I will be honest with you, as I am honest about all my lord’s brothers: some of the twenty should never have been found.
The Sunless World
Nostramo saw no sun. Its people grew chalk-pale in the eternal dark, and its cities ran on murder the way other cities run on trade. Into the gutter-slums of that world fell a child who was tormented, from his earliest memory, by visions — a galaxy locked in unending war, and always, at the end of every vision, his own death at his father’s hands. He answered the dark the only way the dark understands. The city learned to whisper of the Night Haunter, and Nostramo, for the first time in its history, grew quiet. Of the day the Emperor came for him, my archives say nothing at all. Perhaps that is mercy.
Terror as Doctrine
His Eighth Legion, the Night Lords, made his method their doctrine: terror, theatre, and atrocity so complete that worlds surrendered before the first drop-pod fell. Horus called him a moody bastard, but handy — alien empires soiling themselves before the assault began. The friction was constant. At Cheraut, when Dorn named the slaughter of prisoners murder rather than order, Curze answered with his bare hands and teeth, and nearly killed him. He fought in midnight-blue plate edged in gold, dark wings sweeping from the pauldrons like an avenging angel of night — which, in his own broken arithmetic, is exactly what he was.
His justice worked. Sit with that a while, and understand why I fear it more than any daemon.
Questions from the Archive
Where was Konrad Curze found?
On Nostramo, a lightless world of eternal dark, where he rose from the gutter-slums to rule the planet through terror as the Night Haunter.
What visions haunted Konrad Curze?
From childhood he suffered agonising psychic visions of a nightmare future — a galaxy at unending war, and his own death at the hands of his father.
What legion did Konrad Curze command?
The Eighth Legion, the Night Lords, in midnight-blue plate — specialists in terror tactics and psychological warfare that forced worlds into compliance before battle began.