Tsagualsa

Tsagualsa, the Carrion World, is a Night Lords quarry planet on the Eastern Fringe and was the seat of Konrad Curze after Nostramo. Its importance in the galactic story rests on its role as the place where the primarch of the VIII Legion held court in exile, and on the events of the Thramas Crusade that brought his brother Lion El’Jonson to its surface. Accounts describe a world worked for its stone and ore, with the Night Lords drawing on it as a base, though its exact extent and population are not fully recorded.

The planet became the centre of Night Lords authority once Nostramo could no longer serve that purpose. Curze’s exile court on Tsagualsa is one of three recorded episodes that define the world, and it is in this setting that Jago Sevatarion appears among the VIII Legion. The court situates the Night Lords on the periphery of the Imperium, removed from the Legions’ earlier deployments and answerable chiefly to their own primarch. Tsagualsa was contested during the Thramas Crusade, the campaign by which the Dark Angels sought out the Night Haunter after the Heresy.

The second recorded episode is the duel between the two primarchs. Lion El’Jonson and Curze fought on Tsagualsa, and each is recorded as coming close to killing the other. The Lion was accompanied by a Dark Angels strike force that included Corswain and Alajos. The encounter binds the Eastern Fringe to the wider Thramas Crusade, and it links Curze’s court to the Dark Angels’ pursuit of a brother whom the Lion regarded as unresolved business from the Heresy.

The third episode is the death of Curze. He was killed in his palace on Tsagualsa by a Callidus blade, an assassination that ended the life of the Night Haunter. Later tradition holds that the manner of his death answered the fears he had spoken of for much of his existence, although accounts differ on how it should be read. Successor chapters of the Ultramarines subsequently drove the remaining Night Lords warband from the planet, which ended the Legion’s hold on the world.

On the Orrery map and timeline, Tsagualsa anchors the Night Lords and the Thramas Crusade to a single location. Readers tracing the Lion’s movements after the Heresy, the fate of Konrad Curze, or the dispersal of the VIII Legion will find that the planet connects all three. Its present status is that of a former Night Lords stronghold from which the warband was expelled, and the surviving record does not specify what use, if any, the planet has since been put to.