#dishonoring the Lord

[vwikaartt]

Farewell, Corvo.

[dangerousdan-dan]

When I say "my lil dude", I always mean a grown-ass fictional man who can most certainly break every bone in my body without breaking a sweat

[antiyourwokehomophobia2]

Of all the soldiers god could have given this battle to, he gave it to the one with no aim

[nevesmose]

Nostraman Nature Sucks: An Attempted Lore Post

Ave dominus nox Night Lords fans. I thought I'd take some time to go through the various NL stories I have to hand and see what I could find out about the animals that lived on Nostramo. Might come in useful for something, who knows?

Sharks and Whales

As a child, on several coastal journeys with his father, he had witnessed the eyeless barrasal sharks that would group together to hunt the great whales of the open ocean. (Night Lords Trilogy)

His voice filters into something savage and predatory, as hungry as the eyeless white sharks of Nostramo’s blackest depths. (The Long Night)

Not a big surprise since they talk about them fairly often and have the Space Sharks as a successor chapter but Nostramo does have sharks. Pretty gnarly-sounding sharks if I'm honest.

I didn't know what "barrasal" meant, so I looked it up and only found one thread on r/40klore that had the same quote in it as above. Hmm.

Assuming it's not a typo or a more straightforward reference to something I'm just not getting, I'd venture a guess that barrasal, understood here to mean of or relating to "barras" like with "abyssal" could be connected to the French Revolutionary leader Paul Barras who is mostly remembered for supporting Napoleon's rise to power before being overthrown by him.

So maybe the older barrasal sharks will make use of younger ones as temporary hunting partners only to be inevitably betrayed and consumed by them. Sounds about right I think.

As for the whales, where do I even begin? I would imagine they're "whales" in name only like in Dishonored:

This does imply the possible existence of a whaling industry at some stage in Nostramo's history, though.

Crows

Jago reached into his pockets, offering a handful of breadcrumbs. Come, he said to the crows. Food for tonight. Flesh, flesh, flesh, they called back. He laughed as several of the black birds landed on his shoulders and outstretched arm. (Prince Of Crows)

‘Yes. I’ve seen them in books. Is a crow a type of bird?’ ‘Black of feather and dark of eye. It feeds on the bodies of the dead, and sings in a raw, croaking caw.’ (TLN)

Breaking news - legion that keeps referring to crows in shocking has crows on its homeworld scandal. "This is outrageous," said local Nostraman cutpurse and skin disease enthusiast Verxaglryn Quickstabber, "here we are trying to make a good name for Nostramo as a respectable hellhole, a place you'd be proud to exile your worst enemy to, and yet we're surrounded by some of the most intelligent and curious birds in existence. I was shanking someone in a back alley the other night and suddenly I saw a crow learning how to use rudimentary tools! Not on my watch, I said to the rapidly cooling body, and I threw my shiv at it. But it just flew away." At this point Mr Quickstabber was obliged to end the interview due to having been eviscerated by the Night Haunter.

I know their communication with Sevatar is happening in a dream but I really like the idea of the crows adapting to Nostramo by developing some kind of psychic hive mind that's also able to be understood by human psykers.

Crag Cougars

A beast of my home world. When next you see one of the Atramentar, look to their shoulder guards. The roaring lions on their pauldrons are what we called crag cougars on Nostramo. It was considered a mark of wealth for gang bosses to be able to leave the cities and hunt such creatures. (NLT)

Every single one of them is Scar from the Lion King, isn't it? An interesting hint about Nostramo's geography though, of which more later.

Rats

Groundcars whisked by, headlights brighter than deep-hive rats’ eyes, the occupants snug and safe behind armoured glass. (Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter)

No surprises here either. Where there's people there's rats after all.

Something with tusks?

The older Astartes grinned, wolf-like and keen, as the Atramentar either side of the Exalted’s throne growled through their tusked helms. (NLT)

This isn't that conclusive because a lot of Chaos Terminators have tusks no matter what legion they are, but Nostramo being Nostramo they probably belonged to a species of giant carnivorous mammoth that ate babies and sprayed acid from its trunk.

Cows? On My Sunless World?

‘They are still of standard human stock, and not to be mourned. What does it matter if the cattle fear the herdsman?’ hissed Krukesh the Pale. (KC:TNH)

This one's a real reach on my part as it's very likely just a turn of phrase, but I noticed it because wouldn't it be slightly more typical to use a sheep metaphor here? Plus it supports the existence of Nostraman cowboys/ranchers/vaqueros which is fun.

No bats?

His helmet bore a new, spread batwing crest in blatant imitation of Sevatar’s own. (A Safe and Shadowed Place)

A sole space was neat: a circle around an iron lectern fashioned in the form of a bat’s outflung wings, which carried a heavy book bound in human skin. (KC:TNH)

Although they appear a lot in the VIII legion's iconography and artwork, oddly enough I wasn't actually able to find a direct reference to Nostramo itself having bats. Let's cover my ass by saying this aspect might therefore have been brought in by the legion's Terran component instead.

Some Nostraman geography

The Hill Folk lived away from the cities, eking out an existence in the mountains. (NLT)

What's worse than living in a Nostraman city? Living on a Nostraman hill, apparently. This seems to just be an idea of ADB's that doesn't come up again but I've always found it quite interesting. Were the Hill Folk as scummy as the City Folk, just with more of a down-home Dukes of Hazzard vibe? Seems likely.

This also supports the idea of Nostramo not being completely urbanised like some Hive Worlds are. In my view its continents might have had a geographical layout a bit like Italy or Scotland where the cities are mainly on the flatter coasts with a more sparsely populated hilly/mountainous interior.

What else? (This part is just me making stuff up so feel free to ignore it. I'm not ADB, I'm not even ADB's hat.)

If the rest of Nostramo's marine life is anything like the sharks and whales then it's fucking terrifying. I would imagine, because it's funny, that a lot of Nostraman food features disgusting industrially-processed fish in some way or another. Like the food in Dishonored but even worse.

Is something wrong, dearest offworld husband? You haven't touched your stale bread, whalemeat and jellied eels.

Since all life on Nostramo seems to be comically carnivorous and aggressive, it would make sense in a 40K kind of way for there to be giant predatory penguins living at one or both of its poles. A bit like the monstrous blind albino penguins HP Lovecraft wrote about.

Last known infrared pict-capture of an early Nostraman settler attempting communication with a juvenile specimen of the native penguin species. There were no survivors.

[poreyneel]

Jindosh and Gortash would get along I guess

[pendleton-manor]

Quick screenshot redraw between the margins

[no-light-left-on]

trying something new with my comics

[throwawayasoiafaccount]

god tywin lannister deserved worse

just remembering elias death and i wanna puke and the way tywin talks about elia and what happened is so damn gross

but rip tommen and myrcella we all know what’s about to happen in the next book :/

the cycle of violence just keeps spinning and damn you tywin for beginning it

(i got a bit crazy in the tags 💀)

[folkdevilism]

[kg-clark-inthedark]

btw whenever I listen to King of the Rats by Bodysnatcher I always play this fun little headcanon movie in my head of a mixed high/low chaos Corvo beating Burrows within an inch of his life in a fit of rage when he confronts him in Return to the Tower, but ultimately deciding to spare him after all because despite his fury he wants Burrows to live with the shame of his mistakes and failures 🙂

Like yes???

[type40thiefoflight]

Wow Jindosh's non-lethal option is uh...not what I was expecting. Couldn't we have just zapped him a little for information like Bunting and Rothwild then knock him out and take him with us back to the boat?

Or maybe we could have put him on house arrest and ordered him work on a solution to the whale oil crisis as a punishment?

[whaledocboi]

unfortunately it appears with dungeon meshi i got the shitpost brainrot instead of the art brainrot. sad!

[blachernaepalace]

corvo got a weird case, why is he around?

[no-light-left-on]

I adore each and every post-doto fic where the now-human Outsider just waltzes into the Tower and simply moves in

just imagine working at the Tower, your employer likes to sneak out at night to run about with her definitely-not-father, you somehow survived the witch coup and when things finally start looking up, the lord protector and his protégé (who is certainly not related to him by blood) suddenly welcome in a boy of indiscernible age who somehow manages to look more pathetic than a wet kitten, but the lord protector and the empress instantly take a liking to him, come up with half-cohesive stories about his origins that you choose not to pay attention to, just like you don’t pay attention to the two of them covering their left hands at all times. and then a couple days, maybe weeks pass, and the lord protector seems to smile more, and the bed of the guest of honor is always made even though he Insists that he sleeps  in it and you have to move on with your life and pretend that the lord protector isn’t fucking his daughter’s new friend

[salteytakesonmanga]

As usual, Sanji gets the quippy line. He does have a good sense of timing for these. As a rule, One Piece’s sense of humor is not quippy, and usually whenever someone tries to look cool the rest of the crew drags them back down to earth. But in this scene it feels really natural to try to deal with an overwhelming situation with a feeble attempt at humor.

I’m sure you will not be surprised to learn that this is a dishonorable mention because Sanji originally asks if Zoro believes in god, but apparently any references to god or religion aren’t allowed because of… reasons.