Ave Dominus Nox (Grimdark Fantasy WIP) (Patreon)

Hello!

Grimdark Fantasy month has started! And for the first character it's definitely a hybrid of the two. Prepare for a spooky summary! 👻

In the Primarch lineup, I like to think Konrad Curze wins the most interesting traitor award and I'll try to explain why.  This summary is going to be longer than my usual crazy rants but I do think there's quite a lot of interesting things to touch upon.  But if you're just looking for the Cliff's Notes, here's an abridged Sunny version.  Just pretend he's screaming at Erebus, Eidolon or some other asshole. 😄

First off, to use the proper scientific terminology, Konrad Curze is 'completely wacked out of his gourd'.  Curze is so crazy he once made a statue of Big E with human body parts just to scream at it for being a bad father.  He is so crazy, even Leman Russ is unsure if he could take him in a fight because his brother is so unpredictable.  Curze is by his own words 'The most cursed of them all' and his insanity is not even any of the Dark Gods want any part of.

So the 8th Legion Primarch has two very particular mental conditions.  The first is his very accurate but very uncontrollable gift of foresight.  Curze is constantly barraged with the visions of the hellish grimdark future the galaxy will become and it made him fatalistic to the point of believing he can't change anything in his life despite strong evidence to the contrary.

He also has a condition that I hesitate to call 'split personality disorder' because it's too simplistic but that's the closest I can think of.  Basically, there are two major sides to him.  His original 'Konrad Curze' persona, which was meant to be an impartial judge of people's actions and to deliver swift and appropriate justice for the crimes committed.  The other is his 'Night Haunter' persona, which reflected his more sadistic character traits and metted out torture just for the perverse pleasure of it.  And as time went on, the Night Haunter side of him gradually took full control until there was basically nothing left of the original noble Primarch.

To understand how Curze became this way, we have to go to the planet his birth pod crashed on, Nostramo.  You can think of it as Sin City but on a global scale.  Almost perpetually night because of a dying sun, the planet had long devolved into a lawless crime ridden hellhole.  It's only real value was the adamantium deposits within the planet's crusts. The vast majority of the planet's population lived in abject poverty, toiling in the mines while the rich grew in affluence, exploiting the already downtrodden workers. Crime ran mostly unchecked, clinical depression was inescapable for most because of the constant darkness, and overpopulation was kept in check more by suicide than by any other measure.  Seriously, this planet makes Gotham City look like Disneyland.

Kondrad Curze's birth pod crash lands straight through the planet's adamantium crusts and leaves a permanent structural weakness which becomes relevant in the future.  Stories describe him clawing out of the crater screaming and covered in lava as his pod crashed so deep into the planet's crust.  And from day one he was alone and uncared for, left to fend for himself in a living hell.  Yeah, Curze definitely started in the worst possible position of all the Primarchs, even worse than Angron.

The 8th Primarch learned the Nostraman language from observing people and their habits.  Most of the behavior he observed was horrible and Curze instinctively knew the most humans around him were rancid to the core and that this wasn't a normal society because crime wasn't being punished.  So after years of watching humanity commit atrocities against each other, Curze came to the conclusion that the only way people won't commit crimes is if they feared the punishment more.  So he decided he would be the source of that fear and went on a one man crusade to purge the entire world of crime.

And oh boy did he clean house.  Every criminal he could find was punished in the most brutal way.  Murder?  Curze would sentence them to horrendous prolonged torture like flaying then display their carcasses in public.  Theft?  Strangled by his own entrails and left to hang on a shop sign. Jaywalking?  Thrown into the food processor and fed to the dogs and street urchins.  You see, Curze didn't believe in degrees of punishment.  Every transgression, no matter how slight must be punished with equal severity in order to weed out the bad apples.

And perversely, his extreme methods actually worked.  People became so scared to commit crimes it actually went to zero.  Every night would be dead silent because no one even dared to speak for fear of a noise complaint.  Parents would scold their children not to misbehave because the Night Haunter would get them and flay them alive (which was totally true).  And after some terse words with the planet's nobility, Curze became the defacto ruler of Nostramo and claimed the Night Haunter title the populace gave him.  The ruler that would skin you for a cloak if you so much as threw a cigarette butt into the street.

When Big E showed up to take Curze into the Great Crusade, he was assaulted with one of his most violent visions yet.  He saw the horrible fate of his brothers, the nightmarish future and a whole bunch of stuff so nasty Curze tried to claw his own eyes out.  Big E had to reach out and calm him down.  Which led to this fateful exchange.

"Be at peace, Konrad Curze. I have arrived, and I intend to take you home."

"That is not my name, father. My people gave me a name, and I will bear it until my dying day. And I know full well what you intend for me."

And with that, Curze took command of the Night Lords and began to sow his particular brand of terror across the stars.

You might be surprised about this fact, but during the Great Crusade the Night Lords actually achieved compliance with the lowest collateral damage.  Meaning they got an enemy to surrender by killing the fewest number of people.  Even the Ultramarines and Salamanders probably killed hundreds of thousands per campaign to achieve compliance but the Night Lords only needed to kill a couple hundred or even single digits.  But the few they killed were mutilated so horrifically and their tortures broadcasted publicly that the entire populace would be scared into submission.  And if a planet rebelled, the Night Lords were sent back in to teach them a lesson that they would never forget.

And here's where we get into the real cracks with the Night Lords' methodology.  The Night Lords might be able to bring worlds into the Imperium with relatively little bloodshed but they would always be resentful and prone to rebellion.  In fact, the moment Konrad Curze left Nostramo, everyone immediately went back to their criminal ways.  And to make matters worse, Nostramo stopped sending quality recruits to the Night Lords, choosing to dump the worst dregs of society into their recruitment pools.  This is in stark contrast to the worlds the Ultramarines conquered.  All their worlds actually wanted to be part of the Imperium and in turn they would eagerly send their best and brightest to join the Ultramarines because they are seen as a prestigious Legion.  I can already hear the snickering but in universe at least, it's true.

To make things worse, Curze's visions started to come more frequently and with more violent seizures.  He was tortured by the knowledge that his brothers would bring a galactic apocalypse and the inevitable hellish fallout.  His sanity really started to fray and the Night Haunter side of his personality gradually become more dominant.  So Curze would go on...let's call them wild benders, like in the Hangover movies but with more sadistic torture and death.  His closest advisors needed to start doing damage control so the other Legions wouldn't sniff out their problems.

Things went completely off the rails when Curze got word Nostramo had killed off the planetary ruler he appointed and went back to their vile ways.  He immediately took his entire Legion back to Nostrama and pronounced Exterminatus on it, blasting the planet apart by concentrating fire on the structural weakness his birth pod had caused when it first crash landed.  And at that point, the Night Haunter persona pretty much took full control.

When the Horus Heresy broke out, Curze joined Horus less because he really believed in the cause but because of the resigned inevitability of it.  He knew that Horus would eventually get slain but went along with it anyways because the future is supposed to be immutable.  Also privately, Curze believed it absolved him of his own crimes because he lacked the agency to change fate, something he argued with Sanginius a lot over.

Aside from the Dropsite Massacre, Curze's and the Night Lords main contribution to the Heresy was to 1. Capture Vulkan and go full Night Haunter on him (this hilariously backfires after awhile).  2.  Hold up the Dark Angels and the Ultramarines.  To be honest, the Night Lords didn't do very well.  You see, terror tactics work great against squishy humans who are terrfied for their own lives.  But these tactics are completely useless against other Space Marines.  Y'know, the faction that literally has a rule on tabletop called 'And they shall know no fear'.  Plus Night Lords are a cowardly bunch and don't commit to battles unless they have overwhelming numbers and are also prone to infighting.

So the Dark Angels eventually crush them in a decisive battle and the Ultramarines repel them and the Legion fractures.  Curze does manage to cause a lot of havoc on Ultramar but after a prolonged game of cat and mouse against the Lion, the Night Haunter gets captured.  Long story short, he gets locked in stasis and only emerges after the Horus Heresy ends and everything he foresaw had come to pass.

Well, except one event.  Curze always knew he would die by the hands of an assassin, sent to end his reign of terror.  He thought it was Big E who sent the assassin but I think it was just the High Lords who was sick of dealing with him.  So with his characterstic fatalism, Curze engineers his own trip back to the Night Lord's base on Tsagualsa and waits for the assassin to come for him.  He explicitly orders the Night Lords not to interfere and before he dies, utters these final words:

"Your presence does not surprise me, Assassin. I have known of you ever since your craft entered the Eastern Fringes. Why did I not have you killed? Because your mission and the act you are about to commit proves the truth of all I have ever said or done. I merely punished those who had wronged, just as your False Emperor now seeks to punish me. Death is nothing compared to vindication."

Phew, that's some pretty heavy stuff.  But yeah, I do think he's a very interesting character and something the Horus Heresy writers did very well.  For reading material about Curze, I do recommend the short stories Savage Weapons and Prince of Crows.  Really good insight into the Night Lords and their Primarch.  I also recommend Curze's own Primarch book that bears his name.  Definitely one of the best in terms of character exploration.  But I will say it deals with a lot of mature topics so it's not for everyone.

I'll stick to his original design and give him different head options to reflect his conflicting personalities as well as those Edward Scissorhand claws.  Man, those claws are scary awesome! 👍

Career Highlights

• Curze is a very deadly adversary you don't want to underestimate.  He managed to get the jump on Rogal Dorn and the Lion in their first duel.  He might even have killed the Lion if Corswain didn't stab him in the back and ride him around like bucking bull for a bit.  Managed to trick Guillimann and the Lion into a trap which should have killed them if not for the almighty plot armour.
• He has a crown called the Corona Nox, fashioned from the adamantium of Nostramo.  When worn, the crown supposedly suppressed the visions that afflicted Curze and gave him a measure of calm.  Is supposted to be an artefact that marks Curze's heir, Zso Sahaal but was stolen by M'Shen the assassin.
• Konrad Curze admits to Sevatar that he hates what the Night Lords have become because they 'missed the point' of his methods.  He even kills some new recruits because they weren't sowing terror for any purprose other than their own enjoyment.  Ironically, Curze himself would devolve into pure sadism just for the sake of it.
• The Night Lords have a whole gallery of really cool characters but they also have some pretty hilariously bad ones.  Gendor Skraivok is a classic example of a Chaos Space Marine failing upwards.  A mediocre warrior propped up by a Chaos sword, his greatest contribution to the Siege of Terra was falling off a wall.  Curze specifically cites him as being an example of how terrible the quality of Night Lords has become.  Inexplicably gets promoted to Daemon Prince in modern 40K.  Look, I know the Dark Gods are fickle with their gifts but I'd like to think they have some standards.  Are you sure, the paperwork wasn't lost and he should have been changed into one of these?
• But on the completely opposite end of the spectrum the Night Lords have Sevatar, one of the most badass traitor Marines.  Sure, he runs his mouth and fights dirty like every Night Lord but the First Captain actually has the skill to back up all his trash talk.  The only thing sharper than Sevatar's chainglaive is his tongue.  Sevatar is the first traitor to utter the iconic line "Death to the false Emperor!" and is one of the few Space Marines that is within spitting distance of Sigismund in terms of martial skill.  Really cool character, I'd actually be a little worried if he was leading the Black Crusades.  Instead we got...this and and an endless litany of armless memes.  I wonder why nobody takes the Black Crusades seriously. 😄

In other news, I have been working on the Sylvaneth Treelords as well.  Okay, I'm not going to pretend I know anything about Age of Sigmar but from what I can tell, it's their version of Ents (i.e. Treebeard).  They also look a bit like Groot which isn't a bad thing.  Groot's awesome! 👍 Jokes aside, the not-Fangorn do look pretty cool.  I'll try to give them different poses and weapon options.

Next up is Avacyn and a dwarf so badass the Angry Company was too scared to retcon him like everything else.  Stay tuned!