Night Lords - Nostramo: Realm of Eternal Night: It would be easy to say that the coming of Konrad Curze to the VIIIth Legion changed everything, that the fall of the Night Lords began at the moment the Emperor reunited His eighth primarch gene-son with the Legion created from his genome. But it would be truer to say that it was the dark world of Nostramo that set both Curze and the Night Lords on the path to treachery.Curze was the gene-sire of the VIIIth Legion, but he had two fathers, two hands that shaped his nature and through him the fate of his Legion: the Emperor who spun the substance of Curze's life, and the planet Nostramo which had raised and taught him. What the Emperor originally intended for His gene-sons can never be known, but the nature of Nostramo can be.Nostramo was a bleak, sunless Hive World of suffering, pain and corruption. At the heart of a string of planets in the Nostramo Sector which had kept the ability to cross the stars through the Age of Strife, it was a world of sprawling cities, of smoke, industry, and the sweat of millions. Nostramo's wealth, for wealth there was, lay in the seams of adamantine ore beneath its surface. Worlds far from Nostramo fed on its output, and the mines had long wormed deep into its flesh.Nostramo was perpetually dark due to its pollution-clogged atmosphere and the fact that it circled a slowly dying star whose light was unable to penetrate this haze to reach the surface. The world was barely better lit at noon than at midnight. A shroud of perpetual darkness produced by the massive amounts of toxic smog kept the planet swathed in dull greys and deep blacks. Only the rich could afford the Nostraman idea of illumination, which was little more than dim blue illumination-strips that were placed in the ceilings of the ruling hierarchy's luxurious dwellings in the spires of the dark world's hive cities.The world had five major hive cities that straddled the habitable hub of the planet, named in sequence from Nostramo Prime to Nostramo Quintus. Each hive city functioned as a self-contained industrial system. Due to the synchronicity in the orbit of Nostramo and Tenebor, the moon interposed between Nostramo and its dying sun, these cities experienced the equivalent of a Terran night even during the middle of a Nostraman summer.Its hive cities were warrens of stone and iron. Kilometre-tall smoke stacks pointed up at the perpetual night. Bridges of black metal criss-crossed the narrow ravines of alleys and streets. Manses, cathedrals and factories grew from the forest of slums, their faces and roofs crawling with gargoyles.Smog lay over everything like a cloak drawn around a dying man, turning what little light shone from windows or lamps into sickly haloes. Dust, smoke and the reek of toxic chemicals filled the air, and worked into the flesh of every man, woman and child, trimming away their years so that the best that life could offer was a slow decline in grinding servitude, never glimpsing the brightness of hope or the warmth of true happiness.The physiology and genomes of the people that lived within the Nostraman hive cities remained mostly identical to that of the baseline Humans from the Segmentum Solar, with the exception that none of the planet's people possessed irises; the visible part of their eyes consisted entirely of their pupils. The people of Nostramo were pale, and most were thin and gaunt, given by turns to distrust, dark humour and callousness. This acute form of albinism, though a recessive mutation among baseline Humans, had become common in the Nostraman populace.The vast majority of the planet's people lived in abject poverty as foundry labourers, whilst the rich grew in affluence, trampling down or simply killing outright any who dared oppose the status quo. Clinical depression and other mental illnesses were an inescapable way of life for most Nostramans, and overpopulation was prevented not by war, disease or legislation, but by the high suicide rate. Most of these unfortunate souls would die coughing up blood and black dust on a mouldering pallet, but death from lung blight, or having chemicals eat out their bones from the inside was not the worst end that could be found on Nostramo.The dark owned Nostramo, body and soul, and its existence was a horror to equal any xenos enslavement or nightmare of the Dark Age of Technology. If there ever had been true laws, they had vanished long ago, eaten by the greed of a few and the desperation of many. Murder was the currency of life, and strength came from violence.Every Human sin great and small had its home in Nostramo's endless night. It has been said by those Remembrancers who recorded its history after its reclamation by the Imperium that during this time weeping and pleading were the sounds carried eternally on the wind, and every Nostraman child grew to know that the only law was that of the knife, and the only right belonged to the strong to do with as they willed.Corrupt and murderous criminal gangs, whether or not they were named as such, ruled every part of Nostramo. From the heights of the nobility to the lowest alley, every inch of Nostramo was someone's domain, someone's territory or hunting ground. In the slum habitation stacks, the gangs ruled by raw fear, killing and torturing as they pleased, fighting wars with the feral packs of outcasts who were closer to animals than Humans. It was said that many of these gangs ate the dead, treating their territories as a predator might a hunting ground.In the mines and factories which still turned the planet's wheels of industry, the gangs went by names that echoes with a false authority: the Iron Overseers, the Hands of Coregado, the Sons of Toil. Slab muscled and furnace-scarred, they walked the streets clanking with weaponry and reeking of murder, enforcing order that was little more than a form of slavery. In the wealthier areas, the rakeheel sons and daughters of the corrupt Nostraman nobility gathered in packs, clad in costumes like strutting peacocks, as quick to kill with blade or gun as they were to cast an insult.No matter what their station, almost all the Nostraman gangs owed fealty to one of the numberless barons, counts and lords, who in turn served still more powerful men and women, many of whom styled themselves with courtly titles that echoes a long-forgotten nobility. Though wrapped in the trappings of birth, blood and feudal right, there was no true division between the rulers of Nostramo and its lower born criminal overlords; they were one and the same, cruel monarchs of kingdoms built on sin.