Konrad Curze - Great Crusade: The Night Haunter quickly adapted to the teachings of the Imperium, studying the complex doctrines of the Legiones Astartes under the Primarch Fulgrim's tutelage. Curze came to greatly esteem Fulgrim, though he never particularly demonstrated it. For in addition to Fulgrim's kindness to Curze upon meeting him, the Emperor's Children primarch presented Curze with a highly appreciated oddity: Curze had not foreseen any sort of violence upon viewing Fulgrim for the first time. This was so pleasantly unusual for Curze that it immediately endeared Fulgrim to him.  Night Haunter was soon accepted as the leader of the VIIIth Space Marine Legion that had been created from his genome, which he named the "Night Lords."Although he and his Legion excelled in many theatres of war, a tendency soon became apparent. It never occurred to the Night Lords to use anything other than total, brutal and decisive force to achieve their goals. Over the first few standard years after his return, the Night Lords were molded by their primarch into an efficient, humourless force. The Night Haunter encouraged his Legion to decorate their power armour with images designed to inspire fear in the enemy, a tactic that proved incredibly effective.From their inception, the Night Lords had served as the Emperor's terror weapon against particularly recalcitrant Human worlds, and the rediscovery of their primarch changed very little about them. The only real difference after Curze became their new master was their adoption of Curze's philosophy of preventing bloodshed through the application of terror. The Night Lords would descend upon some small portion of a target world in overwhelming force and visit utter butchery upon those they found there. They then offered peace to the rest of the world if it surrendered, while letting it be known that those who resisted would meet the same fate as those the Night Lords had already brutally slaughtered. This tactic usually had the desired effect as most target worlds capitulated without further bloodshed.Soon, rumours of the impending presence of the Night Lords would cause a rebel star system to pay all outstanding Imperial tithes, cease all illegal activities and put to death any mutants and suspected traitors. The reuniting of primarch and Legion was the beginning of a spiral that would see the Night Lords descend further into horror and nihilism. Unfortunately, after Curze's departure, Nostramo shook off his enforced peace, returning to lawlessness. From this point forwards Nostramo fed the VIIIth Legion not with the finest of its youth, but with gutter scum soaked in blood and cruelty. Some claim that this began to poison the Legion, twisting its purpose and making many Night Lords simple murderers gifted with the strength of demi-gods.This thesis, though, willfully ignores a number of factors, not least of which was Curze's leadership of his Legion. That he came to despise his own genetic sons is likely, but he was still their lord. Far from restraining the VIIIth Legion he drove it on, bringing peace through atrocity to planet after planet. Sometimes there seems to have been cause for such methods, but often the only explanations for the decimation of populations, for the skinning pits and crucified cities, seems to be that the Night Lords enjoyed it. They had become not necessary monsters, but simply monsters.Curze quickly began to lose some of the control he held over his Legion's innate savagery, and the visions of a dark future that plagued him increased in both their lucidity and quantity.As noted above, during the early Great Crusade the Night Lords had been used by the Emperor as a tool of terror to pacify rebellious planets that had been recently conquered by the other Space Marine Legions. Their fearsome reputation caused any rogue planetary governor or uprising of rebels against Imperial Compliance to quickly pay any outstanding tithes or quell their rebellions, as the Night Lords had been known to issue an Exterminatus order on several worlds for the most petty of crimes against the Imperium.That the Emperor had concerns about the actions of the VIIIth Legion, and the apparent mental instability of their primarch is clear, but what is not clear is what was done to restrain Curze or his gene-sons. There were words, demands, perhaps even threats, but no action; no hand of judgement to throttle the Night Lords' crimes. Why this was so is a question that can never now be answered, and the Imperium was left only with the consequences. The chain of atrocities grew ever longer in the solar decades before Curze finally turned against the Emperor, like a path spiralling ever downwards into inevitable darkness.Indeed, of all the Legions and their primarchs, the Night Lords were the most sinister and the most suspect, having been censured for the enormities and massacres carried out in the Emperor's service. They were creatures of the dark, harnessed to the will of a father wracked by righteousness and foreboding; what else could have been their fate but to fall back into the night from whence they came?