Night Lords - Specialist Ranks and Formations: Atramentar - The Atramentar were an elite Terminator-armoured unit of battle-brothers drawn from the Night Lords' formidable 1st Company. They were led by the infamous First Captain Jago Sevatarion. These deadly warriors were outfitted in Tartaros Pattern Terminator Armour and armed with the finest weapons the Legion possessed, which they wielded with murderous talent. Along with this fearsome armament and formidable killing prowess, the Atramentar were also just as fractious and rebellious as the rest of their Legion. The task of commanding such a force was only possible for the strongest-willed leaders, those willing and capable of demonstrating what they asked of their charges on the countless battlefields of the Great Crusade. It was in these circumstances that the Atramentar excelled as shock troops, with all their irascibility and spite correctly channeled, ready to be unleashed in a crescendo of savagery against any that dared to stand before them. Following the death of Captain Sevatarion at the Siege of Terra, the leadership of the Atramentar passed to the Terran-born Night Lord Zso Sahaal. The Atramentar largely dissolved as a cohesive force like so much of the Legion in the wake of the Horus Heresy, and spread out amongst the successor warbands of the fractious VIIIth Legion, acting as bodyguards to various Night Lord Chaos Lords who led their own warbands of Chaos Space Marines.Contekar - The Contekar, also called the Contekar Elite, were elite Night Lords Terminators who were used as shock troops that were highly adept at sowing panic and dismay with their arrival. Their talents for steadfast prosecution of war was much vaunted amongst the Space Marine Legions during the Great Crusade. Contekar Terminators were in truth no more than butchers and murderers of a high order, to be called upon when the  VIIIth Legion wished to bring more than terror but utter and abject despair and destruction upon a foe, to burn their armies, infrastructure and agriculture, and to topple the foundations of their civilisation. A haughty warrior class within the Night Lords Legion, the Contekar were made up of recruits taken from Nostramo's ruling elite, and in their blood lay the corruption and contempt held for the Imperial citizenry by those ignoble potentates. Obsessed with status and hierarchy like their mortal kin, the Contekar kept themselves aloof from the rest of their Legion, deigning only to fight for those leaders they deemed worthy or also possessed of noble Nostraman blood. The Contekar were often dispatched to wrest command from lesser Night Lords leaders whom their commanders deemed unfit to prosecute the Legion's objectives. Such cruel but pragmatic methods were favoured by warlords like First Captain Jago Sevatarion and others of both the old Terran Legion and the new Nostraman recruits, relying on the brutal skills of the Contekar to lay waste to the enemies of the Night Lords as an example to those of their brethren that might falter in their duties. Only Konrad Curze himself and First Captain Sevatarion could freely command the Contekar. Other Night Lord officers ran the risk of paying a mighty price for calling upon these elite killers' services, as the Contekar ever sought to further improve their own station in the Legion's hierarchy and interpreted any signs of weakness as an invitation to kill a rival and take their command.Terror Squad - Terror Squads were specialist squads of Space Marines utilised exclusively by the Night Lords during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy. When the Legion desired to unleash maximum punishment and retribution against the enemy in the most visceral and personal way possible, the Terror Squads of the VIIIth Legion were unleashed. Head hunters and torturers, flayers and mutilators; within their ranks were found both the most coldly dispassionate and darkly imaginative of the Night Lords brethren, and where once the terrifying arts of murder and mayhem they perpetrated were a coldly calculated means to an end, as the decades of the Great Crusade progressed, the Terror Squads became a sink-hole for the most unstable and unsubtle elements within their Legion, many within them standing under their own sentences of death -- commuted so long as they proved useful to their macabre master.Night Raptors - Night Raptor squads were a caste apart from the Night Lords Legion -- not so much a martial elite as a bloody coterie of murderers wedded together by similar proclivities and chosen styles of warfare. The Night Raptors were equipped with Jump Packs and an array of close combat weapons, all of which they utilised to bring unfettered savagery down upon the heads of their foes in a single, overwhelming onslaught. Where the rest of the Legion was wielded as a weapon, the Night Raptors rejected all subtlety in favour of assaults as bloody and direct as a butcher's axe cleaving meat. This elite assault formation found bleak joy in soaring above the battlefield like screaming predators hunting for victims and savoured most the stark moment of clarity when a victim witnessed their death reflected back to them in the eyes of their killer. The Night Raptors were the ancient precursors in many ways of the later Chaos Space Marine Raptor assault troops found in all of the Traitor Legions after the end of the Horus Heresy.