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"...a glowing child-form it was, crawled from the Pit onto the broken street, hissing molten metal dripping from its limbs. It was a daemon, no less, with the body of an infant but the expression of an old man, its eyes black and cold as obsidian."

— From the Arcana Progenitum of Nostramo Quintus, detailing the arrival of the infant Primarch Konrad Curze upon Nostramo

What is a soul ?

A memory, experience… Knowledge of a life lived. Personality, character… or something more, something ethereal, transcending time and space.

What was a soul, to a being seeing the life it was to lead before it was born, knowing the personality it would have before it could understand the meaning.

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Unknown to the gods, the messiah and beings larger and older than both, a soul was something more. It was known but not understood.

Beyond the space and beyond the time, with visions of all that would happen, with knowledge of what would be, with perspective of a world from before and beyond of where it was born, like all souls do a soul slipped into universe and settled in the breast of a child falling through space.

But with bestowed gifts of a child it was to be, the soul remembered.

A Child fell from the sky, wrapped in glowing energies of the cosmos it fell like a comet piercing the darkness and illuminating the gloom of a forsaken planet beneath it.

It didn’t matter to the barely living child what a soul was. Spirited away as it was from the grasp of its creator, by purpose or chance, by influence of what passed as gods in this plane or by will of its creator? A pawn set in motion by the hand of its father or a demigod stolen and thrown at the planet of Nostramo by the god of change…who knew? The infant didn’t, couldn’t know nor care young as it was.

So the child fell, through the atmosphere, piercing the clouds and the walls, the asphalt and rock steel and crust until it nestled itself deep, deep underground in the flesh of the Hive city.

From beneath the plasteel structures, the concrete and the adamantium, from dirt and darkness the bloated hive city birthed the child as it dragged itself from the molten pits, hissing and screaming for life.

Too young to understand but already burden by knowledge of who he would be Konrad Curze clawed its way up.