#[corrupted starcharts]

[blackcr0wkingart]

there is not a chance i am not officially a ghost, invisible and slamming all the doors, a paranormal scrambling of phones, look--

colored that doodle of human!Raskol from the other day

i'm... attached.

[corrupted-starcharts]

-{{ I can't remember if I've posted or talked about these before, but I've got a couple NMS playlists I figured maybe some folks would dig??

Fell Into A Black Hole but It's Fine is all lo-fi stuff, beats to relax and explore the galaxy to if you will.

Corrupted Starcharts (ayyy!) is... kinda on a whole different spot of the NMS vibes spectrum from its elder sibling, lmao. It's a mix of stuff from the soundtrack (as well as some other songs from 65daysofstatic), stuff from other game soundtracks such as FFX, Death Stranding, and Chrono Cross, as well as various songs that remind me of either the game's story or my Travellers' stories, and range from kinda dark to a little silly; examples include I Know the End by Phoebe Bridgers and Ruler of Everything by Tally Hall. For best/most fun results, shuffle, lmao. }}-

[iteration-anomaly]

SIGN IN: TECHNICIAN-ENTITY OMN

Omn turns around upon hearing the approaching exocraft, giving a quick wave to the travellers that step out.

-{{ Hello! It is pleasant to meet you in-person at last. Tulosnodons appears to be struggling to process the loss of our starships currently, you'll have to excuse them. }}-

They gesture towards the other korvax accompanying them. Tulosnodons is still knelt at an empty landing pad.

-{{ I do not know how to explain the strange rocks, plants and all the slime that has appeared. It is almost as if the moon is trying to claim the camp... Which has convinced me not to take samples despite my curiosity. }}-

Turning back to face Raskol and Onfim, Omn nods in appreciation.

-{{ I would, once more, like to thank you for your help. This will make things much easier. }}-

SIGN IN: PRIEST-ENTITY TULOSNODONS

-{{ Omn and I are now approaching the camp. We must work quickly so that we— }}-

Following a gasp, there is a prolonged pause.

-{{ Those rocks were not not there before... Or those plants. }}-

[hazele-omega]

@corrupted-starcharts THEM!!! RASKOL!!!

Their design is so awesome I love it

I did take a little bit of creative liberty in guessing what their front looks like (I took inspiration from the old ref)

[cephalonserotonin]

Devstream 171 Notes

These are somewhat scrappy as I had a work meeting so I had to watch the stream late, apologies!

Pablo appears to be wearing a Leon Kennedy (from Resident Evil I think?) shirt under duress... Pablo if you need help blink plz Next update is sort of an Echoes update for duviri but because it's a lot more than just quality of life, it won't be called Echoes. Considering the Echoes title schema is relatively new I'm kind of bemused that it's already being disregarded Rebb needs sleep! The next update: The 7 Crimes of Kullervo

major follow up to Duviri Coming in June New Warframe Kullervo! Kullervo associated with Duviri Themes of betrayal, sacrifice his daggers shoot out of his body and it looks fucking cool... and like Dio tbh Melee frame, lots of mobility Heavy blade signature weapon skin Earn him in Duviri at a lost "dungeon" island available in 3 of the islands On launch, there will be a two-week event miniquest called Kullervo's Hold that takes you right to his encounter irrespective of the current mood spiral Kullervo's prison island has lots of secrets to discover... to me it looks a lot like the Chateau d’If (the actual fortress off the coast by Marseilles, France where the prison part of the count of monte cristo was set). New character who is the prison warden; gives you the assignment to fight Kullervo as a mini-boss Some of Kullervo's boss moves are unique to the encounter; some are his actual Warframe abilities Origami-themed orizu drifter set (of course it's a Liger concept) 5 corrupted decrees, and another 10 for a total of 15 new decrees Duviri somachord fragments! and other secrets added elsewhere! 🎉 ...and a lore quiz! More like an easter egg, per Pablo Plants! which I forgot about somehow? They grow in the duviri cave, and can be harvested once a day Static undercroft portals with guaranteed arcane rewards (same ones as the circuit) Undercroft/Circuit Exterminate has a new visitor whose identity is being unspoiled. she said something about monologues so I am guessing Vor 🙊 Gauss deluxe ("tech hermes") The accompanying acceltra deluxe is so very dakka! that the screen shakes and the team is distracted QOL incoming in update 33.5: Intrinsic to preview duviri random options on starchart Full customizable key bindings for the drifter (thank FUCK) Buff to mawfishing. Interestingly Pablo tested it previously by playing one-handed (petting his cat with the other!), so he was surprised it was still too hard. we all knew Pablo is God Tier though so I'm not that surprised Wisp prime coming later in the summer Prime motes are super cute:

Fulmin prime, gunsen prime, syandana Also comes with a very sorcerery drifter suit

Warframe 10-year anniversary concept art book planned for tennocon 👀

[space-ninja-fashion-show]

Ya boy is officially handling steal path (what the Fuck)

Not well of course, but i did not, in fact, get deleted, and that is an achievement

Cedo and lavos both handle things miles better than I expected (not doubting their potential but my abilities here) and heavy attack vericres was a godsend against the acolyte. It was a rush and I'm certainly not making a habit out of it, but holy shit, first node of steel path down

And then I looked at incursions bc i wanted to see if i can do them without having the planet unlocked, and turns out the answer is Yes and they even clear the node they're on, so watch me chip away at SP starchart via incursions. One was an infested defense which was a breeze (ignore the melee kill count, i was using abilities but also the other person was a mesa, so, y'know) and then another a corrupted mobile defense. Good times!

I guess I need to make a habit of checking on incursions every day I play now

Next up: bringing along different frames and guns to see how I handle with those

[iteration-anomaly]

-{{ I will also kiss korvax, especially a certain one I know. At this point it's like a hobby, hah. }}-

I have kissed all the Korvax

If you're a Korvax guess what. Mwah

[universallytreepeace]

Faction Dmg Types

Eve Pirate Faction Damage Types

Eve Online Pirate Faction Damage Types

There are several types of Torpedoes, which may vary in damage potential, flight speed, launch time, applicable modifiers and additional effects over the base Kinetic Damage, but regardless of type, all of them deal Kinetic Damage. Torpedo types by faction & recommendations edit edit source.

Faction modifiers, body part modifiers, critical hit and stealth modifiers as well as Warframe debuffs are disregarded for now, since all of these are independent of damage types. Dealing damage is quantized. Dec 17, 2015  The purpose of this guide is to give a simple straight forward cheat sheet for the “Best” damage combinations in Warframe given your group and the faction you’re hunting. Information in this guide was formed by a consensus of various Warframe forum posts and damage combo theory crafting discussions on Reddit. These tend to be the same as the NPC damage types of that race's primary opposing faction (e.g. Caldari racial damage types are the same as the Gurista damage types), and the general principle is that these will be the main damage types which that race will put out.

There are four different damage types in EVE: Electromagnetic (EM) Kinetic Thermal Explosive All weapons in EVE do at least one (often two) of these damage types, and every ship has different resistances against each. Understanding damage types helps you to survive longer and deal more damage to enemy ships. There are eight primary types of hybrid ammunition: Antimatter charges. Plutonium charges. Uranium charges. Thorium charges. Lead charges. Iridium charges. Tungsten charges.

Triglavian Collective faction logo.

The Triglavian Collective are a new faction introduced in the “Into the Abyss” expansion (May 2018), they can be found in a new type of space providing a unique solo PVE timed encounters in a special area of space and exotic new technologies, including their very own ships and new weapon system.

1Triglavian Collective

Triglavian Collective

Eve Pirate Faction Damage Types

Full Introduction

While the 'Into the Abyss' expansion adds a number of other changes, this new Triglavian faction is the primary focus of this page, with the related Abyssal Deadspace complexes on top.

The core source of most of the Triglavian content is the Abyssal Deadspace complexes, which are unique complexes in a separate and isolated area of space for which only one person can participate in at a time. These sites are the source for the BPCs used to build Triglavian ships, also called Precursor vessels; these sites also provide 'keys' to access other complexes, blueprints for Entropic Disintegrator modules, Abyssal Deadspace modifier items and some apparel items.

Precursor vessels are the only ships that can use the Entropic Disintegrator modules which have a different setup than the conventional weapon systems most EVE players are familiar with. They focus on an armor tank with emphasis on utility; much like the Society of Conscious Thought vessels, these hulls tend to be somewhat mediocre but can excel in very specific situations. They are specifically equipped to use the Entropic Disintegrator weapon system: all of the hulls have only one turret slot yet have two or more utility high slots, possibly to synergize with the remote armor repair bonuses on each hull. Entropic Disintegrators are a curious weapon system which has some parallels to laser systems, with an interesting but rather specific attribute whereby the damage modifier of the weapon system increases with each shot fired.

Abyssal Mutaplasmids are special modifier elements which are designed to modify certain attributes of select modules. An example would be a Microwarpdrive: the mutaplasmid can boost or decrease the velocity bonus, the powergrid requirement, the signature radius modifier or the activation cost. This allows for interesting concepts in ship choices but also threatens the stability of the module metagame.

Further details on each of these concepts will be explored below.

Eve Online Pirate Faction Damage Types

Lore

The Triglavian Collective is a new faction that appeared in New Eden in early YC120. Fleets were following heavily damaged and incapacitated Drifter Fleets appeared around several locations around New Eden it was discovered that those fleets were engaged by a faction that was not known before. Data vaults salvaged from those damaged drifter fleets and Arataka Research Consortium managed to salvage data from those corrupted trinary data vaults that have video footage that shows that unknown faction, named as 'Triglavian Collective' engaging Drifter Fleet with an exotic weapon system. One of their Battleship class hulls was also captured by CONCORD and further research was conducted to reveal more about those new faction. It was suggested that the Triglavian Collective is a formation of three entities. Those entities are Peruna Clade [CLPER], Svarov Clade [CLSVA] and Velesian Clade [CLVEL].

The Scope Video : The Scope - The Triglavian Collective Revealed

Abyssal Deadspace

Main article: Abyssal Deadspace

Abyssal Deadspace is a special area of space disconnected from conventional Known Space (K-space) and wormhole space (W-space). Players use special Filaments which are like 'keys' to access such areas of space, and have a limited amount of time and face special challenges to complete these sectors of space and survive.

Ships

The Expansion introduces a new ship skill called “Precursor” that leaves room for future races to fall under. What is known so far about the ships and is subject to change. Triglavian ships have medium speed and a focus on armor tanking, as well as several utility role bonuses toward remote armor repairers, energy neutralizers, and smartbombs.

Interestingly enough, the T1 hulls were the only ones to originate from the Triglavian Collective, while the others were designed by one of the factions in known space. Each T2 hull was created by one of the four empires integrating their own technology with Triglavian designs; the Nergal was made by the Gallente, the Draugur by the Minmatar, the Ikitursa by the Caldari, and the Zarmazd by the Amarr. The special-edition Hydra and Tiamat were both designed by the Society of Conscious Thought.

Frigate: Damavik

Assault Frigate: Nergal

Covert Ops: Hydra (Limited)

Destroyers: Kikimora

Command Destroyer: Draugur

Cruisers: Vedmak, Rodiva

Heavy Assault Cruisers: Ikitursa

Logistics Cruisers: Zarmazd

Recon Ships: Tiamat (Limited)

Battlecruiser: Drekavac

Battleship: Leshak

Entropic Disintegrators

See also: Entropic Disintegrators

A new weapon skill and specialization will allow the use of Entropic Disintegrators coming in T1 (Meta 0, Compact, Scoped and Faction) and T2 variants, and in three sizes. The new weapon system will occupy a single turret slot and only one can be fitted, limited to Triglavian ships. This opens many possibilities as a large number of utility highs remain free.

The Entropic Disintegrator has unique characteristics such as increasing damage per cycle and no falloff. When a target is out of range of the weapon, or if any event causes the weapon to deactivate, the damage ramp-up is reset. The weapon system uses tracking mechanics and is impacted by tracking modules, using Entropic Radiation Sink modules as damage modules. The damage type is restricted to explosive and thermal. Ammunition is loaded into the Disintegrator like conventional weapon systems, has no reload time, holds large amounds of ammunition which also takes up large amounts of space in cargo (subject to change).

The base optimal ranges are 6500/15500/28000 m for small/medium/large variants. The rate of fire is 4s/6s/8s. The damage charge-up is 5% per cycle up to 150% maximum damage. Ammo will have up to 80% extra range or down to as low as negative 50% for higher damage. Base turret damage 3/4/6 turrets equivalent.

For ammunition, Tetryon provides the highest base damage and closest optimal range, Baryon for mid-range, and Meson for lower base damage with farther optimal range. Occult and Mystic are Tech II ammunition, with Occult being close-range high damage lower tracking ammunition (similar to Void or Conflagration for blasters or pulse lasers, respectively) with Mystic being a lower damage lower tracking longer range ammunition (similar to Null or Scorch).

Skills

A New set of skills were introduced in order to use the new precursor ship hulls and weapons.

Precursor Frigate (Requires Spaceship Command I)

Precursor Destroyer (Requires Spaceship Command I, Precursor Frigate III)

Precursor Cruiser (Requires Spaceship Command IV, Precursor Destroyer III)

Precursor Battlecruiser (Requires Spaceship Command IV, Precursor Cruiser III)

Precursor Battleship (Requires Spaceship Command V, Precursor Battlecruiser III)

Small Precursor Weapon (Requires Gunnery I)

Medium Precursor Weapon (Requires Small Precursor Weapon III)

Large Precursor Weapon (Requires Medium Precursor Weapon III)

Tech II Disintegrators require similar skill requirements as conventional weapon systems such as pulse lasers: for instance, to use a Small Entropic Disintegrator II, the player must first train Small Precursor Weapon to V and then train Small Disintegrator Specialization to at least level I.

Retrieved from 'https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/index.php?title=Triglavian_Collective&oldid=146922'

This is an elemental damage and physical damage weakness overview for Warframe (updated 08/2019). This overview is a starting point for new players that want to progress through the starchart. This overview does not consider finisher damage, status procs and crit multiplier that are needed for high level (sortie or endless) content. – Explanation video below

Physical Damage types and fraction weakness

Physical damage is the base damage for most weapons you encounter in Warframe. Very rarely will you find a weapon with a physical damage. Early game weapons will always have a combination of all 3 physical damage types.

Going against Infested you should prefer Slash heavy weapons. Against GrineerPuncture damage is preferred and against CorpusImpact damage is the damage type of choice.

Slash damage is good against Infested & effective against flesh

Puncture damage is good against Grineer & effective against armor

Impact damage is good against Corpus & effective against shield

But these 3 physcial damage types are only your starting point because elemental damage combinations are way more effective against each faction.

In Warframe you have 4 base elemental damage types: Heat, Cold, Toxin and Electricity. They are even more powerful when they are combined. I have listed the most effective combinations against each faction for you.

Grineer elemental weakness and best setup

Basic Grineer grunts are weak against Heat damage. But heavier units wear armor and Corrosive damage is your best choice against them.

Corrosive (Toxin + Electricity) against heavy Grineer

Heat against light Grineer

Infested weakness and best setup

Similar to Grineer grunts are light Infested units. They are also weak against Heat damage. Heavy Infested units possess armor that can is weak against Corrosive damage.

Corrosive (Toxin + Electricity) against heavy Infested

Heat against light Infested

Corpus elemental weakness

Corpus units posses shields that have a weakness against Magnetic damage. Additionally Toxin has the ability to do damage under Corpus shield against Corpus flesh.

Magnetic (Cold + Electricity) against heavy Corpus

Toxin against light Corpus

Void elemental weakness

Void enemies on the start chart have similar weaknesses like Grineer. That means that Corrosive damage is useful against heavier units. Heat damage as well as Cold damage are useful against grunt enemy types.

Corrosive (Toxin + Electricity) against heavy Void units

Cold against light Void units or Heat against light Void units

Additional damage types and weakness

The Index – damage types Eidolon hunt – damage types Rathuum Arena (Nakki, Yam, Vodyanoi) – damage types

Elemental damage will always be applied to the target. It has nothing to do with status chance. Status chance is the chance of triggering the elemental status effect; also known as proc. The higher the status chance the higher the chance a damage type (physical or elemental) will proc.

Video guide to Warframe faction weakness

[orokinarchives]

Operation: Sling-Stone

(Operation Sling-Stone event splash)

26 July 2013 – 29 July 2013

Intel videos

On 24 July 2013, a video titled Interception was released with the description "Intercepted transmission: Tenno take notice". The video was scrolling text in Corpus with no sound. As the video continues, a shadow gradually falls over the planet in the background.

Transmit

Honourable Board,

The dogs are barking again. They somehow figured out we have been stockpiling. This upsets them given how we have been tightening the leash on their contracts. The Sisters are demanding we lower our material prices or suffer retribution by some new supership they have. Obviously they do not teach economics at obedience training.

My recommendation: raise the prices, call the dogs' bluff, and laugh when the imaginary Fomorian ships do not show up and do not disrupt our stockpiles.

Alad V Grineer Relations

On 25 July 2013, a video titled Lotus Intel: Sling-Stone was released with the description "Prepare, Tenno; this won't be easy". The video showed the new Grineer Fomorian-class ships, with a Galleon for scale, with voiceover from the Lotus.

Lotus: "We have just learned that the Grineer Empire is preparing a major offensive against the Corpus. The Grineer are deploying new Fomorian-class ships, poised to strike the Corpus within days. As much as we'd like to see the Corpus suffer, we cannot allow such growth in Grineer influence to go unchecked. We must work together to destroy the Fomorian ships as they appear, or we will suffer resource shortages that will curtail our war effort."

Operation

On Friday (26 July 2013), the event began with the release of Hotfix 9.3 and was set to run through the weekend. Upon logging in and selecting the event, a diorama was shown, depicting Captain Vor and a masked Corpus crewman facing off, backed by Grineer lancers and Corpus crewmen, with a Fomorian ship in the background. A box of text gives more detail about the event:

We have just learned that the Grineer Empire is preparing a major offensive against the Corpus. The Sisters have grown impatient with the Corpus monopoly on manufacturing supplies. Their aim is to destroy resource stockpiles throughout Corpus space in order to force the arrogant Corpus back to the bargaining table. The Grineer are deploying new Fomorian-class ships, poised to strike the Corpus within days.

As much as we'd like to see the Corpus suffer, we cannot allow such a growth in Grineer influence to go unchecked. We must work together to destroy the Fomorian ships as they appear, or we will suffer resource shortages that will curtail our war effort. We must uphold the balance of this conflict.

Tenno, you must coordinate your attacks – their engineers will be repairing these ships throughout our assault. This is not a standard sabotage mission. You will need to inject a chemical agent harvested from the Infestation to destabilise the Fomorian reactors. With enough corruption, the Fomorian reactors will implode and take the monstrous ship with it.

Mechanics and Missions

Tenno had to obtain corruptors from Infested missions. Corruptors dropped from Infested enemies during the course of the event and came in three versions: stable, alpha, and beta. After obtaining corruptors, Tenno equipped them as a gear item. Only one corruptor could be equipped at a time. The Fomorian sabotage missions appeared as new nodes on the existing planets of the Solar System, and used the Grineer Galleon tileset, albeit with a new fly-in cinematic that showed the sheer size of the Fomorian ship. Each planet had a Fomorian attack it over the course of the event, with the first Fomorian, Balor, appearing near Mercury. Attempting to play the Fomorian sabotage mission without a corruptor equipped resulted in the message "You need to equip a Corruptor in your gear for this mission. Harvest these from Infestation enemies and equip them from the Arsenal."

During the Fomorian sabotage mission, the Lotus would give instructions on how to sabotage the Fomorian reactors.

Lotus: "Destroying a single reactor will not be enough to take down a Fomorian. We will need to poison the well… coordinated teams will corrupt its fuel supply. This will require gear harvested from Infestation tissues. I will route you to an injector point…."

Lotus: "These Fomorians are massive; keep searching. You will need to locate a fuel cell and inject the corrupting agent. I hope you have a corruptor with you."

Lotus: "Remember: you are coordinating with other Tenno. The alpha-beta mixtures are more potent, but a single Tenno cannot equip them at once."

(upon arriving at the injector) Lotus: "There it is! You should be able to inject the corruptor you brought using the attached console."

The Fomorian injector (with the description "Used to refuel Fomorian reactor cores") had three slots, one for an alpha corruptor, one for a beta corruptor, and one for a stable corruptor in between them. Any combination of the corruptors could be installed on the console, including all three. Once the corruptors were installed, a timed defence mission would begin, and the Tenno would have to defend the console for 1-3 minutes (with more corruptors installed decreasing the defence time).

(upon installing the corruptors) Lotus: "Excellent, the corruption process has begun. You must defend this position to ensure the Grineer do not destroy this fuel cell before it spreads throughout the ship."

(upon completing the defence) Lotus: "Corruption process is complete. Good work, Tenno. Get to extraction where I will record your contribution to the operation."

Each mission awarded between 2 and 10 points for each participating Tenno, depending on how many corruptors were used and which kinds. Any corruptors used in a mission were consumed, and needed to be farmed again from Infested enemies.

Global health bars for each current Fomorian, representing its health, were displayed on the Starchart and went down from 100% to 0% as the Warframe playerbase sabotaged the Fomorians repeatedly over the weekend.

The named Fomorian ships that attacked were:

Mercury: Balor Mars: Elatha Europa: Neit Uranus: Ethniu Jupiter: Bres Ceres: Conand Venus: Tethra Pluto: Corb Earth: Chichol Saturn: Birog Eris: Buarainech Sedna: Nemed Neptune: Lugh

There were 13 ships, one for each of the planets (Phobos had not yet been added to the game). All were successfully destroyed by the community.

Each time a Fomorian ship was destroyed, the Lotus would tell the player:

Lotus: "Our coordinated attacks have worked… this time. There may be other Fomorians coming. We need to destroy them or suffer resource shortages in the future."

Rewards

Each player who participated received a Sling-Stone emblem (the first time a holographic emblem was ever released) and 2 of the new ammo mutation mods. Players with at least 100 points received 3 ammo mutation mods, players with at least 150 points received 4 ammo mutation mods, and players with at least 250 points received all 5 ammo mutation mods. The top clan in each bracket received a Fomorian statue for the Dojo. The ammo mutation mods were stated in the original forum post to be grudgingly given to the Tenno by the Corpus as thanks.

Aftermath

After the event, a lore entry was added to the player profile (later moved to the Codex) in Hotfix 9.3.3, with the following text:

Honourable Board,

I'm proud to report that Sling-Stone was a success! The Fomorian ships have been reduced to radioactive scraps drifting through the system….

The Betrayers did our work for us. Billions saved in potential damages. I just dangled some Mod technology in front of their noses and let their homicidal nature do the rest. Too easy!

The Grineer have returned to the bargaining table, but something in their tone irks me. I've dispatched scouts to Pluto – I suspect the Grineer may have held a few Fomorians in reserve.

—Alad V

[Navigation: Hub → Events → Operation: Sling-Stone]

[asktheadeptus]

Konrad Curze - Night Haunter

"Look out at my father’s Imperium. Do not unroll a parchment map or analyse a hololithic starchart. Merely raise your head to the night sky and open your eyes. Stare into the blackness between worlds – that dark ocean, the silent sea. Stare into the million eyes of firelight – each a sun to be subjugated in the Emperor’s grip. The age of the alien, the era of the inhuman, is over. Mankind is in its ascendancy, and with ten thousand claws we will lay claim to the stars themselves.‘"— Primarch Konrad Curze Addressing the VIII Legion during the Great Crusade

Konrad Curze, better known as Night Haunter, the name he preferred, was one of the 20 superhuman Primarchs created by the Emperor of Mankind in the late 30th Millennium and was the commander of the Traitor Legion of Chaos Space Marines known as the Night Lords. Night Haunter was tortured all his life by terrible, dark visions of the future, and this generated a level of psychic anguish and despair that set him apart from his fellow Primarchs. His psyche damaged by the difficulties of his early life, Curze never recovered his psychic balance and sought only oblivion from the pain of his reality. He was a brutal warrior who believed in the use of fear as the most potent weapon against one's foes, and he taught his Astartes to be as brutal and savage as necessary to put down the enemy. Night Haunter did not enjoy his role as an Imperial war leader and was the only one of the Primarchs who showed little affection for his "sons," the Space Marines of the VIIIth Legion that had been created from his genetic template. He was slain, some believe willingly, by the Callidus Assassin M'Shen on the world of Tsagualsa in the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy immediately following the end of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium. His VIIIthLegion, without his leadership, then broke up into competing warbands and fled into the Eye of Terror with the rest of the Traitor Legions.

History

A dark and haunted figure, obsessed by death and judgement, and unshakable in his belief in the fundamental fallibility of man and the agency of fear as the only true means of controlling humanity's failings, Konrad Curze and his Night Lords Legion were shaped by the terror of darkness of Nostramo, just as much as they were by the gene-craft of the Emperor.

Youth

According to the heretical handwritten chronicle of his life, entitled simply The Dark, the Primarch Konrad Curze's earliest memory was of descending from the heavens in a crackling ball of light to the night-shrouded planet of Nostramo. His embryonic form's gestation capsule, cruelly ripped through the Warp from distant Terra by the machinations of the Chaos Gods, impacted on the dense city scape of the planet's largest hive city of Nostramo Quintus, smashing through countless levels of urban debris and mouldering architecture, through the planet's crust and into its geosphere before finally coming to a halt near the highly unstable liquid core of the planet. His descent left a scar in the virtually inviolable adamantium strata of Nostramo, the result of the supernaturally resilient Primarch's violent birth into a world that knew no light. The cratered pit his descent had carved into the planet was closed over and later regarded with fear and suspicion. Theoretically, the only way the Primarch could have reached the surface was to have swum through molten metal or had his gestation capsule borne upwards through volcanic vents to the surface.

Nostramo was a human-settled world that circled a dying sun whose light now only barely reached the world, leaving it trapped in perpetual darkness. The crust of Nostramo bore high quantities of the strategic mineral adamantium, which provided the basis of the planet's immense mining and refining industries and supported the economies of its large hive cities. 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. Unlike many of the other Primarchs, Konrad Curze was not taken in by any family and was left to raise himself in the vast underhive of the largest hive city on the planet, Nostramo Quintus. He spent his early life surviving off his wits and determination, feeding himself by hunting the feral animals that roamed through the vast hive city. He was continually plagued by visions of the darkest possible future, horrifyingly potent waking dreams that would curse him throughout his life. Uniquely among all the Primarchs, Curze grew up completely alone, surviving only thanks to his wits, ruthlessness, and courage as a feral child in the underhives of Nostramo Quintus.

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 collectives 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 rumors 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. He 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.

The Dark King

Night Haunter became the first monarch of Nostramo Quintus, absorbing accumulated knowledge with a diligence almost akin to greed. He ruled with temperance and reason unheard of until word came to him that some injustice had been done, whereupon he alone would hunt the offender through the hive cities' empty streets until exhaustion forced his quarry to collapse. He would then proceed to mutilate his prey, although not beyond recognition. This unpredictable pattern of benevolent wisdom and hideous vengeance ushered the shocked Nostraman populace into new realms of efficiency and honesty. Exports of adamantium to their neighboring worlds soon tripled. Nostraman society came to exist in a terrible balance maintained by shared wealth and shared fear. None dared to have more than his neighbor and under the shadow of Night Haunter's rule, the city grew well-lit and prosperous. And as Nostramo Quintus led the way, the rest of the planet's population followed, anxious to keep the Night Haunter from their own doors.

After a few decades he no longer had to hunt, as the passing years had stolen the need. Curze's city had become a silent hive, illuminated by the light of progress. No crime, no sin, had been committed in decades. The last vestiges of anarchy and resistance had died out soon after he began to broadcast his mutilations across the city via the picture interfaces available in every home, transmitting his victims' screaming over the planetary communications network. Those executions, recorded in his throne room, ended what little crime remained. His people knew their superhuman ruler would take to the streets in vengeance at the slightest provocation. In their fear, the last souls holding out finally accepted the salvation he offered them. Nostramo continued to trade its abundance of adamantium with the worlds in neighboring star systems, which they had done for generations, though under the Night Haunter's kingship, planetary exports rose to unparalleled levels, as did the profits of such endeavor. The city's foundries and forge fires burned hotter, the refineries and processing plants spread across the urban sprawl, and the mines clawed ever deeper into Nostramo's priceless crust.

Coming of the Emperor

Curze foresaw the coming of his father, the Emperor of Mankind, for he knew all things. The answers came to him as they always did: in his dreams. Now master of his world, he found his transhuman senses sharpening beyond anything he had ever imagined possible. He knew, on some voiceless level, he was becoming something, ripening, maturing into whatever he was born to be. The Emperor had watched the way that Nostramo worked from His divine auguries. The citizens were clean and efficient, working towards a common good with determination and silence. The night-shrouded streets were completely empty as the entire planet slept. Though they lived in ignorance of the glory of the Imperium of Man, the Dark King undoubtedly possessed great authority and was able to command unquestioning respect. He had molded his society into a model of productivity -- matchless productivity, natural conformity and total obedience.

A short time into the reign of the Night Haunter as Nostramo's "benevolent" dictator, the Emperor's Great Crusade finally reached the outskirts of the Nostraman star system. The coming of the Emperor of Mankind was an event that had been prophesied in Nostramo's history; an event that would lead to the planet's downfall. The Emperor landed on Nostramo, and led an Imperial delegation to the center of Nostramo Quintus on foot. The citizens of Nostramo, adapted to the near-constant darkness, could not bear to look upon the sheer radiance of the Emperor. The city wept at the Delegation of Light, weeping collectively, every man, woman and child gathered in the streets, their pale faces staring at the strangers in their midst, as the sky was brightened by the false stars of voidship engines.

Most wept as the healing light the Emperor projected reflected off the rain-slicked streets into their faces. The strangers walked in a slow, regal parade. The ground trembled, quite literally, with their rhythmic tread. They walked in great, grinding phalanxes, different formations wearing armour of black, of gold, of royal purple or earthen grey. Giants led them. Giants towering above their warriors, just as their warriors towered above mortal men. Leading the giants was a sun incarnated in human skin; a god in a man's flesh; his soul-fire uncontainable in a sheath of flesh and bone. Those brave enough to look upon Him directly were blinded for daring to gaze at His radiant countenance. Those afflicted spent the rest of their lives sightless but for the image of the living god flash-flamed into their dead retinas. At the end of the broad road leading to Night Haunter's palace at the city's heart, the Primarch stood, waiting for the delegation to approach.

The army of strangers ceased as one, every single one of the quarter-million soldiers standing motionless in the same moment. The four giants stepped forwards. The blazing god led them. The first demigod, clad in wrought gold, inclined his white-haired head in majestic acknowledgement -- a king greeting an equal. He introduced himself as Rogal Dorn. The Night Haunter said nothing, but in his mind's eye, he saw the giant die, dragged down by a hundred murderers in a dark tunnel, their knives and swords wet with the warrior's blood. The second giant wore armour of patterned grey, etched with ten thousand words, as if a scholar had taken a quill to a stone. He nodded his shaven, tattooed head, likewise inked with scripture -- the lettering gold upon the tanned skin. He introduced himself as Lorgar Aurelian, his voice a hymn where Dorn's had been a measured, stately demand. There was sorrow in his otherwise kind eyes -- sorrow at the dark city, its unhealthy people, the obviousness of their colorless, exhausting lives. Again, the Night Haunter said nothing. He saw this warrior crowned in psychic fire, screaming up at a burning sky.

The third giant wore armour of riveted, dense black. His arms were solid silver, yet contoured and moving as living limbs. His voice was the steely grind of a foundry's bowels. He introduced himself as Ferrus Manus. His eyes were dark, but not cold. The Night Haunter remained silent, seeing within his mind an image of the future in which this warrior's head was clutched by its empty eye sockets in another man's armoured fingers. The last giant wore armour painted the violet of an alien sunset. His hair was silvery, long and elegant. He alone smiled, and he alone met the Night Haunter's eyes with warmth in his own. He introduced himself as Fulgrim. The Night Haunter still said nothing. In the future that played out over and over, he saw this final giant in only the faintest of images; always slithering and laughing, never entirely visible.

At last, the golden god Himself stepped forwards, His arms wide open. He drew to speak, but as He did, Curze succumbed to a vision so potent and horrifying that he went to his knees and tried to claw his own eyes out, but was stopped by the Emperor. He felt a hand upon his head, the excruciating pain died in a pulse, restoring his sanity in a moment of mercy. The Night Haunter then looked up to see the golden god, faceless and ageless, resolve into the image of a man. The following words were recorded for posterity by those who witnessed this fateful meeting and still echo with terrible import across the gulf of time:

"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."

Curze submitted to the Emperor's will as if he had already seen it, as if he was playing out a part he had long feared would fall to him. From that moment on, the fate of the VIIIth Legion was set on a path of oblivion.

The Great Crusade

Night Haunter quickly adapted to the teachings of the Imperium, studying the complex doctrines of the Legiones Astartes under the Primarch Fulgrim's tutelage. Night Haunter was soon accepted as the leader of the VIIIth Space Marine Legion that had been created from his genome, which he named the Night Lords. Although he and his Legion excelled in many theaters of war, a tendency soon became apparent. It never occurred to the Night Lords to use anything other than total, brutal and decisive force to achieve their goals. Over the first few years, the Night Lords were molded by their Primarch into an efficient, humorless force, possessing the fanatical thoroughness of Witch Hunters. Night Haunter encouraged his Legion to decorate their Power Armour with images designed to inspire fear in the enemy, a tactic that proved incredibly effective. Soon, rumors of the impending presence of the Night Lords would cause a rebel star system to pay all outstanding Imperial tithes, cease all illegal activities and put to death any mutants and suspected Traitors.

The reuniting of Primarch and Legion was the beginning of a spiral that would see the Night Lords descend further into horror and nihilism. After Curze's departure, Nostramo shook off his enforced peace, returning to lawlessness. From this point Nostramo fed the VIIIth Legion not with the finest of its youth, but with gutter scum soaked in blood and cruelty. Some claim that this began to poison the Legion, twisting its purpose and making many Night Lords simple murderers gifted with the strength of demi-gods. This thesis, though, willfully ignores a number of factors, no least of which was Curze's leadership of his Legion. That he came to despise his own sons is likely, but he was still their lord. Far from restraining the VIIIthLegion he drove it on, bringing peace through atrocity to planet after planet. Sometimes there seems to have been cause for such methods, but often the only explanations for the decimation of populations, for the skinning pits and crucified cities, seems to be that the Night Lords enjoyed it. They had become not necessary monsters, but simply monsters. Curze quickly began to lose some of the control he held over his Legion's innate savagery, and the visions of a dark future that plagued him increased in both their lucidity and quantity.

During the time of the Great Crusade, the Night Lords were used by the Emperor as a tool of terror to pacify planets that had been recently conquered by the other Space Marine Legions. Their fearsome reputation caused any rogue Planetary Governor or uprising of rebels against Imperial Compliance to quickly pay any outstanding tithes or quell their uprisings, as the Night Lords had been known to issue an Exterminatus order on several worlds for the most petty of crimes against the Imperium. That the Emperor had concerns about the actions of the VIIIth Legion, and the apparent mental instability of their Primarch is clear, but what is not clear is what was done to restrain Curze or his sons. There were words, demands, perhaps even threats, but no action; no hand of judgement to throttle the Night Lords' crimes. Why this was so is a question that can never now be answered, and the Imperium was left only with the consequences. The chain of atrocities grew ever longer in the decades before Curze finally turned against the Emperor, like a path spiraling ever downwards into inevitable darkness. Indeed, of all the Legions and their Primarchs, the Night Lords were the most sinister and the most suspect, having been censured for the enormities and massacres carried out in the Emperor's service. They were creatures of the dark, harnessed to the will of a father wracked by righteousness and foreboding; what else could have been their fate but to fall back into the night from whence they came?

Rot Within

As it became necessary to recruit additional Space Marines to replace those who fell in battle, Neophytes were brought from Nostramo to fill the gaps in the VIIIth Legion's ranks. However, the planet had fallen back into its corrupt and decadent ways soon after the Night Haunter's departure, and only the strongest and most ruthless Nostraman criminals were now fit to join the Night Lords. Amoral and vicious, they served only to further poison the VIIIth Legion and push it to increasing levels of cruelty that made Curze's fellow Primarchs grow uneasy. Night Haunter began to lose some of the control he held over his savage Legion, and the prescient visions that plagued him increased in both lucidity and quantity. Curze continued to be plagued with visions of his own death and of his Legion fighting its brother Astartes. As his mental anguish grew, so did his Legion's dark reputation.

Learning of the fate of his homeworld, Night Haunter tried to confide in his brother Primarchs, but had never been close to them, and their reaction was less than favorable to his claims. Events reached a head following the pacification of the Cheraut System, a joint-Imperial Compliance action conducted by the Night Lords, Emperor's Children and Imperial Fists Legions. Suffering from one of his violent fits, Fulgrim rushed to Curze's aid. The Night Lords Primarch then confided in his brother of the dire visions that he had seen; his death at the hands of their father, that many of the Primarchs would die fighting amongst themselves, and that the light the Emperor brought to his home world of Nostromo would destroy it forever. Troubled by these dire portents, Fulgrim confided in his brother Rogal Dorn. Dorn took exception to this slight on the Emperor's name and confronted Curze. Shortly thereafter, Dorn was found unconscious and bleeding with great gouges of flesh ripped away from his torso. Crouching above his fallen brother was the pallid form of the Night Haunter, weeping. Wracked with self-loathing and guilt, Curze was taken into custody and exiled to his chambers, while his brother Primarchs discussed what actions to take against their deeply disturbed brother. Hours later, when the council of Primarchs finally disbanded, they found Night Haunter missing and the Imperial Fists' Huscarl Honour Guard that had been watching over him butchered. By the time the Primarchs gave chase, Night Haunter had already disappeared with his Legion into the Warp.

Death of Nostramo

Without the supernatural skill and incredible prescience of the Emperor's Primarchs, many of Night Haunter's pursuers could have been lost that day as the rogue vessels delved deep into the heart of the Empyrean. The journey, malleable within the Warp, may have taken hours or months; no reliable records exist. But one thing was certain, despite their valiant pursuit, Kurze's brothers arrived too late. As they arrived in-system, they found the Night Lords' fleet orbiting Nostramo, hundreds of weapons trained on the shrouded planet. Curze ordered his warship to unleash Exterminatus upon his unsuspecting world. Then simultaneously, the Lances and mass drivers of Night Haunter's flagship Nightfall opened fire upon the planet. Beam after beam of incandescent light joined the fusillade, all concentrating upon the same point, a weak spot in Nostramo's adamantium crust theorized to be left by the Primarch's initial landing in his gestation pod when he first arrived on the bleak world. The giant lasers of the Night Lords' warships focused a blinding lance of pure energy into the planet's core, and with a cataclysmic explosion, the dark planet burst apart.

Curze later 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. 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 and expansion. 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.

Horus Heresy

After this atrocity, Curze and his VIIIth Legion left a trail of violence and atrocity across the sectors they conquered. They now killed merely for the sake of causing pain and suffering, while spreading fear and death in their wake. The Night Haunter also began to change, denouncing the Emperor of Mankind as a weakling and a hypocrite, and transforming into a hunched and terrible predator. Many believe it was during this period that the Primarch began to heed the whispered temptations of Chaos. The campaigns of the Night Lords became less justifiable, little more than terror campaigns that left behind devastated worlds across the galaxy. Night Haunter no longer crusaded in the Emperor's name, instead fighting only in the name of death and fear. Eventually, the Emperor was forced to order the recall of Night Haunter to answer charges laid against him and his warriors by the other Primarchs and the citizens of various worlds that had felt the terrible onslaught of the Night Lords Legion. But before the Night Lords reached Terra, a new crisis for the Imperium erupted. When the Warmaster Horus revealed his treachery during the Istvaan III Atrocity and plunged the galaxy into the fires of civil war, Konrad Curze would eventually throw himself into a bitter campaign of death and destruction, giving full vent to his most violent urges. When Imperial forces were assembled to strike against Horus and the four turncoat Legions, there were many who were surprised to learn that the Night Lords had answered the call. For years the VIIIth Legion had existed on the border between sanction and censure, fighting its own wars of terror like shadows within the forces of the Great Crusade. Such was the desperate spirit of those times that few questioned Curze's aid, and those who did perhaps remembered the Night Lords' need to punish those who strayed from the light. As the treachery of the Drop Site Massacre would show, however, the Night Lords had not forsaken contact with all elements of the Great Crusade, and their need for retribution had led them to become the Traitors and criminals they had once loathed.

Once unfettered by Horus' need to drive on Terra and their tenuous allegiance with the powers of Chaos, the Night Lords went on to conduct a campaign of terror that continues to echo down the millennia to this day, wreaking bloody murder across the galaxy. The Night Lords would participate in the epic Battle of Terra and the Siege of the Imperial Palace by the Forces of Chaos. Immediately after the death of Horus, the Night Lords went on a killing spree in the Eastern Fringes of the galaxy that caused havoc for long years after the Horus Heresy had ended. The Night Haunter did not fall during the Horus Heresy, and neither did he receive the dark blessing of the Ruinous Powers in the form of apotheosis to daemonhood. Instead, he met his end at the hand of an assassin of the Callidus Temple named M'Shen on the planet Tsagualsa, where the VIIIth Legion had built its fortress after the destruction of Nostramo. It is known that throughout his life Curze had possessed the gift (many would say curse) of foresight; he was constantly struck with powerful visions of the worst of all possible futures, and that his last had been a foretelling that he would die at the hand of one such as M'Shen. This prophetic psychic ability was passed on to other Night Lords who share their gene-sire's genetic heritage. This was a unique trait, as it is said to be unrelated to Warp taints or other known psychic properties. It is believed that Curze let his assassination happen, in order to show his father, the Emperor of Mankind, that he stood by his beliefs as surely as the Emperor stood by His. While acknowledging his own crimes against humanity, Curze also stated that his martyrdom would ultimately vindicate him and his methods. Curze ordered his Legion not to pursue his assassin, a last wish that was eventually disobeyed. The Primarch's acceptance of his own fate confirmed his bleak worldview, granting him a victory he could never attain under the rule of his father. His death did not slow the Night Lords down, as they continued to apply themselves to his mantra and are specialists in the application of terror and the tactics of fear to this day. Though they paid lip service to the Ruinous Powers of Chaos and certainly felt its insidious pull, in the end the Night Lords, like their Primarch, served only their own twisted conception of justice.

Drop Site Massacre

After the news of the Istvaan III Atrocity was brought to the Emperor by the Loyalists aboard the Death Guard Frigate Eisenstein, He ordered the combined forces of seven Space Marine Legions to assault the positions of Horus and his Traitor Legions in the Istvaan System. Horus had decided to make his stand on the surface of Istvaan V. The Imperium of Man had sent 7 Legions to kill its wayward scion, little knowing that four of them had already spat on their oaths of allegiance to the Imperial Throneworld and its master. The Fidelitas Lex, Lorgar's flagship, played host to a secret gathering of rare significance. There were commanders from the Night Lords, Alpha Legion, Iron Warriors as well as three additional Primarchs: Night Haunter, Alpharius and Perturabo. Lorgar strode to the center of the gathering of Traitors. He proceeded to impress upon the gathering of his sons, brothers and cousin Astartes the importance of their cause, and of the significance this day would hold in history. The Word Bearers and their allies believed that the Imperium had failed them by being flawed to its core, imperfect in its pursuit of a perfect culture, and in its weakness against the encroachment of xenos breeds that sought to twist humanity to alien ends. And it had failed them, most of all, by being founded upon the lies of rationalism and atheism that defined the Imperial Truth. The Imperium had been forged under the aegis of a dangerous deceit, demanding that its citizens and their defenders sacrifice truth on the altar of necessity. This was an empire that deserved to die. And on Istvaan V the purge would begin.

From the ashes Lorgar promised would rise the new kingdom of Mankind: an Imperium of justice, faith and enlightenment. An Imperium heralded, commanded and protected by the avatars of the Chaos Gods themselves. An empire strong enough to stand through a future of blood and fire. Now the Traitors would declare their intentions openly. There would be no more manipulating fleet movements and falsifying expeditionary data. Now the Alpha Legion, the Word Bearers, the Iron Warriors and the Night Lords would stand together with their comrades in the Sons of Horus, World Eaters, Emperor's Children and Death Guard Legions – bloodied but unbowed beneath the flag of the Warmaster Horus, the rightful second Emperor of Mankind. The true Emperor. When Lorgar had finished speaking, First Captain Sevatar of the Night Lords Legion declared, "Death to the False Emperor!" In so doing, he became the first living soul to utter those words that would echo from the throats of countless others through the millennia of the Long War that was to come. The cry was taken up by other voices, and soon it was cried in full-throated roars, "Death to the False Emperor! Death to the False Emperor! Death! Death! Death!"

The Traitor forces composed of the World Eaters, Death Guard, Sons of Horus and Emperor's Children deployed throughout the defenses constructed along the ridge of the Urgall Depression, making ready for the howling storm of battle that was soon to descend upon them. Behind them, long range support squads manned the walls of the fortress, and Traitor Army artillery pieces waited to shower any attacker with high explosive death. The Legio Mortis Imperator-class Titan Dies Irae stood before the wall, its colossal guns primed and ready to visit destruction on the enemies of the Warmaster. Hundreds of thousands Astartes hunkered down on the northern edge of the Urgall, their guns ready and their hearts steeled to the necessity of what must come. For long minutes, the forces of the Emperor that had moved into orbit over Istvaan V pounded the Urgall Plateau from orbit, a firestorm of unimaginable ferocity hammering the surface of Istvaan V with the power of the world’s end. Eventually, the horrific bombardment ceased and the drifting echoes of its power faded, along with the acrid smoke of explosions, but the Emperor’s Children had performed perfectly in creating a network of defenses from which to face their former brothers, and the forces of the Warmaster had been well-protected. From his vantage point in the ruins of an alien-built keep, Horus smiled, and watched the sky darken once again as thousands upon thousands of Drop Pods and Stormbirds streaked through the atmosphere towards the planet’s surface to carry out the initial Loyalist assault.

The first wave was under the overall command of the Primarch Ferrus Manus and besides his own Iron HandsLegion, the Salamanders led by Vulkan and the Raven Guard under the command of their Primarch Corax joined him. Vulkan's Legion assaulted the left flank of the Traitors' battle line while Ferrus Manus, the Iron Hands' First Captain Gabriel Santor, and 10 full companies of elite Morlocks Terminators charged straight into the centre of the enemy lines. Meanwhile, Corax's Legion hit the right flank of the enemy's position. The odds were considered equal. Horus was aware of the location of the Loyalists' chosen drop site and his troops fell upon the Loyalist Legions. The battlefield of Istvaan V was a slaughterhouse of epic proportions. Treacherous warriors twisted by hatred fought their former brothers-in-arms in a conflict unparalleled in its bitterness. The mighty Titan war engines of the Machine God walked the planet’s surface and death followed in their wake. The blood of heroes and traitors flowed in rivers, and the hooded Heretek Adepts of the Dark Mechanicum unleashed perversions of ancient technology stolen from the Auretian Technocracy to wreak bloody havoc amongst the Loyalists. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Traitors had been slaughtered in the opening moments of the assault. All across the Urgall Depression, hundreds died with every passing second, the promise of inevitable death a pall of darkness that hung over every warrior. Thousands were dying every minute, the slaughter terrible to behold. Blood ran in rivers down the slopes of the Urgall Depression, carving thick, sticky runnels in the dark sand. Such destruction had never yet been concentrated in such a horrifically confined space, enough martial power to conquer an entire planetary system having been unleashed in a line less than twenty kilometers wide.

The slaughter continued unabated, on a scale never before seen, with neither side able to press home their advantages. The Traitors were well dug-in and had defensible positions, but the Loyalists had landed almost directly on top of them with numerical superiority. The bloodletting was a truly horrific sight as warriors who had once sworn great oaths of loyalty to one another fought their brothers with nothing but hatred in their hearts. No Legion fared well in the slaughter, as the scale of the fighting rendered tactics meaningless as the two armies battered each other bloody in a remorseless conflict that threatened to destroy them all. The Traitor forces held, but their line was bending beneath the fury of the first Loyalist assault. It would take only the smallest twists of fate for it to break. The forces on the surface were in combat for almost three hours with no clear victor emerging. The Loyalists waited for the second wave of "allies" to make planetfall, believing they would be reinforced for their final advance. The Traitors all knew the parts they had to play in this deadly performance. They were all aware of the blood they needed to shed to install Horus as the Master of Mankind.

Though the Iron Hands, Raven Guard and Salamanders had managed to make a full combat drop and secure the Loyalist drop site, known as the Urgall Depression, they did so at a heavy cost. What had begun as a massed strike against the Traitors’ position was rapidly turning into one of the largest engagements of the entire Great Crusade. For all the wrong reasons, this battle was soon to go down in the annals of Imperial history as one of the most epic confrontations ever fought.

The Urgall Depression was churned to ruination beneath the boots and tank treads of countless thousands of Astartes warriors and their Legion's armour divisions. The Loyalist Primarchs could be found where the fighting was thickest: Corax of the Raven Guard, borne aloft on black wings bound to a fire-breathing flight pack; Lord Ferrus of the Iron Hands at the heart of the battlefield, his silver hands crushing any Traitors that came within reach, while he pursued and dragged back those who sought to withdraw; and lastly, Vulkan of the Salamanders, armoured in overlapping Artificer plating, thunder clapping from his warhammer as it pounded into yielding armour, shattering it like porcelain.

The traitorous Primarchs slew in mirror image to their brothers: Angron of the World Eaters hewing with wild abandon as he raked his Chainaxes left and right, barely cognizant of who fell before him; Fulgrim of the lamentably-named Emperor’s Children, laughing as he deflected the clumsy sweeps of Iron Hands warriors, never stopping in his graceful movements for even a moment; Mortarion of the Death Guard, in disgusting echo of ancient Terran myth, harvesting life with each reaving sweep of his great Warscythe.

And then there was Horus Lupercal, the Warmaster of the Imperium, the brightest star and greatest of the Emperor’s sons. He stood watching the destruction while his Legions took to the field, their liege lord content in his fortress rising from the far edge of the ravine. He was shielded and unseen by his brothers still waging war in the Emperor’s name. At last, above this maelstrom of grinding ceramite, booming tank cannons and chattering Bolters -- the gunships, Drop Pods and assault landers of the second Loyalist wave burned through the atmosphere on screaming thrusters. The sky fell dark as the weak sun was eclipsed by ten thousand avian shadows, and the cheering roar sent up by the Loyalists at the arrival of their comrades was loud enough to shake the air itself. Like fiery comets from the heavens, the thrusters of countless drop-ships, landers and assault craft broke through the fire-shot clouds of smoke and descended to the Loyalist landing zone on the northern edge of the Urgall Depression. Hundreds of Stormbirds and Thunderhawks roared towards the surface, their armoured hulls gleaming as the power of another four Legiones Astartes came to Istvaan, their heroic names legendary, their mighty deeds known the length and breadth of the galaxy: the Alpha Legion, Word Bearers, Night Lords, and Iron Warriors.

The Traitors, the bloodied and battered Legions loyal to Horus, fell into a fighting withdrawal without hesitation. Overwhelmed with rage, the headstrong Ferrus Manus disregarded the counsel of his brothers Corax and Vulkan and hurled himself against the fleeing rebels, seeking to bring Fulgrim to personal combat. His veteran troops -- comprising the majority of the Xth Legion's Terminators and Dreadnoughts -- followed.

The second wave of "Loyalist" Space Marine Legions descended upon the landing zone on the northern edge of the Urgall Depression. Hundreds of Stormbirds and Thunderhawks roared towards the surface, their armoured hulls gleaming as the power of another four Astartes Legions arrived on Istvaan V. Yet the Space Marine Legions of the reserve were no longer loyal to the Emperor, having already secretly sworn themselves to Chaos and the cause of Horus. The Night Lords of Konrad Curze, the Iron Warriors of Perturabo, the Word Bearers of Lorgar Aurelian, and the Alpha Legion of Alpharius represented a force larger than that which had first begun the assault on Istvaan V. The secret Traitor Legions mustered in the landing zone, armed and ready for battle, unbloodied and fresh.

The Iron Warriors had claimed the highest ground, taking the Loyalist landing site with all the appearance of reinforcing it through the erection of prefabricated plasteel bunkers. Bulk landers dropped the needed battlefield architecture: dense metal frames fell from the cargo claws of carrier ships at low altitude, and as the platforms crashed and embedded themselves in the ground, the craftsmen-warriors of the IV Legion worked, affixed, bolted and constructed them into hastily-rising firebases. Turrets rose from their protective housing in the hundreds, while hordes of lobotomized Servitors trundled from the holds of Iron Warriors troopships, single-minded in their intent to link with the weapons systems’ interfaces. The Word Bearers bolstered their brother Legions on one flank of the Urgall Depression while the Night Lords took positions on the opposite side. Down the line, past the mounting masses of Iron Warriors battle tanks and assembling Astartes, First Captain Sevatar of the Night Lords and his 1st Company elite, the Atramentar, took up defensive positions. Both the Word Bearers and the Night Lords were to be the anvil, while the Iron Warriors would be the hammer yet to fall. The enemy would stagger back to them, exhausted, clutching empty Bolters and broken blades, believing their presence to be a reprieve.

Dragging their wounded and dead behind them, Corax and Vulkan led their forces back to the drop site to regroup and to allow the warriors of their recently arrived brother Primarchs of the second wave a measure of the glory in defeating Horus. Though they voxed hails requesting medical aid and supply, the line of newly-arrived Astartes atop the northern ridge remained grimly silent as the exhausted warriors of the Raven Guard and Salamanders came to within a hundred metres of their allies. It was then that Horus revealed his perfidy and sprung his lethal trap. Inside the black alien fortress where Horus had made his lair, a lone flare shot skyward, exploding in a hellish red glow that lit the battlefield below. The fire of betrayal roared from the barrels of a thousand guns, as the second wave of Astartes revealed where their true loyalties now lay. The Loyalists' supposed "allies" opened fire upon the Salamanders and Raven Guard, killing hundreds in the fury of the first few moments, hundreds more in the seconds following, as volley after volley of bolter fire and missiles scythed through their unsuspecting ranks. Even as terrifying carnage was being wreaked upon the Loyalists below, the retreating forces of the Warmaster turned and brought their weapons to bear on the enemy warriors within their midst. Hundreds of World Eaters, Sons of Horus and Death Guard Astartes fell upon the veteran companies of the Iron Hands, and though the warriors of the Xth Legion continued to fight gallantly, they were hopelessly outnumbered and would soon be hacked to pieces. The Iron Hands had damned themselves by remaining in the field instead of retreating like their fellows.

The Raven Guard's front ranks went down as if scythed, harvested in a spilling line of detonating bolter shells, shattered armour and puffs of bloody mist. Black-armoured Astartes tumbled to their hands and knees, only to be cut down by the sustained volley, finishing those who fell beneath the initial storm of head- and chest-shots. Seconds after the first chatter of bolters, achingly bright laser beams slashed from behind the Word Bearers as the cannon mounts of Land Raiders, Predators and defensive bastion turrets gouged through the Raven Guard and the ground they stood upon. The Iron Warriors and Word Bearers kept reloading, opening fire again, hurling grenades and then preparing to fall back. The Word Bearers Legion had taken up landing positions on the west of the field, ready to sweep down and engage the Raven Guard from the flank.

Taking stock of their dire situation, the Primarchs Corax and Vulkan differed over how to salvage what they could from the situation. The Salamanders' Primarch suggested that the Loyalists attempt to make a tactical withdrawal to their respective drop ships and dig in to resist any further attacks. Corax advocated instead that the Loyalists should do whatever they could to make good their escape from the slaughter as the battle was lost. Neither Primarch could agree with the other, and so Corax turned from Vulkan and ordered his Legion to retreat. A short while later, a direct artillery strike hit the Primarchs' position. By the grace of the Emperor, Corax somehow managed to survive, but the fate of his brother Vulkan was unknown.

Amidst the carnage and the slaughter, Lord Corax, Primarch of the Raven Guard charged into the ranks of the Traitorous Word Bearers, a blur of charcoal armour and black blades, butchering with an ease that belied his ferocity. Soon the voices of dying Word Bearers became a conflicting chorus over the Vox as they screamed for help. Soon the raven met the heretic in a clash of crozius and claw. The Primarchs fought in furious combat -- Corax fighting to kill, while Lorgar fought to stay alive. Corax lashed out furiously with his pair of Lightning Claws across Lorgar's face, cutting the meat of his cheeks deeply. Even should Lorgar somehow manage to escape his ultimate fate this day, he would bear these scars until the day he died.

The two Primarchs traded vicious blows, but the Raven Lord had the advantage not only of speed and finesse, but of also being a penultimate warrior with decades of fighting experience. Lorgar did not, for he had always been more of a scholar than a warrior, and his lack of experience cost him dearly as Corax impaled Lorgar through his stomach, the tips of his meter-long talons glinting to the side of his spine as they thrust out his back. Such a blow meant little to a primarch – only when Corax heaved upwards did Lorgar stagger. The claws bit and cut, sawing through the Word Bearer’s body. Lorgar fell to his knees, hands clutched over the ruination of his stomach. As Corax stepped closer, he raised his one functioning claw to execute his brother. Lorgar screamed his defiance at the raven. As the claw fell, it struck opposing metal.

Corax looked to meet eyes as black as his, in a face as pale as his own. His claw strained against a mirroring weapon, both sets of blades scraping as they ground against each other. One claw seeking to fall and kill, the other unyielding in its rising defense. Where the Raven Guard Primarch’s features were fierce with effort, the other face wore a grin. It was a smile both taut and mirthless -- a dead man’s smile, once his lips surrendered to rigor mortis. It was the Night Haunter. Corax sought to wrench his claw free, but Curze’s second gauntlet closed on his brother’s wrist, so that Corax would be unable to fly away and escape his fate. Curze looked upon his prostrate brother and ordered him to rise from his knees, disgusted at his cowardice. Corax was not idle as this exchange took place. He fired his flight pack, burning his fuel reserves to escape Curze’s grip. The Raven Lord’s claw ripped free, and Corax soared skyward, carried on jet thrust away from Curze’s rising laughter. Curze then shoved Lorgar back towards his Word Bearers.

Though grievously wounded, Lorgar would live. The Traitors had carried the day and dealt the Emperor and the Imperium a grievous blow. As the Horus Heresy began in earnest, Horus now possessed nine Space Marine Legions and had all but destroyed three of the remaining nine Loyalist Legions. The path to Terra was wide open, and the decisive Battle of Terra and the Siege of the Imperial Palace would follow after seven more years of blood and terror as the Traitor Legions penetrated to the very heart of the Imperium of Man.

The Torture of Vulkan

Vulkan had survived the nuclear fire of the Iron Warriors' orbital strike, where so many of his sons did not. Finding himself surrounded by hundreds of Traitor Legionaries from both the Night Lords and the Iron Warriors, Vulkan resigned himself to his fate. Fighting valiantly, the Primarch fought to the death, but was eventually overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the enemy and was shot, stabbed and bludgeoned into unconsciousness. The Night Haunter, now inherently insane, saw the opportunity to torment his fallen brother and took the unconscious Vulkan as his prisoner. When the Salamanders' Primarch finally awoke, he found himself fettered in massive chains aboard a gaol-hulk belonging to the VIIIth Legion. Over the span of several months, the Night Haunter took sadistic pleasure in attempting to break both Vulkan's body and mind, or kill him outright. But the task proved impossible, as every time Curze thought he had succeeded in killing his brother, Vulkan's body would miraculously regenerate to its former healthy state. Vulkan had been revealed to be a "Perpetual", a being who was capable of continuous cellular regeneration and therefore was effectively immortal, much like their father, the Emperor of Mankind. Enraged, Curze took it upon himself to kill Vulkan as many times as was necessary to permanently rid himself of his intolerable presence. The Night Haunter personally beheaded the Salamanders' Primarch, ripped out his throat with a piece of cutlery, stabbed him through the chest and virtually tore him limb from limb with his own wicked claws. When these attempts failed to kill Vulkan, Curze had him eviscerated, shot at close-range by hundreds of Bolters, put into a ventilation shaft of a starship's engine and even stripped naked and thrown out of an airlock into the airless void of space. But the Night Haunter's efforts proved all for naught.

Each time the Night Haunter thought he had successfully murdered his brother Primarch, Vulkan's body would continue to regenerate back to its former vigorous state, further enraging the Night Lords' Primarch. With his unnatural abilities to regenerate revealed to him, Curze attempted to make Vulkan admit that he was no less a monster than himself. To further torment his brother, the Night Haunter had Davinite sorcerer-priests use the fell powers gifted to them by the Ruinous Powers to ensnare Vulkan's mind and run him through a series of illusionary mental trials where he continuously failed at some noble task, resulting in the deaths of innocents. But even this form of sorcerous torture failed to break the resolute Vulkan. Fed up with his insufferable prisoner, the Night Haunter devised a final solution to his problem of ridding himself of the Salamander's presence. Vulkan's fate would be decided in a duel to the death.

He offered his brother a means of escape and achieving that which he had sought for so long -- his freedom. All he had to do was navigate a labyrinth, where, at the center of it, lay his personal warhammer Dawnbringer. But this was no ordinary maze. At the request of Night Haunter, the Iron Warriors' Primarch Perturabo had crafted him the singular prison, unlike any other, in imitation of his own private sanctorum known as the Cavea Ferrum. This special prison was an elaborate labyrinth, whose featureless walls and strange geometric design made it all but impossible to map and therefore escape. Anyone who attempted to mentally map the labyrinth would be hopelessly knotted in turns that should have been physically impossible. Even after trying scores of times to map the labyrinth, an individual would only manage more than a handful of turns within its twisting corridors before it all stopped making sense. But despite the odds, Vulkan did the impossible, and managed to find his way to the center of the maze and reclaim his hammer. With his weapon in hand, he managed to overpower his jailer Curze, and activate the secret personal teleporter built into the head of the finely wrought warhammer. Vulkan immediately transported halfway across the galaxy, and reappeared in the upper atmosphere of the Ultramarines Legion's homeworld of Macragge. As he fell from an impossible height, his body was burned to a crisp upon reentry. But before his mind faded into blackness, Vulkan was content that he would soon find himself whole once again, and in the care of his Ultramarran cousins.

Thramas Crusade

Following the victory of the Drop Site Massacre, Horus called a meeting of the Primarchs of 8 of the Traitor Legions (minus the participation of the Alpha Legion's Primarch Alpharius) aboard his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. Five of the Primarchs, including four who had fought at Istvaan V, met in person, including Horus, Fulgrim, Angron, Mortarion and Lorgar. Three appeared through the use of hololithic emitters that transmitted their signals through the Warp, including Perturabo, Night Haunter and Magnus the Red, who had only recently joined the Traitors after the Scouring of Prospero when the broken remains of his XVth Legion had been transported by Tzeentch into the Eye of Terror to the Planet of the Sorcerers. The Thousand Sons, bitter at what they perceived as their betrayal by the Emperor, now willingly became the ninthTraitor Legion. The council of Traitor Primarchs made their plans for the next step in their war against the Emperor and then each Legion went its way according to its assigned role. The Night Haunter’s fleet had already departed, bound for the planet of Tsagualsa, a remote world in the Eastern Fringe that lay shrouded in the shadow of a great asteroid belt. From there, the Night Lords’ terror troops would begin a campaign of genocide against the Imperial strongholds of Heroldar and Thramas, star systems that, if not taken, would leave the flanks of the Warmaster’s strike on Terra vulnerable to attack. This campaign would also delay the Dark Angels Legion from reinforcing the Loyalists. The Thramas System was of particular importance, as it comprised a number of Mechanicum Forge Worlds whose loyalty was still to the Emperor.

This bitterly contested campaign, known as the Thramas Crusade, dragged on for nearly three standard years. In an attempt to sway his brother Lion El'Jonson to Horus' cause, the Night Haunter left a deep-void beacon in the patrol path of one of the Dark Angels' outrider vessels. The beacon was set to transmit coordinates in advance, so that the two Primarchs could meet and parley on the planet of Tsagualsa. Night Haunter wanted to break his former brother either mentally, physically or both to obtain his objectives. The Primarchs were accompanied by two warriors from their personal Honour Guards to the parley. The meeting began amicably enough between the two as they conversed with relative civility. This amity lasted only until the Night Haunter slandered El'Jonson, and in return the Lion struck his former brother. This melee further degenerated into an all-out brawl between the two sides. As the Night Haunter strangled the life out of El'Jonson, one of the Dark Angels Honour Guardsmen ran his sword through the Night Haunter's back, saving his Primarch's life. Eventually both Legions sent reinforcements in response to this incident. Each side dragged away their respective Primarchs from the scene of the combat. Both Primarchs survived this brutal confrontation and went on to continue the contest between their Legions for control of the Aegis Sub-sector.

When next they fought, the Dark Angels executed a meticulously planned ambush on the Night Lords' fleet while it was in transit across the sub-sector that saw the back of the Night Lords Legion broken and their Primarch mortally wounded after having faced his brother El'Jonson once again in mortal combat. Thanks to the skilled coordination and superb execution by the Lion, the Night Lords fleet was devastated, losing dozens of capital ships and approximately one-quarter of their Legion fleet to the Dark Angels' assault. Unfortunately, the remainder of the Night Lords fleet fled the Dark Angels' wrath, while the recently recovered Night Haunter, First Captain Sevatar and the elite Night Lords Atramentar Terminators led a desperate boarding assault action upon the Dark Angels' flagship Invincible Reason. This resulted in the death of all but a dozen of the Atramentar and the capture of Sevatar and the remaining survivors. Konrad Curze fled El'Jonson's wrath, evading the Dark Angels for months, stalking the shadows within the bowels of the mighty capital ship. Somehow, the remaining Night Lords managed to affect their escape and fled into the void.

Death of the Night Haunter

The VIIIth Legion sided with none of the Chaos Gods, instead using the Forces of Chaos as tools in their terror campaigns. Slowly but surely, the Night Lords, now almost entirely comprised of murderers and criminals recruited from Nostramo before its destruction, began to carve a bloody path towards Terra alongside the other Traitor Legions. After the invasion of Terra by the forces of Chaos and the death of Horus at the hands of the Emperor, the Night Lords did not splinter and flee into the Eye of Terror like the rest of the Traitor Legions. Instead, they continued to attack the Imperium in its Eastern Fringes, however, their tactics seemed to change, betraying a self-destructive desperation. The Emperor himself, wishing to disband the Night Lords forever, dispatched half the Callidus Temple of Assassins to terminate the renegade Primarch. Legend has it that a lone agent, named M'Shen, was purposely allowed to infiltrate the Legion's lair on the world of Tsagualsa and confront the fallen Primarch, now a naked and hunched monster. Before his death, M'Shen's video-log records Night Haunter's enigmatic last 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."

The final remembrance of Konrad Curze is of mad, black eyes and a cruel, lip-less smile, aware that his horrific visions had all come to pass. The vid-log of the event then shows M'Shen leaping forward at the Primarch. However, the kill was never confirmed, as the video feed cut out right before the fight ensued. It is believed that Night Haunter allowed himself to be killed: he saw himself as a murderous and corrupt villain, the very thing he sought to destroy. Regardless, his final words are considered one of the great enigmas in the Imperium's history.

Source: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com

[plunnies-n-shit]

(Okay im apparently not done with this au someone stop me)

(Grimmjow stares incomprehensibly at the hologram, because its just-- its not possible.)

(Its him. Face a little softer, form a little curvier, but its still. Its him. His own blue hair, his own scarred jaw, his own hands wrapped around something bouncing on his-her hip. Whatever it is, the communicator doesnt pick it up, but the motion tickles something in the back of Grimmjow's brain.)

("If anyone's hearing this -- zzzt -- Six and Three -- zzt -- portal malfunction -- zzzt -- damaged. Cant tell where I am. Star charts attached. Please, if there's anyone--")

(The communication cuts out as quickly as it started, corrupted fritz and background radiation. The plasteel cracks under Grimmjow's claws, and he winces as he carefully extracts himself. That was-- it was--)

("A kid," ichigo breathes, wrapping a careful hand around Grimmjows elbow. "I dont-- i mean, there wasnt--" he takes a deep breath. "I used to do that with the girls all the time. That. Ya know." He mimes bouncing a toddler on his hip.)

(Grimmjow stares at him, struggling to process. Because that was. That was him. His communicator beeps with the foreign starchart, and he almost cracks his own omnitool rushing to open it. Ichigo leans over his shoulder to see as well.)

(There are answers out there. And now, Grimmjow knows where to start looking.)

(Ive decided that Grimmjow is from a line of clones that include Six (femGrimm) and Nelliel. Six has been using portal technology that she reverse-engineered from the Sentinels to get the clones out, but her last jump something went wrong, stranding Grimm with the damaged ship, and her and Nelliel in the middle of nowhere.)

[ishouldreadthat]

  I’ve been thinking about doing this for awhile.  Science fiction is such an incredibly rich genre, but it’s hard to figure out where to start!  Whether you’ve been a fan of sci-fi TV and movies or just curious to dip a toe into a new genre, I promise that there’s something out there for you!

  The following is a list of science fiction books tailored to people who want to start reading sci-fi.  I’m not listing YA books here because honestly there are so many people out there who are far more knowledgeable about YA than me.

  I want to start with the classics

Foundation or I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

  You can’t get much more classic than Asimov.  I’ve included two very different books here because it all depends on what you like.  There are other great early sci-fi writers, but I have only read a few and find some of their work a little problematic for a modern audience (ahem, Stranger in a Strange Land).

If you want a space opera (sprawling, epic stories that focus more on drama.  Think Star Wars), Foundation is a great place to start:

  For twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future — to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years. To preserve knowledge and save mankind, Seldon gathers the best minds in the Empire — both scientists and scholars — and brings them to a bleak planet at the edge of the Galaxy to serve as a beacon of hope for a future generations. He calls his sanctuary the Foundation.

But soon the fledgling Foundation finds itself at the mercy of corrupt warlords rising in the wake of the receding Empire. Mankind’s last best hope is faced with an agonizing choice: submit to the barbarians and be overrun — or fight them and be destroyed.

  Full of twists and turns, Foundation was written as a series of vignettes in the late 1940’s.  It’s incredible to look back and see just how much Asimov influenced modern science fiction in all its forms. Some people find him to be a bit dated and dull, but I didn’t think this was the case at all.  There are three books in the original trilogy, but Asimov went back and expanded the series later in life so you’ll have plenty of reading material.

  If you’re more into the tech side of things, I, Robot is a great place to start:

  The three laws of Robotics:

1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2) A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

With these three, simple directives, Isaac Asimov changed our perception of robots forever when he formulated the laws governing their behavior. In I, Robot, Asimov chronicles the development of the robot through a series of interlinked stories: from its primitive origins in the present to its ultimate perfection in the not-so-distant future–a future in which humanity itself may be rendered obsolete.

  If you’ve seen the movie, throw that out of your head before you start.  The film bears little resemblance to the book.  I, Robot features nine short stories that tie into the life and career of robopsychologist Susan Calvin.  It’s an absolutely brilliant read and incredibly accessible due to its short story format.

  I want space action!  Things should be blowing up, characters should be in mortal peril, and the continued existence of mankind should be in jeopardy!  No one is safe!

The Expanse by James S. A. Corey

  Maybe you’ve seen the (excellent) TV show.  Maybe you’ve heard about these books, but are find the length daunting.  Just stop right now and pick up these books:

  Humanity has colonized the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond – but the stars are still out of our reach.

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, the Scopuli, they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for – and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations – and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.

  The Expanse is more than just the book equivalent of a summer blockbuster.  While it is an incredibly fast and easy read, it still has a huge amount of depth.  It deals with xenophobia, political machinations, war, conspiracy, and yes, the potential downfall of mankind.  Now I’ll admit that I’ve only read the first two, but I plan to grab the rest of the series.  Do yourself a favor and do the same.

    I’m more into romance than sci-fi

Hold Back the Stars by Katie Khan

  Hold Back the Stars is one of my favorite books of 2017 so far (you can read my ravings here), and with good reason.  Yes, it is a romance.   Yes it is a beautiful book.  But it is SO much more than that:

  Trapped in the vast void of space, Carys and Max have only ninety minutes of oxygen left to live. None of this was supposed to happen. After a freak accident, Carys and Max are left adrift in space with nothing to hold onto but each other. As they fall, they can’t help but look back at the world they left behind. A world whose rules they couldn’t submit to, a place where they never really belonged; a home they’re determined to get back to because they’ve come too far to lose each other now. While their air ticks dangerously low, one is offered the chance of salvation—but who will take it?

  This book has many moving parts that make up the fantastic story.  The US and Middle East have been destroyed, and Europe has become a utopia.  Two characters fall in love against the rules of society.  The writing style and story structure are so wonderfully refreshing.  I’m not ashamed to say I cried like a baby.

    I’m not so keen on battles and action sequences.  I like long character arcs and development.

Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

  Becky Chambers is a new favorite author and both her books are just wonderful (you can see my review of The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit here).  I had never thought of sci-fi as being the perfect genre for ‘comfort reads’, but oh boy did she prove me wrong.  In addition to having the best book titles, she defies the expectations of action-heavy sci-fi:

  Somewhere within our crowded sky, a crew of wormhole builders hops from planet to planet, on their way to the job of a lifetime. To the galaxy at large, humanity is a minor species, and one patched-up construction vessel is a mere speck on the starchart. This is an everyday sort of ship, just trying to get from here to there.

But all voyages leave their mark, and even the most ordinary of people have stories worth telling. A young Martian woman, hoping the vastness of space will put some distance between herself and the life she‘s left behind. An alien pilot, navigating life without her own kind. A pacifist captain, awaiting the return of a loved one at war.

Set against a backdrop of curious cultures and distant worlds, this episodic tale weaves together the adventures of nine eclectic characters, each on a journey of their own.

  Although they’re loosely connected, I highly recommend you read The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet first.  It’s less of a straight narrative and more of a loose collection of vignettes and stories that happen during this year-long long haul journey.  It’s a beautiful story filled with a huge variety of cultures, is LGBTQ-friendly, and has enough science and technology to please any level of sci-fi reader.  It’s a hard book to explain, just do yourself a favor and read it.

  Okay, I’m seriously a beginner.  Give me something a little closer to home with science that’s easy to understand

The Martian by Andy Weir

  The Martian!  I think many people have seen, or at least heard of, the fantastic film starring Matt Damon.  It’s a great adaptation of a great book, but reading the book is well worth it:

  Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. 

Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded and completely alone with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive — and even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. 

Chances are, though, he won’t have time to starve to death. The damaged machinery, unforgiving environment, or plain-old “human error” are much more likely to kill him first. 

But Mark isn’t ready to give up yet. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills — and a relentless, dogged refusal to quit — he steadfastly confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next. Will his resourcefulness be enough to overcome the impossible odds against him.

  The Martian is funny, tense, and incredibly accessible.  This was one of the first sci-fi books that really got me into the genre.  The science is definitely there, but I had absolutely no trouble understanding it.  The Martian is a great gateway into the science fiction genre and I highly recommend it.

  There’s a whole bunch of other recommendations I have, but I think they’ll just make this post way too long!  Keep an eye out for part 2 coming sometime in the future.  Also, let me know if you want me to do more beginners guides!  I’ve read pretty much every genre under the sun, so give me a shout if you’d like more recommendations!

  Have you read any of these books?  Do any of them take your fancy?  Let me know!

    *All copy is courtesy of Goodreads

From Isaac Asimov to Andy Weir: A Beginner's Guide to Science Fiction Part One #bookbloggers I've been thinking about doing this for awhile.  Science fiction is such an incredibly rich genre, but it's hard to figure out where to start!  

[corrupted-starcharts]

The broadcast feeds of the Corrupted Starcharts collective have been rather quiet for some time.

Amidst the static of off-air channels, something new joins the white noise: a song, soft and droning.

》 Hello, world...

[corrupted-starcharts]

-{{ Corrupted Starcharts }}-

A No Man's Sky RP/Ask Blog following the journeys of two Travellers, Raskol and Onfim, also known as the Twin-Iterations.

Character references and info under the cut, as well as a deeper dive into the blog as a whole. Some liberties may be taken with No Man's Sky's storyline and lore.

-{{ Iteration: Raskol }}-

Pronouns: They/Them

Specialties: Astrocartography, Cosmology, Language, Agriculture, Communications.

Raskol is an incredibly old Traveller, one who claims to have been around since the early days; they have lived more lifetimes than they care to count. Taciturn and a bit socially stunted, it was until very recently that Raskol largely kept to themself. They dip their hands into many different projects and fields, but their work begins and ends with, well, the beginning and end of the universe. Known for being particularly grumpy, Raskol is finally learning how to relax and be a bit more... well, fun. It's probably the Nipnip. Particularly sensitive to the v̴͔͒̕ͅo̵͓͑̉i̵̧͇͋̊d̵̗̻̆.

Trivia:

Commander of Korvax freighter CS-16 Parhelion

Overseer of Korvax settlement Okinowa's Blight

Primary starship is a Sentinel Interceptor, callsign: Purged-EVA

Often settles on paradise, swamp, or desert planets

Runs a pirate radio station alongside Onfim; Raskol broadcasts from Isdoraijung Galaxy

Cultivated a strain of Nipnip that will knock your boots off

Spent many lifetimes convinced they were a Korvax entity

Difficult to anger, but their anger sure is terrifying

Raskol's Tags:

Character Tag

Travels

Broadcasts

-{{ Iteration: Onfim }}-

Pronouns: They/It

Specialties: Tech Development, Mechanics, Piracy, Smuggling, Hacking and Data Siphoning.

A much younger Traveller, Onfim met the early legs of their journey with unbounded enthusiasm and optimism. They were reckless and feared little. Onfim loved to dig for information, to pull things apart and study them, but trouble only followed when they dug too far and found only c̵͚͖̝̈́r̸͚̀̇i̵̗͐̒m̷̨̧͑s̴͈͚͗̿o̴̬̜̅n̶͖̓͐̈́ and g̷̩͂̀l̴̡̠͊̔͝a̵̭̲̻͗ś̴̢̄s̵̗̱̀̇. They're back now, though, feeling more stable and yet incredibly discordant. The more social of the Twin-Iterations, Onfim is eager to meet with others and constantly be in a crowd.

Trivia:

Commander of Korvax freighter CS-22 Tresserhorn

Overseer of Vy'Keen settlement Sajiru's Crossing

Primary starship is a particularly nasty Sentinel Interceptor, callsign: Hellrider

Frequently settles on paradise, dissonant, or anomalous planets

Runs a pirate radio station alongside Raskol; Onfim broadcasts from Eissentam Galaxy

A bit of a silly goose to the point of being a menace to society

Deathly afraid of lightning storms

Their physical form seems to stutter, glitch, and lag

Onfim's Tags:

Character Tag

Travels

Broadcasts

-{{ OOC Blog Info }}-

Hi, call me Shy! I'm the fool running this blog, my main is @blackcr0wking, and I have an art blog - @blackcr0wkingart - as well. I've been playing No Man's Sky since 2016, and have fallen off now and then, but currently play fairly actively on PS5. My PSN is saintvoid if anyone would like to add me and/or meet up!

Posts on this blog are made both in and out of character depending on content as well as my energy levels at the time. In- and out-of-character posts are usually tagged as such, though I tend to make clearer distinctions in the text of posts as well, as follows:

》 Raskol's broadcasts are denoted by purple symbols, and ten-.. -kzzkt- ..-o have very little interference.

-{{ Out of character text posts will be in brackets, like so. }}-

》 Onfim's broad-.. -kzzzkt- ..-oadcasts are marked with - with orange symbols, and their corrup-.. -kzzk- ..corrupted signal is - is - is evident in text.

I also have No Man's Sky playlists! Check them out here:

Fell Into A Black Hole But It's Fine // A simple, chill, lo-fi playlist with songs that felt (to me, at least) like calmly drifting through space in your starship, or slowly wandering planetside. Chill beats to explore the galaxy to, if you will.

Corrupted Starcharts // A little bit weird, a little bit sad, and a little bit silly, this playlist somewhat centers around my interpretation of both the canon of No Man's Sky's story, as well as the journeys Raskol and Onfim have undertaken. If I'm being completely honest, it's a collection of songs I'm picturing silly little NMS animations/music videos to. For best/most fun results, shuffle.

-{{ Tag Directory }}-

I'm a monster with an insatiable need to sort things, so I figured this could potentially be helpful to newcomers. Commonly used tags are as follows:

Answered Asks

Vibes

Other Travelers

Memes

Planetary Records

Artworks

Bases

Filler

Old NMS

Queue

Scheduled Posts

And I think that about covers it, thanks for reading! Inbox is always open for questions and such both in- and out-of-character. :)

[iteration-anomaly]

-{{ Uhhh... I don't- I don't think that's safe for most people. }}-

★ This is fine.

[corrupted-starcharts]

-{{ Corrupted Starcharts }}-

A No Man's Sky RP/Ask Blog following the journeys of a small collective of Travellers and their companions.

Character introductions and info under the cut, as well as a deeper dive into this blog as a whole. Please note that some liberties may have been taken with No Man's Sky's storyline and lore!

-{{ The Collective }}-

-{{ Twin-Iteration: Raskol }}-

Pronouns: They/Them

Specialties: Cosmology, Language, Agriculture, Communications

-{{ Cosmologist // Phantom }}-

Raskol is counted among the universe's oldest Travelers. Around since the early days, they have lived more lifetimes than they care to count. Taciturn and a bit socially stunted, it was until very recently that Raskol largely kept to themself. They dip their hands into numerous projects and fields, but their work begins and ends with, well- the beginning and end of the universe. In fact, they are determined to see this universe to its end; Raskol is constantly fighting their body breaking down- they must find or build a new body before every 16th death, lest they risk being lost to the World of Glass indefinitely. Though known for being particularly grumpy, Raskol is attentive and protective to those they care for. And they're finally learning how to be more fun, to boot. It's probably the Nipnip. Particularly sensitive to the V̸͈͎͚̹̓̑ͅổ̷̯͎̍̇͠i̶̳͕̫̻̓̅d̵̡̹̮̹͚̒̾͝.

Trivia:

Interceptor Callsign: Purged-EVA

Commander of Vy'Keen Freighter CSV-16 Parhelion

Overseer of Korvax Settlement Humend's Crossing

Often settles on paradise, swamp, or dissonant planets

Fluent in Korvax, ATLAS, and Autophage

Runs a pirate radio station alongside Iteration: Onfim; Raskol typically broadcasts from the Isdoraijung and Eissentam galaxies

Cultivated a strain of Nipnip that will knock your boots off

Spent many lifetimes convinced they were a Korvax entity

Rebuilt Priest Yamazyv is their partner, they are more or less together again after millennia of separation

Difficult to anger, but their anger sure is terrifying

Took Iteration: Threnody under their wing, more or less "mothers" them

Raskol's Tags:

Broadcasts

Travels

Aesthetic

-{{ Twin-Iteration: Onfim }}-

Pronouns: He/They

Specialties: Tech Development, Mechanics and Cybernetics, Piracy, Smuggling, Hacking and Data Siphoning

-{{ Hellion // Virus }}-

Onfim, by all accounts, is not supposed to exist. A fragment of a fragment, an iteration of an iteration. During one of Iteration: Raskol's stints in the World of Glass following a death in Odyalutai, a fragment of their soul broke away, later forming into its own separate and fully formed individual, spawned into a new universe of his own. His universe turned out to be incredibly unstable, however; and after being caught in a timeloop for... weeks? Months? Onfim found himself somehow shunted out of his own universe and into Raskol's. This transition was not a gentle one, and much of their torso and arms had to be rebuilt by Polo. Prone to reckless decisions, his body has ended up in need of constant repair and revision; a recent addition of an Atlas Terminal's panel to his heart casing may have been a mistake, but it's f̴̰̎̎ǐ̷͇̓̽ņ̴̻̖͇̌͊͘̕e̶̯̦͛̚͜. Capricious, fickle; a wonderful friend to have and a terrible enemy to make. Onfim is a social butterfly who never stays in one place for long. Known to be quite ruthless in piracy dealings but, at heart, he's just a goofy little punk.

Trivia:

Interceptor Callsign: Burning-Hellkite

Co-captain of Gek freighter CSV-22 Tresserhorn alongside Pirate Lord Agni

Overseer of Vy'Keen settlement Sajiru's Crossing

Settles on desert and radioactive planets; avoids extreme weather and storms at all costs

Fluent in ATLAS, Gek, Vy'keen, Autophage

Runs a pirate radio station alongside Iteration: Raskol; Onfim primarily broadcasts from the Euclid and Calypso galaxies

Iteration: Kestrel is his partner :)

Onfim's Tags:

Broadcasts

Travels

Aesthetic

-{{ Iteration: Kestrel }}-

Pronouns: She/They

Specialties: Big-Game Hunting, Archaeology, Paleontology, History, Tracking and Survival

-{{ Historian // Cursebearer }}-

In her early years, Kestrel cared little for exploration and discovery. She was something of a big-game hunter, often contracted by various guilds for jobs tracking and hunting Titan Worms and Biological Horrors. Her hunting days came to an abrupt end when she was unknowingly hired to kill a Leviathan- an encounter she refuses to talk about. One by one, she watched her entire squadron go down as the creature rightfully defended itself. Kestrel's hesitance saved her- barely. A piercing song hit her ship, forcing all systems to fail and shut down, sending her crashing to her death. The song hit her brain, too, like a railspike through her right eye and ear, blinding and deafening her. As she recovered from her time in the World of Glass, Kestrel staunchly avoided her old life. Somehow, she found a taste for archaeology and paleontology, finding an appreciation for history, ancient things. Ruin excavation and treasure hunting can be a thrill in its own way.

Trivia:

Interceptor Callsign: Singing-Venatrix

Commander of Korvax freighter CSV-23 Dreadmaw

Overseer of Gek settlement Edostryo Water

Often settles on swamp and infested planets

Fluent in Gek, Vy'keen, and ATLAS

She is terrified of Living Ships, Organic Frigates, and the like; this includes Iteration: Threnody

Iteration: Onfim is her partner :)

She has fitted her right eye with a cybernetic replacement made from Atlantideum and Salvaged Glass; it serves as her analysis visor/scanner

Kestrel remains deaf in her right ear

Particularly fond of building bases within ruins

Kestrel's Tags:

Broadcasts

Travels

Aesthetic

-{{ Iteration: Threnody }}-

Pronouns: They/It/She

Specialties: Astrocartography, Navigation, Divination, Music, Communications

-{{ Astrocartographer // Seer }}-

Only a Traveler in part, Threnody is the result of a glitch. When a Traveler and their Living Ship perished simultaneously, an error occurred upon their arrival to the World of Glass which merged the two entities: the Traveler's body with the Ship's soul- though the Ship did end up having some influence on their new body. Softhearted, incredibly emotional, and afraid of most things. Threnody largely keeps to themself, unless Iteration: Onfim insists on dragging them around. Threnody is still trying to figure out what their 'purpose' is, after a long time of guilt. They follow rather than lead, going wherever they are needed.

Trivia:

Interceptor Callsign: Forsaken-Harmony

Reluctant commander of Vy'keen freighter CSV-24 Whalesong

Overseer of Vy'keen settlement Yetrint's Eve

Prefers dissonant, exotic, and infested planets

Fluent in Korvax, Vy'keen, and ATLAS

Aside from Raider and Support crews provided by Onfim and Raskol, Threnody's entire fleet consists of Cosmic Megafauna

They have two sets of eyes; the second set is usually (mostly) closed, and when open, they expand Threnody's vision into the Infrared/Ultraviolet ranges

Threnody's Tags:

Broadcasts

Travels

Aesthetic

-{{ The Crew }}-

-{{ Yamazyv }}-

Pronouns: They/Them

Specialties: History, Metaphysics, Religion, Cosmology, Cybernetics

-{{ Rebuilt Priest // Harbinger }}-

Yamazyv was a Priest-Entity who was among Korvax Prime's casualties at the hands of the First Spawn in Iteration: Raskol's universe. Left to fester and rot in the World of Glass for eons, Yama's resentment for the Gek, the Korvax who lived, the ATLAS, and the universe at large, only grew. With the Voidmother's resurgence, Yamazyv was given a second chance. Scraps of their shell found by Raskol during a tense stint in the Odyalutai galaxy, they and Iteration: Onfim worked together to rebuild the fallen priest. Brooding and vengeful, much of the crew is rather unsettled by the Rebuilt Priest, even Raskol- despite the love they hold for their old partner.

Trivia:

Interceptor Callsign: Little-Sister

Co-commands Iteration: Raskol's freighter, the CSV-16 Parhelion

Overseer of Korvax settlement New Esakure

Typically settles on radioactive, dissonant, or frozen planets

Fluent in Korvax and Autophage

Nearly killed Pirate Lord Agni during several of their first meetings, but now they get along almost too well

Yamazyv's Tags:

Broadcasts

Travels

Aesthetic

-{{ Agni }}-

Pronouns: They/Them

Specialties: Piracy, Smuggling, Weapons Development, Sabotage and Demolition

-{{ Pirate Lord // Destroyer }}-

Agni was born into what was, at a point in time, one of the most affluential and high-rated trade families in their sector of Eissentam- until, that is, Agni brought the whole damn thing down themself, with the help of some particularly irate Vy'keen pirates. They've actually had numerous dealings with the Corrupted Starcharts gang- they were among old Iteration: Kestrel's hunting crew; the fact that they survived the Leviathan's retaliation is a feat they will take every opportunity to brag about, much to their old squadmate's dismay. When Kestrel could not be found, they returned to piracy, plain and simple, and met Iteration: Onfim. The two (now three, since Kestrel has been found) are thick as thieves, causing all sorts of havoc together.

Trivia:

Interceptor Callsign: Vile-Ironhand

Co-captain of the CSV-22 Tresserhorn, alongside Iteration: Onfim

Overseer of Gek settlement Linik's Eve

Usually prefers swamp or desert planets

Fluent in Gek and Vy'keen

Agni's Tags:

Broadcasts

Travels

Aesthetic

-{{ OOC Blog Info }}-

Hi, call me Shy or Crow! I'm the fella running this blog. My main is @blackcr0wking, and I have an art blog- @blackcr0wkingart - as well, some posts from which may end up in here. ;D

Anyway. I've been playing No Man's Sky on Playstation since release in 2016, and though I've fallen off of it here and there, it always pulls me back in. :'3 If you'd ever like to meet up/hang out in-game, feel free to shoot a message for my PSN and/or NMS friend code!

Posts on this blog are made both in and out of character depending on content as well as my energy levels at the time. In/out of character posts should usually be tagged as such (as long as i remember to do so); though I do also distinguish character posts by color, as follows:

》 Raskol's broadcasts are denoted by a deep violet.

》 Onfim's are marked by red-orange.

》 Kestrel's text is accented with teal.

》 Threnody's posts are marked with sky blue.

》 Yamazyv's broadcasts bear a deep, muted gold.

》 Agni's text is a dark olive green.

-{{ Tag Directory }}-

Other Travelers

Answered Asks

Bases

Planetary Records

Artworks

Memes

Old NMS

And I think that about covers it, thanks so much for reading! Inbox is always open for questions and such, both in-character and out-of-character. :)