Gideon Ravenor's crippling [Eisenhorn Malleus - Dan Abnett]

Context: A imperial host returns to Thracian Primaris in a parade and bombed in an act of terrorism. "Blammerside Street" also amused me a bit.

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In addition to fatigue and the pain of my wounds, what darkened my mood was the news about Gideon Ravenor. Now, of course, we all understand what a priceless and brilliant contribution he was to make to Imperial learning, and how that would have never happened if he had not been confined to a life of mental rumination.

But back then, in that stinking hospice ward off the street of Prescients, all I saw was a young man, burned and crippled and physically paralysed, a brilliant inquisitor ruined before he could fulfill his potential.

Ravenor, in the eyes of some, had been lucky. He had not been amongst the on hundred and ninety-eight Inquisition personnel killed outright by the crashing fighter that fell into the Great Triumph beyond the Spatian Gate.

He, like fifty others, had been caught on the edge of the explosion and lived.

My pupil was barely recognisable. A blood-wet bundle of charred flesh. One hundred per cent burns. Blind, dead, mute his face so melted that an incision had been made in the fused meat where his mouth should have been so he could breathe.

The loss touched me acutely. The waste even more. Gideon Ravenor had been the greatest, most promising pupil I had ever taught. I stood by his plastic-sheeted cot, listening to the suck and drool of his ventilator and fluid drains and remembered what Commodus Voke had said in the Arbites sector house on Blammerside Street.