Xarl

Xarl is a Space Marine of the Night Lords Traitor Legion, a veteran of First Claw and the oldest friend of its commander, Talos.

Born on Nostramo before the Legion’s primarch, Konrad Curze, led it into the Horus Heresy and the long exile that followed, Xarl endured where many of his kin did not, becoming one of First Claw’s most senior and enduring members. He serves within the raiding fleet answering to the Exalted, a Night Lord commander who claims authority in Curze’s absence, and has long acted as the squad’s pragmatic counterweight to Talos, whose prophetic visions and doubts about the Legion’s purpose Xarl treats with open scepticism. Maimed in battle and rebuilt with augmetics, he wars alongside fellow First Claw legionaries Cyrion, Mercutian, and the increasingly unstable Uzas, whose deterioration has repeatedly brought the two into conflict.

Xarl’s standing within First Claw rests less on formal rank than on longevity, reliability, and a hard-edged conviction that survival and usefulness to the Exalted matter more than the Legion’s fading ideals, a stance that sets him apart from Talos’s uncertainty. He is a contemporary of Talos, Cyrion, and the squad’s Techmarine, Deltrian, bound to them through shared service aboard First Claw’s strike cruiser across the Night Lords’ long campaign of raids against the Imperium. The full course of First Claw’s later actions, and Xarl’s ultimate fate within them, is recorded unevenly, with accounts of the squad’s final campaigns differing in detail.