Night Lords - Death of Nostramo: Nostramo's death in 984.M30 came at the end of a long chain of events which saw the Night Lords relinquishing the last of their honour.While much has long been made by historitors of the Drop Site Massacre being the first conflict between the Emperor's primarchs, this is not strictly true. There exists a single instance of a primarch turning upon one of his brothers and meting out grievous injury to them that predates both the conflicts in the Isstvan System and the Scouring of Prospero. That Konrad Curze sits at the heart of this incident, long concealed from historitors in the archives of the Imperial Palace, should elicit little surprise from those that know of the mental instability of the Night Haunter.This incident occurred in the aftermath of the long and bloody Cheraut Compliance campaign, a conflict that saw elements of the Emperor's Children, Imperial Fists and the Night Lords Legions deployed to bring a particularly stubborn lost clade of Humanity under the rule of the Imperium. All three of those Legion's primarchs were present, a rare occurrence in those hectic days of conquest and expansion, with little common ground to be found between Rogal Dorn and Curze in the prosecution of the campaign. By the end of the fight, Curze's brutal methods and the indiscriminate slaughter he committed to pacify the defeated people of Cheraut had brought the relationship between those two disparate brothers to a razor's edge of bitterness.The lack of moderation in the Night Lords' methods had long attracted scorn and hostility from the other Space Marine Legions. Even as the tally of disgust grew, Konrad Curze became increasingly plagued by visions and portents of ruin, calamity and betrayal. He saw everything he had striven for to be broken, the order and justice of the galaxy shattered and his gene-sons become monsters without cause or higher purpose. Curze became ever more withdrawn, what little had ever shone in his being guttering to nothing, and leaving him with nothing but darkness, deep depression and the constant screams of a lost future.Learning that his homeworld had slipped back into corruption at the end of the Cheraut campaign, the Night Haunter tried to confide in his brother primarchs, but he had never been close to them, and their reaction was less than favourable to his claims. The scars left by his former life on Nostramo ran deep. Despite the fact that he spent much time with his less-dour peers at Cheraut, the Night Lords primarch kept himself at a distance, never able to join in their camaraderie or share their joy. He still fell into convulsions, plagued by prophetic visions of his own death, of his Night Lords fighting war after war against the other Legions. But despite the concern of his companions, he would not reveal any more than dark hints of the cause of his tormented spirit.This feeling of isolation gradually grew into true paranoia, and the gulf between the Night Haunter and the brotherhood of the other primarchs only widened. Events reached a head following the end of the pacification of the Cheraut System.After Curze confided in his mentor Fulgrim of the terrible things he had foreseen, the shocked primarch of the Emperor's Children repeated these grim tidings to his brother Rogal Dorn. Dorn, already angry with his brother over the Night Lords' conduct on Cheraut, took exception to the Night Haunter's slight of the Emperor's good name with such terrible deeds and confronted him. The exact events of what occurred between the two primarchs is not recorded in detail, but Dorn was found severely wounded and the Night Haunter's personal cadre of bodyguards slaughtered to a warrior.Those warriors that had witnessed the event were sworn to silence, and the Night Haunter was placed under guard on Cheraut pending sentence by his brother primarchs. Yet there would be no secret trial nor penitent crusade for the Night Haunter, for the primarch of the Night Lords broke free of his confinement and left only more bloodied corpses in his wake in the course of his escape. Blood had been spilled between the Legions, a crack opened in what many had previously seen as a brotherhood to stand the test of time.Once free of his confinement, Curze made haste and returned to Nostramo with his Legion and fulfilled one of his visions. Curze's judgement was simple and swift; the Night Lords destroyed Nostramo. A few Imperial pursuit craft arrived just in time to see the Night Lords' starships open their Lance batteries into the hole in the planet's surface that had been left by Night Haunter's arrival through the Warp solar decades earlier.Nostramo's core destabilised and the world tore itself apart. As a primarch and a Lord of Crusades, it was Curze's right to liberate or destroy the world as he saw fit, but in the moment that Nostramo died, the Night Lords lost their last tether to restraint, though it would take the treachery of others to bring this change to light. Some believe that Curze's destruction of his homeworld was also as much a symbol of defiance to his brother primarchs as an act intended to return his former domain to some semblance of order.Here accounts of Curze's next actions differ based on the sources. One account holds that in the wake of Nostramo's destruction, Curze and the Night Lords Legion were recalled to Terra to explain their behaviour, where they were then reprimanded by the Emperor and the Council of Terra. The last straw for the Emperor was when the Night Lords had unleashed an Exterminatus upon their own homeworld.Curze explained his actions to the Emperor by pointing out that Nostramo, in the Legion's absence, had slid back into its old ways of cruel violence and crime. He and the Night Lords were embittered by what they saw as the Emperor's and the Council of Terra's hypocrisy when they were censured for their brutality even as the Emperor had unleashed a Great Crusade that used military power to forcibly reunite the scattered worlds of Humanity, regardless of those planets' own wishes.The Night Lords thought that the Emperor would acknowledge that their actions had been in the right. They also felt that these actions were the direct consequence of the mission that the Imperium had always tasked them with, which was essentially that of "sanctioned" terrorism against all who opposed the expansion of the Imperium and its mission to reunite all the worlds of Mankind across the galaxy.To Curze, it seemed that the Emperor had castigated him for carrying out the same actions that had once been deemed so vital to the Imperium's formation. Curze believed the Emperor to be a hypocrite who was unwilling to face the reality of the means that His dream of Human reunification actually required to be brought into being.A different account claims that after the destruction of Nostramo, Curze and his Legion disappeared into the hinterlands of the ongoing Great Crusade rather than return to Terra to face judgement. In this account, no news of this quiet rebellion by one of the primarchs ever reached the wider Imperium, no writs of condemnation or denouncement issued from the Imperial court or Council of Terra or punitive fleets sent in search of the errant primarch. Elements of the Night Lords present in other expeditionary fleets faced no censure and the Night Haunter himself kept to the dark places beyond the borders of known Imperial space, killing and conquering as he always had in the Emperor's name.In truth, the great and the wise of the Imperium placed a higher value on the unity of the Emperor's crusade across the stars than on the open punishment of a warlord who had erred, perhaps even fearing what they might unleash should they force Konrad Curze's hand. Instead they resorted to more subtle punishments, ending the shipments of supplies to the sectors held by the Night Lords and effectively banishing the Night Haunter from the ranks of the Great Crusade's vanguard.By the early years of the 31st Millennium the Court of Terra deemed this punishment complete and issued an order for the Night Haunter's recall, granting him a place in the Loyalist fleet that assembled to meet the sudden betrayal of Horus Lupercal at Isstvan.