Event · M31–M32

Death of Konrad Curze

The Death of Konrad Curze was the assassination of the Night Lords primarch by the Callidus assassin M’Shen, an act commonly placed around 036.M31, some years after the Horus Heresy, though not every account fixed the date precisely. It occurred on Tsagualsa, the barren world on the Eastern Fringe that had served the Night Lords as a Carrion World seat since Curze seized it during the Thramas Crusade, after his own fleet had already razed his homeworld of Nostramo to ruin before the Heresy began. The killing closed a chain of events that had begun at the end of the Imperium Secundus episode, when the primarch Sanguinius sealed him within a stasis coffin and cast it adrift in the void, telling him that fate would find him regardless. That fate took the form of the salvage vessel Sheldroon, which recovered the drifting coffin around 032.M31. A hidden Imperial agent aboard the ship broke the casket open, whereupon Curze massacred the crew; a Callidus acolyte named Gun, present in disguise, managed to alert his temple to Curze’s general location before dying. Curze spared one crewman, Elver, keeping him on as pilot for the long voyage home; with the ship’s warp drive inoperable, the journey to Tsagualsa consumed four years. On arrival he rejoined the remnants of his Legion under Talos Valcoran and First Claw, with Zso Sahaal said to be among the first to greet his return, and he had Elver put to death soon after, once the pilot betrayed some glimpse of doubt about his master. The Night Lords Curze found on Tsagualsa had built him a palace from still-living bodies, its floor a carpet of screaming faces known as the Screaming Gallery, and a throne fashioned from bone. Unlike the other Traitor Legions, which splintered and fled after the invasion of Terra, the Night Lords continued to strike at the Imperium in the years that followed, in a manner widely regarded as self-destructive rather than strategic. Curze himself declined further, given to spells of incoherent violence and sadism that some accounts suggest left even his own officers, Sevatar among them, disheartened by what their primarch had become. It was said that the Emperor, desiring an end to the Night Lords, ordered half the Callidus temple committed to the hunt for Curze. Curze was said to have foreseen the hour of his death. Before it came he reportedly conversed with a statue built from a corpse, which he addressed as the Emperor; the figure told him that his madness had never been his fault, and when it questioned his belief that fate was fixed, suggesting instead that he had chosen his own path, Curze broke down and tore it to pieces. Whether the figure had been the Emperor in some fashion or merely a hallucination of a failing mind was never settled. In this period he also completed his memoir, titled The Dark, and concealed the manuscript within his fortress. When M’Shen finally came for him, she passed no guard between the threshold and his throne room, a circumstance taken by many as proof that Curze permitted her approach. He told her that he had known of her presence since her craft first entered the Eastern Fringe, that her arrival to kill him proved the truth of everything he had done in his life, and that he had only ever punished the guilty, just as the Emperor now sought to punish him; death, he said, meant nothing set against such vindication. The vambrace vid-log she carried recorded her lunge towards him before the feed failed, so the killing blow itself was never captured, and it has been widely supposed that Curze allowed himself to die. What followed the killing is remembered differently in different accounts. One holds that M’Shen took his head along with a number of his possessions as trophies, told the Night Lord Talos that she would be remembered as the Godslayer, fought him briefly as she withdrew towards her ship, and escaped, only to be hunted down and killed by Talos later; Curze, by this telling, had commanded his Legion to let her leave unharmed even as he foresaw that Talos, and afterwards the rest of his sons, would defy that order. Another account holds instead that she took the Corona Nox, the adamantium crown that marked his rule, and that Zso Sahaal pursued her to reclaim it, only to be lost within a warp storm for ten thousand years. In either case, her recording reached Terra and preserved Curze’s final words, which remained counted among the enigmas of Imperial history. In the decades after his death the Night Lords never again fought as a single force, their raiding provoking the Imperium to send the Ultramarines and several of their successor chapters, including the Aurora, the Praetors of Orpheus, the Novamarines, the Genesis Chapter, the Silver Eagles and the Black Consuls, against Tsagualsa itself; the Night Lords fleet escaped the attack but scattered beyond any hope of reunification.

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