Konrad Curze

Konrad Curze, called the Night Haunter, was the primarch of the Night Lords, the VIII Legion of Space Marines. He was one of the twenty primarchs created by the Emperor and scattered across the galaxy as an infant; his gestation capsule crashed through the crust of Nostramo, a sunless world of adamantium mines, entrenched poverty and unchecked crime, landing near the city of Nostramo Quintus. No family claimed him, and he raised himself in the city’s darkness, hunting feral animals for food and afflicted from an early age by waking visions of death and of the darkest futures that might befall him and those around him.

As a youth Curze began a solitary campaign against Nostramo Quintus’s criminals and corrupt officials, who began to vanish or were found mutilated. Within a year crime in the city had fallen to almost nothing, and the population adopted a curfew of their own accord; mothers invoked the Night Haunter to frighten disobedient children. He eventually presented himself to the city’s surviving nobles and was accepted as its first monarch, ruling through a pattern of measured judgement punctuated by sudden, terrible vengeance against transgressors. Other cities adopted the same arrangement, and in time he governed much of Nostramo’s urban population.

The Emperor came to Nostramo accompanied by Fulgrim, Ferrus Manus, Rogal Dorn and Lorgar, though one account also places a company of Ultramarines among the party. As they approached his palace, Curze was struck by a vision so terrible that he attempted to claw out his own eyes and had to be restrained by the Emperor; he is said to have foreseen the fates of his brothers and the manner of his own death. Addressed by the name Konrad Curze, he answered that he was Night Haunter and told the Emperor that he already understood what was intended for him. He subsequently studied Astartes doctrine under Fulgrim before taking command of the VIII Legion, which he renamed the Night Lords and remade into an instrument of terror; entire worlds submitted tithes and purged their own heretics merely at word of the Legion’s approach. In his absence Nostramo relapsed into corruption, and its nobles began sending criminals to serve as Legion recruits, a development that led Curze to regard his own sons as corrupted and to despise them; of his brother primarchs, he professed open hatred only for Corax.

During a joint campaign with Vulkan and the Salamanders on Kharaatan, the Night Lords massacred the population of Khar-tann City, bringing Vulkan to the brink of open violence against Curze. In the Cheraut System, campaigning alongside the Imperial Fists and Emperor’s Children, Rogal Dorn confronted him over the Night Lords’ atrocities and over visions Fulgrim had disclosed; Curze beat Dorn severely before being restrained, then killed his captors — accounts differ on whether these were Phoenix Guard and Templars or his own household guard — and fled with his fleet to Nostramo. There he punished the world’s renewed corruption by bombarding it until its core failed and it broke apart, as Imperial pursuit vessels arrived. Summoned to Terra to answer for these acts, he instead declared for Horus. At the Drop Site Massacre on Isstvan V he led the Night Lords against the Raven Guard, Salamanders and Iron Hands, fighting alongside Lorgar against Corax, and afterwards held Vulkan captive aboard his flagship Nightfall without being able to kill him.

During the Thramas Crusade of roughly 007–009.M31, Curze waged a protracted terror campaign on the Eastern Fringe from a citadel on Tsagualsa against Lion El’Jonson, descending personally upon Yaelis, rampaging at Crucible where the Dark Angels’ Excindio engines held him at bay, and meeting the Lion on Tsagualsa, where he nearly strangled his brother before Corswain drove a blade through his spine. On Sheol IX the Lion beat him into a coma; on recovering, Curze stowed away aboard the Lion’s flagship Invincible Reason for some sixteen weeks before escaping by drop pod at Macragge, where he massacred his way through the capital, trapped Guilliman and the Lion with explosives in a chapel of the Fortress of Hera, fought a maddened Vulkan through the streets, and confronted Sanguinius in the throne room of Imperium Secundus before being broken by the Lion in the Alma Mons region. Tried before Sanguinius, he was spared and kept chained aboard the Invincible Reason, later taken down to Davin with Sanguinius, the Lion and Guilliman, where he despaired on finding events there had slipped beyond his foresight. Sanguinius then sealed him in a stasis coffin and cast him into the void.

Around 032.M31 the salvage vessel Sheldroon recovered the coffin; Curze massacred its crew, sparing one, Elver, who piloted him over four years to Tsagualsa, where he rejoined remnants of his Legion under Talos Valcoran and others and resumed attacks upon the Imperium while descending into violent incoherence. The Emperor’s servants eventually despatched Callidus assassins against him; one, M’Shen, reached his throne room unopposed, and Curze, having foreseen the hour, told her that her act proved the truth of everything he had done. Her vid-log reached Terra, though the killing itself was not recorded. His death is commonly placed around 036.M31 on Tsagualsa. He fought with the lightning claws Mercy and Forgiveness, wearing armour known as the Nightmare Mantle. After his death the Night Lords never again fought as a unified force, and Ultramarines and successor chapters later drove the remnants of the Legion from Tsagualsa.