Round Table Viewing: Curze Branch

Nostramo.

A land of rot and chaos, where slaughter ran rampant and corpses carpeted the ground.

The lavishly dressed nobles stood in their courts, indulging in everything. Their minds fevered by the stimulation of forbidden drugs, they flung out one ludicrous scheme after another. These schemes followed the steam through the circulatory systems down into the Underhive, where gangs fought madly over them. On streets that never saw daylight, the blood of countless innocents splashed onto the ground one drop at a time, mercilessly reduced to footnotes.

Konrad Curze, crouched like a beast atop a Gargoyle, slowly raised his head.

His already oversized black robe was now heavy with rain, weighing down on his body. The protruding spine along his back and the unnaturally sharp lines of his shoulders made one wonder whether he was as thin as a skeleton—and in truth, he was. One only needed to glance at his face to know that he was little more than skin and bones.

His pitch-black eyes were fixed upon the night sky of the Underhive, segmented layer upon layer. He seemed to be watching the weather, but he was actually observing the grim towers reserved solely for the nobility.

A few seconds later, as the sour rain trickled down his wet black hair to his chin, he suddenly smiled.

The skin stretched tight over his bones abruptly tensed, like hide being cured. Blue-gray veins quietly emerged around his eye sockets. He smiled with excited yet sickly delight, bit through the tip of his tongue again, licked at the blood, then leapt down from the Gargoyle and landed on the ground.

"Home, sweet home."

He softly hummed a song he had learned on Terra, cheerfully splashing through puddles as he raced through the alleyways.

The filthy surroundings he knew so well,