Editing Konrad Curze (section)

====Vulkan====
[[Vulkan]] became Konrad's prisoner after Isstvan V. Unfortunately, Vulkan is [[Perpetual|immortal or some shit]], so he kept coming back from the dead. For some odd reason, this infuriated Curze rather than delighting him; one would think that an undying victim would be a dream come true for a sadistic master torturer. Vulkan had to do all kinds of shit, including being forced to kill his own [[Salamanders]], watch prisoners starve themselves, and fight [[Corax]] in a dream. In the end, though, Curze couldn't bring Vulkan down to his level, causing massive amounts of [[rage]].

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Vulkan ended up in a maze built by [[Perturabo]], with his hammer at the end of it. Vulkan had a teleporter in his hammer which he figured Curze didn't know about, and resolved to get to it and teleport out of the Nightfall. He couldn't navigate the maze worth shit though, and he was pretty much fucked, but after a couple of days, he pissed off Curze to the point where Curze just dropped the maze and let Vulkan into the center so they could fight. Vulkan revealed that Curze had just given him a teleporter and Curze was all "fuck you, teleporters don't work here", to which Vulkan replied, "[[Lulz|It's also a hammer]]". Vulkan then proceeded to beat the shit out of Curze, but didn't kill him [[Batman|(because that would be stooping to his level, apparently).]] For whatever reason, Curze's precognitive abilities didn't warn him about any of this. Or maybe they did; it seemed like Curze really wanted Vulkan to kill him during the fight, so maybe he did in fact foresee some of it. Doesn't make much sense either way though.

When he was done, Vulkan said (essentially) "Fuck you Curze, ''I'M'' VULKAN! So MY teleporters work here. I just wanted to beat the shit out of you." He then escaped, leaving Curze more emo, depressed, and filled with more [[RAGE]] than ever before. After this came his second confrontation with the Lion, and he was defeated and temporarily rendered comatose. He recovered in time for the final void engagement against the Dark Angels, and boarded the ''Invincible Reason'' with a number of Night Lords. But the battle went against them and Curze escaped into the bowels of the gigantic ''Gloriana-class'' cruiser. From there, he spent a few weeks playing hide and seek with the Dark Angels aboard the ''Invincible Reason'', until the Lion tried his hand at personally hunting Curze down. Before he could find Curze however, the Dark Angels fleet reached Macragge, and the Lion decided to abandon his search and go down to the planet's surface for a heart-to-heart with Guilliman. A heart-to-heart which did ''not'' include the fact that the galaxy's most deranged murder machine was currently up in orbit and unattended. These two monumentally terrible decisions by the Lion enabled Curze to escape the ''Invincible Reason'' by launching a massive Drop Pod Assault from the ship onto Macragge. Needless to say, this nearly caused a complete catastrophe for the Dark Angels. The Ultramarines had obviously not been aware that an orbital assault by another Legion was about to take place, and Curze launching the ''Invincible Reason's'' entire complement of Drop Pods caused the Ultramarines to flip their shit; they'd just been betrayed at Calth by another [[Word Bearers|ostensibly loyal Legion]] after all. The Lion managed to smooth things over with Guilliman before anybody could be shot out of the sky (though the incident stretched Guilliman's tolerance near to breaking point), but Curze, lost amongst the mess of Drop Pods, escaped onto Macragge's surface and vanished. He then decided to go on a rampage in the capital city, butchering Ultramarines and civies, flipping Land Raiders, and making a general nuisance of himself. Despite the presence of ''three Legions'' on the planet (three highly competent ones at that), Curze's supreme sneakiness allowed him to engage in his merriment undetected.

Eventually, the Lion and Guilliman caught up with him, and the three of them engaged in a duel. Curze managed to hold his own against both, and even skewered the Lion right through the throat with his lightning claws at one point. However, it turned out that the duel was a trap, as Curze had set the entire Chapel of Hera to explode with his two brothers inside. Curze managed to trap his brothers in the doomed chapel, and detonated the explosives while he made his escape. Little did Curze know that the Lion and Guilliman had managed to escape through the power of friendship. Seriously...[[My Little Pony|friendship truly is magi-]]{{BLAM}}. However, they were at least off the planet for the time being (they got teleported off world by [[Barbarus Dantioch]], and so Curze had more or less the run of the place. Curze's next move was to pay Bobby G's mother a surprise visit. He tried freaking her out with the fact that what appeared to be a 10-12 foot tall, smelly, particularly strung out drug addict had just entered her sitting room. It worked for all of about ten seconds before she told Curze to sit and spin. A mere mortal talking back to him pissed Curze off quite a bit, but he had no time to ruminate as he was unexpectedly set upon by Vulkan.

Vulkan had by sheer coincidence teleported to Macragge right after escaping the Nightfall. As was to be entirely expected for the poor bastard however, he had teleported several miles up in Macragge's atmosphere, and had burned up on re-entry. This final incineration was seemingly the last straw for poor Vulkan's mind, and he'd gone completely, ferally insane by the time what was left of him he hit the ground. The Ultramarines had found his virtually carbonized skeleton and taken it to a medical center, only to see it regenerate from an unrecognizable husk into Vulkan. When he regained consciousness, he broke out of the medical facility and started hunting for Curze. So Curze encountered the berserk Vulkan and had a running battle with him through the streets of Macragge. He ultimately killed Vulkan a bunch more times, and had seemingly gotten over his assmadery in not being able to permanently kill his brother. Instead, he took a sardonic delight in seeing how long it took Vulkan to regenerate from each of his various deaths, which is much more in character for him. He ended up being jumped by a bottled demon and briefly being dragged into the warp. Curze managed to kill (as in completely, not just banishing) the demon, and was dumped back onto Macragge. Due to the vagaries of time passage in the Warp, he returned several months after he'd chronologically entered the Warp. Despite this, he found upon his return that the entire planet had been put on lockdown due to his previous escapades. Since obviously nobody had been able to find him in the meantime, it had been assumed that he'd either gotten bored and stopped his shenanigans for a while, or made his way off-world via conventional means.

After getting back, he spent a bit more time terrifying the locals before he eventually snuck into Sanguinius’s throne room. Here, Curze took Azkaellion hostage in order to entice Sanguinius into having a chat with him. Before the chat could occur however, the two of them proceeded to have an extremely cool but totally pointless duel. For despite Curze being fully armed and armored while Sanguinius was not, they both not only had constant visions of what would happen during the fight (ie, this fight had more slow motion action visions than a Zhang Yimou film), but they each already knew how both they and the other was going to die, and each knew it wouldn't be during the duel. Despite this, and despite Curze even humorously pointing out how silly the two of them fighting would be, Sanguinius seemingly couldn't help himself and attacked Curze anyway. True to form, the entire thing played out in their heads à la the Sherlock/Moriarty brain fight in the A Game of Shadows movie, only in real time. After a long stalemate on which neither Primarch was so much as scratched, Curze got bored and backed off. He then revealed that the purpose for his visit was simply to expound on his theory that the scattering had been a deliberate ploy by the Emperor. Likewise, he believed that the circumstances of where and how each Primarch had been raised had also been the Emperor's doing. To Curze's brief delight, Sanguinius was actually rather receptive to his brother's theorizing. Sanguinius even went so far as to state that he did not believe that the circumstances of the Scattering had been chance, and admitted that he knew the Emperor had lied to the Primarchs about many things. However, this didn't change his outlook on the Emperor or the Imperium, as he believed that despite the Emperor's perfidy, his plan for humanity was ultimately beneficent and born of compassion. Curze then gave Sanguinius the chance to kill him and thereby prove that the future could be changed, but Sanguinius stopped the blow in mid-air out of pity. Curze, ''royally'' pissed at Sanguinius's mercy, proceeded to mutilate [[Sanguinary_Guard#Azkaellon|Azkaellon]] and blow up a whole lot of Sanguinary Guard, before he threw what remained of Azkaellon off a cliff and disappeared. Rather miraculously, Azkaellion actually managed to survive.

Despite having the resources of almost 3 full legions, the rulers of Imperium Secundus had great difficulty tracking Curze down. When it was revealed that Curze had never ever even left Macragge once in the years since his arrival, the Lion put the planet under almost total martial law and brought in his official [[Dreadwing|overkill brigade]] to deal with him. It had been discovered that Curze had been fomenting rebellion amongst the Illyrians, a part of Macragge that had never really accepted the civilisation of Konor and Guilliman. As such, the Lion broke his word to Guilliman, and contrived a devastating (and forbidden) orbital bombardment using drop pods and assault rams converted into barrage bombs and torpedoes. When the smoke cleared and the radiation levels subsided a fair bit, the Lion went solo hunting again. He had decided that he was simply going to walk into the rather obvious trap Curze had set for him, as there was simply no other way anyone was ever going to find the bastard. Despite having Dreadwing Astartes and vehicles crawling all over the mountain, the Lion knew that if Curze wanted to slip away, he quite easily could. If even the Lion's own exceptional instincts and hunting skills weren't up to snuff, the capabilities of mere Astartes certainly wouldn't be. So he took Curze's bait, hoping to draw his brother into the open and trap Curze between himself and the Dreadwing's heavy support. It worked, and the two brothers began their protracted final duel in and out of the mountain fortress. Unfortunately for a precog, Curze hadn't anticipated that the Lion had already cleared all the traps set for him and he was captured after the duel (the Lion cheated by calling in Fire Raptors to prevent Curze from escaping, but that was also kinda the point).

Despite being finally caught, Curze had both the penultimate and last laugh. He managed to do what the Word Bearers, World Eaters, and Night Lords legions had not managed to do with soldiers and fleets, and broke the Imperium Secundus. His official court trial had barely started when he told Guilliman that that the Lion had broken his word by staging an ersatz orbital bombardment. Guilliman, having finally lost his patience with the Lion's ends justify the means crap, snapped the Lion's sword in two and Sanguinius told him and his legion to GTFO of Imperium Secundus. For despite having found and captured Curze, the Lion had murdered at least tens of thousands of people to do it, and had ignored Sanguinius's direct instructions. However, just as the Lion was about to leave the system, he remembered Curze's words of prophecy; that his back, the Lion's sword, and word would be broken (as well as Curze's proclamation that he would be killed by an assassin sent by the Emperor). The Lion teleported back to Macragge, just as Curze was about to be executed and fell to his knees in front of his brothers, begging them not to kill Curze. He explained to them that because the Emperor was going to have Curze assassinated, he'd need to be around to order such a thing and must therefore still be alive (which doesn't makes much since because the Emperor could have given the kill order at any point before the Ruinstorm sprang into being but whatever). Guilliman had a mini breakdown over everything he had done on the premise the greater Imperium had fallen, and Curze laughed himself into an aneurysm at the whole situation.

He would remain in custody throughout the journey back to Terra, initially kept under lock and key by the [[Dark Angels]], but was later "broken free" by Sanguinius, who dragged him down to '''Davin''' so that they could possibly change their destinies together. This frightened the absolute crap out of Curze, not least because of the potential fact that if Sanguinius could change his destiny to die by Horus' hands, then that would mean that Curze could avoid his own assassination later on, which in turn would make all of his life meaningless because he was such an evil bastard based on his absolute certainty of how events would unfold.

However, this would not be, as Sanguinius realised that to make the change in his fate, he would need to become something worse than even Horus, so he allowed fate to continue on course. What's worse is that although Sanguinius accepted his own fate, he threatened Curze with the possibility that the Emperor could even ''forgive'' him for all of his crimes, pushing Curze into silent horror at the thought that his universe was not what he thought it was. But in a cruel twist, Sanguinius decided to leave his brother to his destiny, while also pointing out that while he could pin down the actual time and location of his death to the bridge of the ''Vengeful Spirit'' at the [[Siege of Terra]]; Curze's assassination might not actually occur for millennia, and thus he promptly jettisoned his brother's stasis coffin into space.

These interactions firmly establish Sanguinius as a foil to ol' Konrad, in the sense that both were cursed from birth with precognitive abilities that would shape their personalities and ultimately their fates. Sanguinius believed it possible to avert and alter the path of his future, but accepted it instead upon realizing that doing so would entail becoming something even worse in the progress; Konrad actively rejected even the possibility of doing so, as he considered his fate to be set in stone, to the point he'd lived his whole life based on that notion. And as he had just discovered, Sanguinius was also a scary motherfucker in his own way.