First Claw

First Claw is the Night Lords warband led by Talos Valcoran, a Traitor Space Marine squad that raids from the Eye of Terror in the forty-first millennium. It belongs to the Legion raised on Nostramo under the primarch Konrad Curze, and it operates as a Renegade band in the long exile that followed the Horus Heresy. Its allegiance is to its own leader and to the Legion’s inherited traditions of terror rather than to any surviving Legion command. The term “claw” is the Night Lords’ own word for a small tactical squad, and First Claw is the best-attested example of one.

The warband sails aboard the strike cruiser Covenant of Blood and has used the dead world of Tsagualsa as a refuge. From there it has hunted rival Astartes, Eldar corsairs and Imperial agents across the Eye of Terror and its approaches. Its recorded members include Talos, the swordsman Cyrion, the berserker Xarl, the Word Bearer-influenced Uzas and the Apothecary Variel. The human thrall Septimus served the warband alongside them, and Mercutian, an earlier member, was lost in its first encounters along this path. Talos is recorded as its leader, and his visions and his standing among the warband shaped its course. Its history includes internal mutiny, daemonic corruption and pursuit by Imperial forces, though accounts differ on the order and detail of these events.

First Claw matters as the narrative focus through which the Night Lords’ post-Heresy existence is most often described. It shows a Legion reduced to scattered warbands, still shaped by Curze’s legacy of fear and by the Nostramo that produced it. Its closest contemporaries are its own members, together with the wider Night Lords warbands that operate in and around the Eye of Terror. Its story is bound to the Eye of Terror and Tsagualsa in the forty-first millennium. Its present fate is not fixed in the attested accounts, and its status is therefore recorded as unknown.