Event · M31
Exterminatus Nostramo
Exterminatus Nostramo denotes the destruction of Nostramo, homeworld of the Night Lords Legion. The act is recorded as the effective end of Nostramo as an inhabited world: orbital forces subjected the planet to exterminatus-level bombardment, extinguishing nearly its entire population and severing the Night Lords from the world that had shaped them. It stands among the more deliberate acts of self-inflicted ruin in the opening years of the Horus Heresy, distinguishing itself from Legion homeworlds lost to enemy action or Imperial reprisal. Nostramo itself was a world without meaningful planetary government, its cities kept in perpetual gloom by a dim, erratic sun and its population governed by fear, crime, and the predations of gangs and cults. It was on this world that Konrad Curze, later called Night Haunter, was discovered by the Emperor’s agents and raised as the primarch who would found and lead the Night Lords. Curze’s own rule over Nostramo prior to and alongside Imperial compliance was recorded as a reign of terror in the guise of order, in which he styled himself judge and executioner of the world’s criminal population. Accounts describe Curze as having foreseen, from visions in his youth, that Nostramo was destined for annihilation — a belief that the eventual exterminatus was later held to confirm. When the Night Lords turned from the Emperor’s service to the Warmaster’s cause, the Legion’s departure from Nostramo coincided with the planet’s destruction. Accounts differ on whether the act was ordered directly by Curze or executed by Legion forces acting on his will, and on the precise means of bombardment, but the outcome recorded consistently is the same: Nostramo was rendered lifeless, its cities and population erased, in what later tradition holds was as much a fulfilment of Curze’s fatalism as a military or political act. The destruction removed any remaining tie binding the Night Lords to Imperial oversight of their home system and is treated as a hardening point in the Legion’s turn toward the terror-driven warfare that would define it through the Heresy and beyond. The event sits within the wider chronology of the Legions’ withdrawal from Imperial compliance in the early 31st millennium, alongside the mustering of Traitor forces toward the Warmaster’s banner, and is frequently cited in accounts of Curze and the Night Lords as the moment that severed the Legion’s last claim to a home world. In the present era, Nostramo endures in Imperial and Legion record alike as a dead system, its name invoked chiefly in chronicles of Konrad Curze’s origin and of the Night Lords’ founding cruelty rather than as a place of any ongoing activity.
See where Exterminatus Nostramo occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.