show: Ravenor's an in-universe famous writer of philosophy and commentaries, making his writings a Type 1 in this trilogy, though it never becomes a plot point. His writings and books are sometimes referred to by various characters in the 40K canon, though particularly in Abnett's work, making him a Type 2 in most other works, though Culzean first recognizes his name as "that writer".
• Soul-Crushing Desk Job: Nayl doesn't complain about much, but he does complain about having to pose as a records runner in an Administratum office tower. All the characters involved in this infiltration are miserable the whole time and find both the work and the work environment utterly unbearable. And they aren't over-reacting - during their time there an anonymous scribe dies of a seizure at his keyboard, and none of the staff seem shocked by this.
• Squashed Flat: In the first book, Ravenor kills a minor villain by squashing him against a wall with telekinesis.
• Street Urchin: Zael, a flect-addicted kid who gets caught up in Ravenor's investigations. He turns out to be a mirror psyker. And later becomes a Grey Knight, of all things..
• Taken Off the Case: In Rogue, Inquisitor Ravenor has been forced off of his hunt for Zygmunt Molotch by his superiors on the grounds that the case is too personal (the fact that their previous encounter resulted in a Mega City being burned down doesn't help). When the task is given to another inquisitor, it initially appears that Molotch met his end when his hideout went up in flames, claiming the lives of the other inquisitor and his retinue... until the dead inquisitor's second-in-command shows up and reveals that Molotch survived after all. Not wanting the trail to run cold again, Ravenor defies orders and goes rogue in pursuit of his nemesis.
• Talking in Your Dreams: After a close call at the conclusion of the first book, Ravenor visits his team in their dreams to ask them if they want to go on. Excluding Frauka, of course, with whom such things are impossible.
• Thought-Aversion Failure: In the first book, Ravenor asks a captive suspect to tell him about flects. The suspect concentrates on not thinking about them, which makes it easier for Ravenor to lift the information from his mind.
• Turn in Your Badge: A detective on Eustis Majoris is required to do this when her case is taken away by another, secretive, department during Ravenor's investigation.
• Unreliable Narrator: Usually averted. Although the novels have significantly large sections written from Ravenor's first person perspective, he tends to be remarkably honest and Genre Savvy, even pointing out some of his unflattering habits. Examples include his inappropriate attraction to Kara Swole, his jealousy of her relationship with Belknap, and his outrage that Nayl would dare even try to hide a secret from him, a man that could read his subordinates' minds like open books with little effort.
• Unskilled, but Strong: The psyker Kinsky, from the first book, has more raw power than Ravenor, but Ravenor's training gives him an edge. It's still only Frauka's intervention that saves Ravenor in their final confrontation.
• Urban Segregation: Petropolis, capital of Eustis Majoris, is a particularly interesting example in terms of layout. The hive's major hazard is acid rain that only started regularly occurring after centuries of industrial pollution. In many places the upper levels, damaged by non-stop exposure to caustic water, have been abandoned to destitute squatters and gangs as a result. The truly wealthy live deeper in the hive, with the best mansions and complexes being entirely underground. Even the simple possession of an acid-treated umbrella is a sign of success, with the wealthy having rain-proof palanquins with forcefields to prevent their passenger from having to risk getting a single drop near them. The middle class can hire "gampers", people who own a large umbrella, to protect them from the rain for a time; the poor make do with prayer paper (which does absolutely nothing to protect them) or no umbrellas at all.
• Wizard Duel: Ravenor has a few astral-form fights with other psykers.
• Waif-Fu:
  • Patience and Thonius are both remarkably deadly in unarmed combat despite a very light build.
  • Averted with the strongly-built Combat Pragmatist Swole.

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