Event · M31
Destruction of Nostramo
The destruction of Nostramo was the bombardment by which Konrad Curze, primarch of the Night Lords, broke his own homeworld apart late in the Great Crusade. The Night Lords Legion carried out the act with its own guns, cracking the planet’s core in the years before the Horus Heresy. The precise date is not firmly established, and accounts differ on how it sits against the other events of Curze’s final years in the Imperium. The remains of the world lie on the inner edge of the Ghoul Stars. Nostramo was a sunless, adamantium-rich world whose hive cities were given over to entrenched crime. A moon locked in permanent eclipse denied the planet natural light, and its pale, night-adapted population later supplied the Night Lords with recruits, among them Jago Sevatarion, who rose from its hives. Curze had grown to maturity in Nostramo’s depths, where he began stalking and executing criminals as the vigilante known as the Night Haunter, imposing a peace built on terror rather than law. As primarch he governed the world in the same manner. His conduct grew increasingly erratic as the Great Crusade continued. After a violent confrontation with Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists, his brother primarchs convened to weigh his fitness for command, and Curze slew his own guards on the world of Cheraut and fled back to Nostramo. On his return Curze found his homeworld sunk back into the criminality he had once punished, and he turned the Night Lords fleet against it. The Legion targeted a weak point in the planet’s crust and unleashed its full arsenal, cracking the core and reducing Nostramo to drifting fragments. The act was carried out by the Legion’s own warships under its primarch’s direction, not by an enemy. It is therefore recorded as a deliberate judgement on the world that shaped him, and as his final, irrevocable breach with the Imperium he had served. The shattered planet remained the point of origin of the Night Lords and the lasting record of their primarch’s rule. With Nostramo gone, the Legion could no longer rely on its birthplace as a source of recruits, and later tradition has the Night Lords drawing on other worlds thereafter. The Legion later took Tsagualsa as its seat in exile, a world that became a sister theatre to the ruin Curze had made of Nostramo. On the Orrery map the event is anchored at Nostramo, and on the timeline it sits among the last years of the Great Crusade, alongside the Night Lords’ turn from Imperial service.
See where Destruction of Nostramo occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.