Nostramo

Nostramo was a sunless, crime-ridden world in the Nostramo system, homeworld of the primarch Konrad Curze and his Night Lords Legion. Its atmosphere and remoteness left the surface in near-perpetual darkness, broken only by the sodium glare of hive-cities where cartels, not any formal government, held real power. The world lay on the coreward fringe of the region later charted as the Ghoul Stars, isolated enough that Imperial compliance during the Great Crusade found a society already governed by fear and vigilante violence.

It was on Nostramo that Great Crusade search fleets located Konrad Curze, who had spent his youth stalking the hives as a solitary enforcer of his own justice before his Legion, and his primarchhood, were revealed to him. Once raised as primarch of the VIII Legion, Curze returned to rule his homeworld directly, governing through terror and public example rather than law. The hives supplied the Night Lords with recruits drawn from Nostramo’s gladiatorial pits and criminal fraternities, among them Jago Sevatarion, later First Captain of the Legion, and Talos Valcoran, both products of the world’s violent underclass.

Nostramo’s compliance proved brittle: its populace rose against Curze in an attempted assassination that he survived, and the primarch’s subsequent turn towards nihilism hardened into the conviction that humanity could only be ruled, never redeemed. In the opening years of the Horus Heresy, after pledging himself to Horus’s cause, Curze returned to Nostramo and ordered his Legion’s fleet to bombard the world into ruin, an act recorded as having taken place before the Night Lords’ Thramas Crusade against Ultramar. The bombardment cracked the planet’s core, killing its population and leaving Nostramo a shattered wreck rather than a living world.

The ruin of Nostramo remains the defining reference point for the Night Lords’ identity: a homeworld destroyed by its own primarch as proof of his creed, rather than lost to an external enemy. After the bombardment, the Legion’s exile fortress of Tsagualsa served as a sister theatre to the broken homeworld, a new seat for a Legion that no longer had a world to return to. Nostramo’s fragments are recorded as still drifting on the inner edge of the Ghoul Stars, a wreck without habitation, visited only as a site of memory for those Night Lords who trace their lineage to its hives.