Konrad Curze - Night Haunter: As a lone young boy, feral and wary, Curze shivered in the shadows of broken buildings and atop roofs, living as a scavenger and slaying any who sought to prey upon him, for even as an infant he was possessed of frightful strength and an indefatigable will married to a superhuman and watchful intelligence.The cries of people pleading under the torturer's knife were his cradle songs, and when he slept, he would dream of wars waiting in the stars, the dead heaped on worlds he had never seen, and he would wake with the screams of the dying in his ears and find that they were real.Ever in the dark, isolated and silent, he was more nightmare than demi-god. He killed to survive, and discovered that he was not like those that he killed. They were weak and slow by comparison, and fell easily to his hands and fists and teeth. He ate the flesh of vermin to survive and when that was not enough, he ate the dead.In his cauldron of sin he learned, his mind taking the whispers of thoughts from the flesh he ate, leeching speech and the arts of murder from those he watched. He soaked up all the darkness could teach him, assimilating it as only the mind of a transhuman primarch could. But the product of this savage tutelage was not a simple murderer or beast.Perhaps something of the Emperor's greater purpose whispered to Curze. He could have become like the rest of Nostramo, a killer and a criminal. Given his nature, who can doubt that he would have risen to be the corrupt king of all he surveyed, but he did not. Instead the boy who had grown up amongst the vermin and on the flesh of the dead chose to change the world by bringing it justice.He began by killing those who crossed his path. Sin had surrounded him since he had first drawn breath -- there was no need to seek it out. Murderers and street thugs began to vanish, then whole gangs. Bodies appeared, mutilated and crucified on the walls of buildings. Flayed sheets of skin hung from bridges and severed heads grinned from railings.A name began to follow his deeds, a name that he heard the people of his world whisper, half in fear and half in hope. "The Night Haunter" was the fearful name they gave him -- an avenging spirit, an angel of blind justice -- a murderer other murderers feared.They began to hunt him: the gangs, the nobles' enforcers and the crime syndicates alike and this suited him, for if nothing it brought his prey to him. He killed most who came after him, and let a few live to carry his message back to Nostramo's nefarious courts and princes. Without eyes, without hands, but left their tongues, the mutilated messengers would weep out a simple message: "I am coming for you."The Night Haunter followed the whispers, the rumours and the truths taken from the mouths of flayed gangers. His vigilante actions began small, intervening when he witnessed something he believed to be wrong, but rapidly escalating into hunting down those he believed had committed transgressions.At first, several people prominent within Nostramo Quintus' corrupt civic hierarchy disappeared. Leaders of the most vocal opposition to the status quo vanished in similar circumstances. Bodies of known criminals began to appear, gutted like fish by some cruel assailant. Corrupt officials were found hung from high windows. Body parts blocked storm water drains. Many of the corpses found were so horribly beaten by their assailant that identification was impossible.Within the year, the crime rate of Nostramo Quintus fell to near-zero. Cruze killed and mutilated until the streets fell quiet and his name was no longer a prayer for justice, but a plea of the fearful. An entire world had been cowed by sheer terror.When the cities slept in silence and the sound of gunfire was a rare murmur, he went before the aristocracy of sin and gave them a choice; kneel and follow his law or be destroyed. Some never left that first council; the rest knelt before their master.Nostramo belonged to the Night Haunter. He would be their first king, their "Dark King," and became the first absolute monarch Nostramo had ever known.