Talos Valcoran

Talos Valcoran, called the Soul Hunter, was a Night Lords Apothecary and prophet who led a warband in the long exile that followed the Horus Heresy. He was born on Nostramo, the world that shaped the VIII Legion and its primarch, Konrad Curze, and he is recorded as belonging to the Legion’s later, scattered generations rather than to the first muster of the Great Crusade. By his time the Night Lords were known to the Imperium chiefly through rumour and through accounts of their flaying pits. His own history is therefore also a record of what that Legion had become.

The curse of Nostramo, the prophetic affliction associated with Curze, appeared in Talos as visions. He treated these as binding instructions and acted on them even when they demanded atrocities he found distasteful. He is described as disliking what the VIII Legion had turned into, yet he did not withdraw from its practices. His campaigns are placed in the years after the Heresy, beginning with the ruin of Tsagualsa and continuing through a long period of raiding and survival. He is associated with the First Claw of the Night Lords, the small band of Legionaries who served under him and formed the core of his warband.

The Orrery graph places Talos among the surviving Night Lords who kept a Legion identity alive without a central command. His contemporaries are those warbands and Legionaries who, like him, had lost contact with Nostramo and with Curze’s authority. His Apothecary’s craft, the gathering and study of gene-seed and flesh, connects him to the Legion’s technical traditions as well as to its terror tactics. He also took on Decimus as his heir, although accounts indicate he had not planned to need one. That succession is the clearest link between his warband and the Night Lords who came after him.

Talos is recorded as dead. The Eldar who pursued him are held to have caught him in the end. The Night Lords continue to recount his history, and later tradition treats him as the nearest figure the VIII Legion has to a saint. Talos would have rejected that comparison. On the map, his story runs from Nostramo to Tsagualsa and onward. On the timeline it sits in the Night Lords’ post-Heresy exile, after the Legion’s ties to its homeworld and its primarch had gone.