Editing Konrad Curze (section)

===Crime and Punishment... and Punishment===
{{Topquote|Know how I stayed alive this long? All these years? Fear. The spectacle of fearsome acts. Somebody steals from me: I cut off his hands. He offends me: I cut out his tongue. He rises against me: I cut off his head, stick it on a pike. Raise it high up so all in the streets can see. That's what preserves the order of things. Fear.|Bill the Butcher, ''Gangs of New York''}}

As such, Curze began to commit utterly horrific acts of torture upon his victims before killing them and displaying their bodies in the most public of manners. Leaders of the corrupt administration disappeared, only to be found later hung from administration buildings and horribly mutilated, their faces often untouched so people could instantly identify them. Notorious criminals (as defined by Konrad) were found in the streets, eviscerated or impaled and left to die on the spires of manufactorum rooftops. The blood of those who had committed "crimes" flowed in the streets, with body parts stopping up storm drains. He apparently even saw suicide as a crime, and would sometimes show up at the potential perpetrator's residence before they could carry out the deed. [[Grimdark|Not to talk them out of it, but rather to torture the person to death in order to set an example.]] What the fuck. And as before, no matter the crime, the sentence was always the same; death. Only now it was via the most horrific means that could be dreamt up in the superhuman mind of a deranged Primarch, rather than simple execution. And to be completely fair to Curze, most of the Nostramon populace were not mere petty criminals. As previously mentioned, this was a world where activities like killing for the sake of cannibalism were commonplace. So even had he gradated his punishments, simple statistical chance would mean that the vast majority of his victims would have been guilty of some capital offense regardless of why he killed them. Of course this was not universally true, but could go some way in explaining why a superhumanly intelligent being would seemingly just not bother to apply ''any'' sort of nuance in dispensing his "justice".

The really scary part? ''It worked''. Within a year, Curze had terrified the people of his home hive city, Nostramo Quintus, to the point where the crime rate had reached damn-near zero. Where once the nighttime streets had bustled with activity, now everyone maintained a self-imposed curfew to minimize the casualties from [[Awesome|Space Marine Batman]]. Mothers began to threaten their kids that if they continued to misbehave, the Night Haunter would come for them. Additionally, absolutely nobody was safe. The planet's most powerful kingpins, crimelords, and political officials were killed just as regularly and barbarically as the lowliest of petty thieves. The criminal syndicates and planetary nobles (tautology) had continued their attempts to find and kill Curze, but after a number of years of him slaughtering their ever larger kill-teams with ever increasing barbarity, they essentially just gave up.

However, it is at this point that things started to unravel for Curze. Growing up on Nostramo had, just by itself, caused significant damage to Curze's psyche. Nostramo was a world that displayed an entire population full of the absolute worst humanity had to offer, even if the people themselves weren't entirely to blame. This left him with quite a dim view of human nature, and it would show in how he dealt with the planets he would go on to conquer. Curze had also never had anything approaching friends or family upon Nostramo, which might have allowed him to develop some understanding of comradery. All of this aside, Curze might have been able to shift his view of humanity once he got off of Nostramo but unfortunately, he had an even worse problem compounding his all-consuming pessimism. For as it turned out, Curze was a potent psyker, and his talents manifested largely in the form of visions of the future. These visions seemed unerringly accurate and were exacting in detail, but almost all of them depicted the most horrifically violent of all possible outcomes for any given situation. Curze conducted practically all of his actions around these visions, attempting as best he could to avoid, or at least mitigate, whatever terrible future he saw coming to pass. 

Sadly, he was almost never successful, and some brutal permutation of his visions would almost always come to pass. This left him with the hopeless view that life was both unspeakably awful ''and'' virtually impossible to change. However, sometimes Curze would have visions that presented outcomes that were not so terrible. One important example of this came when Curze stopped two boys from assaulting some random woman. He killed the first boy, than played cat-and-mouse with the other until eventually cornering him. As he prepared to kill the second boy, he had a vision. In this vision, he offered the boy a chance to live rather than killing him as per usual. This had two outcomes; the first being that the boy became a disciple of Curze's justice and helped him form a sort of vigilante group to enforce law and order upon Nostramo. In the second, the boy grabbed a knife laying on the ground, stabbed Curze, and escaped. This escape would hurt Curze's reputation, and force him to redouble his killings as the crime rate skyrocketed amongst the now less fearful populace.

Under better circumstances, these more optimistic visions might have provided Curze with an impetus for introducing some genuine positivity to Nostramo. As stated previously however, the nature of Nostramo's people had polluted Curze's outlook on life. The world was a place where practically nothing good ever happened and having experienced only this planet sized Sin City for his entire life, Curze was convinced that the most negative outcome of a situation was virtually guaranteed to occur. The fact that the vast, vast majority of his visions bore this out didn't help either. It follows then that Curze chose to kill the boy, believing the negligible possibility of a positive future to not be worth the risk. After killing the boy however, he noticed that the knife that he had seen the boy grabbing in his vision seemed too far away for the boy to have physically reached it. This confused and disquieted him, and he believed for a moment that he might have made a mistake. However, he ultimately dismissed his doubt and assumed that he must simply have missed something during his vision, for it was unthinkable that the vision could have been ''false''. It is thus heavily implied that Curze's [[noblebright]] vision had in fact been the real future, but his own biases caused him to disregard it. 

On that note, it it is highly likely that his ability to see the future was fucked with by the Chaos Gods while he was in the Warp, as Sanguinius had a similar ability which was not so grimdark. These visions also caused Curze to engage in the practice of punishing "pre-crime". That is, if he saw a vision of someone committing a crime, he would punish them as though they had successfully committed that crime, even if no actual crime had occurred. For instance, the two boys he had butchered in the above incident had not yet assaulted the woman, he had simply foreseen that they would (and to be fair to him they were about half a second away from doing so). It was also how he managed to find and kill those about to commit suicide, as obviously suicide is a rather unpunishable crime once it has been carried out. In reality of course, the entire concept of "pre-crime" is idiotic. If someone is prevented from committing a crime, even if they absolutely would have committed it if not stopped, then what that person is at worst guilty of is ''attempted'' whatever-the-crime-was. For instance, one definitionally cannot be guilty of murder if there is no murder victim. As has been noted however, Curze was not big on making distinctions when it came to his vigilantism.

The problems of Nostramo's environment, Curze's own vigilante butcherism (rip enough people's guts out with your bare hands and even the hardest motherfucker is gonna have some PTSD), and his horrific visions started to create an alternate personality within Curze's mind. As Curze continued to drown himself in blood and guts, this personality began to develop a taste for murder and torture that was independent of any greater goal. Curze managed initially to keep these dark impulses under control but as his killings continued to escalate in scope, scale, and creativity, these impulses would grow ever stronger. This additional personality would come to be known as the Night Haunter in order to distinguish it from Curze for posterity. This becomes slightly confusing however, as Night Haunter was initially just Curze's "nickname" on Nostramo, as obviously nobody knew his actual name. This confusion is then further amplified by the fact that Curze used the moniker to refer to himself long before his true descent into madness. 

The most simple (and least canon-breaking) way to view the situation is that Curze and the Night Haunter were essentially interchangeable for the majority of the Great Crusade, and the Night Haunter would not truly begin to manifest itself as a separate personality until the tail-end of the conflict. Basically, at any point before the destruction of Nostramo, the Night Haunter was just Curze having a particularly bad day. It should be noted however, that those bad days steadily increased in frequency and intensity as time went on. Interestingly enough, despite Curze's hatred of humanity and his growing appetite for death, he seemed to be aware that enjoying torture and murder were "wrong" in some fashion. Often when he enjoyed the suffering and fear he inflicted, as was the case during one of his twisted suicide preventions, his conscience would kick in and he would feel shame and guilt. So despite his actions being utterly monstrous, he was apparently not a sociopath. As with so many things, Curze did not seem to understand ''why'' it was wrong to enjoy his work, despite coming to firmly believe that the work itself was necessary.