The Necrons
The Necrontyr and the Wars of Succession
The Necrons are a mysterious race of robotic skeletal warriors that can lie dormant in stasis-tombs for millions of years. They are the soulless creations who were once servants of the ancient C'tan. The C'tan are also known as the Star Gods by The Eldar and were once the most powerful race in the galaxy. The Necrons began their existence as a normal humanoid species known as 'The Necrontyr' living under a fearsome, scourging star in the far reaches of the galaxy known as the Halo Stars region, billions of years before the birth of our world. Assailed at every moment by ionising solar winds and intense radiation storms. The flesh and blood Necrontyr were a morbid race of people whose precarious life spans were riven by constant loss. What little information we have on the Necrontyr tell us that their lives were short and uncertain, their bodies blighted and consumed at an early age by the terrible cancers and other illnesses linked to the high levels of ionising radiation given off by their sun. Necrontyr cities were built in anticipation of their inhabitants' early demise, and the living eeked out their brief lives in the shadow of vast sepulchres and tombs dedicated to the ancestors they would soon join. The living were thought of as no more than temporary residents hurrying through the more permanent and lasting structures raised to honour the dead. On the Necrontyr homeworld, the greatest monuments were always built for the dead, never the living. Driven by necessity, the Necrontyr eventually source to improve their existence and struck out for the stars, hopeful of carving an empire in which they could realise their species' potential free from the lethal energies of their birth star. The Necrontyr blindly groped outward into the universe to explore other stars. Using stasis crypts to pro-longe their short lives and slow-moving, antimatter-powered torch-ships. They eventually began to colonise distant worlds. Little by little, the Necrontyr dynasties spread ever further, until much of the ancient galaxy answered to their rule. Sometime during their slow expansion, the Necrontyr encountered an ancient intelligent species far older than any other in existence in the known galaxy. Collectively, these beings were known as The Old Ones , and they were absolute masters of forms of energy the Necrontyr could not even conceive of, let alone wield. The Old Ones had long ago conquered the secrets of immortality, yet they refused to share the gift of eternal life with the Necrontyr, who still bore the curse of the bitter star they had been born under. The colonisation of much of the galaxy by The Old Ones had been immeasurably swifter and more expansive than that of the Necrontyr because of their The Warp Gates and mastery of the Immaterium. That, and The Old Ones incredibly long, if not downright immortal lifespans, kindled a burning, jealous rage in the Necrontyr, which ate at their culture spiritually as much as their physical cancers consumed their bodies. The Necrontyr were astonished to learn that another intelligent species enjoyed such long lives while their own were cut so brutally short. But as time wore on, further strife came to the Necrontyr. As their Empire expanded and each dynasty sought to claim its own destiny the unity of the Necrontyr fragmented and soon the great houses were engaged in all-out conflicts known as the "Wars of Secession." Had circumstances remained as they were for but a generation more, it is possible that the Necrontyr would have wiped themselves out, as so many species had before them and shall do in the future. In desperation, the ruling council of the Necrontyr Empire sought to unite their surviving houses by seeking a common enemy who could bind the feuding Necrontyr dynasties to a common cause. Having decided that their only hope of unity lay in conflict with an external enemy it was soon realised that few could prove a credible threat. Only The Old Ones, the first of all the galaxy's known sentient species, were a prospective foe powerful enough to bind the feuding Necrontyr dynasties to a common cause. Such a war was simplicity itself to justify, for the Necrontyr had ever rankled at The Old Ones refusal to share the secrets of eternal life. So did the Necrontyr declare war on The Old Ones. At the same time, they offered amnesty to any secessionist dynasties who willingly returned to the fold. Thus lured by the spoils of victory and the promise of immortality, the separatist Necrontyr realms abandoned their Wars of Secession and the War in Heaven began.The War In Heaven
The stories of the terrible war between The Old Ones and the Necrontyr that followed, known later by The Eldar as The War in Heaven, would fill a library in their own right, but the Necrontyr could never win. Their technology was consistently outmanoeuvred by The Old Ones thanks to their mastery of the Webway portals and The Warp Gates. The Necrontyr were pushed back until they were little more than an irritation to The Old Ones dominance of the galaxy, a quiescent threat clinging to their irradiated world among the Halo Stars, exiled and forgotten. The Necrontyr's fury was cooled and hardened by their failure and return to imprisonment on their homeworlds, slowly transforming into an utter hatred towards all other forms of intelligent life and an implacable determination to avenge themselves upon their seemingly invincible enemies. But in the face of defeat, the always fragile unity of the Necrontyr began to fracture once more. No longer did the prospect of a common enemy have any hold over the disparate dynasties. Scores of generations had now lived and died in the service of an unwinnable war, and many Necrontyr dynasties would have gladly sued for peace with The Old Ones if their ruling Triarch had permitted it. Thus began a second iteration of the Wars of Secession, more widespread and ruinous than any that had come before. So fractured had the Necrontyr dynasties become by then that had The Old Ones been so inclined, they could have destroyed their foes with ease. Faced with the total collapse of their rule, the Triarch searched desperately for a means of restoring order. In this, their prayers were answered, though the price for their species would be incalculably high.The Alliance with the C'tan
It was during the reign of the Silent King Szarekh that the godlike energy beings known as the C'tan first blighted the Necrontyr. It is impossible to say for certain how the Necrontyr first made contact with the C'tan, though many misleading, contradictory and one-sided accounts of these events exist. The dusty archives of the Tomb World of Solemnace claim it was but an accident, a chance discovery made by a stellar probe during the investigation of a dying star. The Book of Mournful Night, held under close guard in the Black Library's innermost sanctum, tells rather that the raw hatred that the Necrontyr held as a race for The Old Ones sang out across the Universe, acting as a beacon that the C'tan could not ignore. Whatever the truth that led to the first contact between the Necrontyr and the C'Tan the Necrontyr scientists soon realised that they had found a sentience species that was even more ancient and more powerful than of any of the corporeal species in creation, including The Old Ones . The C'Tan were entities of pure energy that had spawned during the birth of the stars aeons before. These entities had little conception of what the rest of the universe entailed when the Necrontyr first found them. They led a simple existence feeding upon the solar flares and magnetic storms of bloated red giants. But Necrontyr scientists soon realised that the C'Tan had the power they had long sought to bring about the downfall of the Old Ones. The power of these star-born creatures was incredible, the raw energy of the stars made animate, and the Necrontyr called them the C'tan or "Star Gods" in their own tongue. The C'tan were dispersed across areas larger than whole planets, their consciousnesses too vast for humanoids to comprehend. How the Necrontyr ever managed to communicate with them is unknown. Understanding that such diffused minds could never perceive the material universe without manifesting themselves in a material form, some Necrontyr actively sought the C'tan's favour and oversaw the forging of physical shells for the C'tan to occupy, cast from the living metal called Necrodermis. Fragmentary Eldar legends tell of translucent streamers of electromagnetic force shifting across space as the star vampires coiled into their new bodies in the physical realm across an incorporeal bridge of starlight. Thus clad, the C'tan took the shapes of the Necrontyr's half-forgotten gods, hiding their own desires beneath cloaks of obsequious subservience. Incomprehensible forces were compressed into the living metal of the Necrodermis bodies which the Necrontyr had forged as the full power of the C'tan at last found form. As the C'tan focused their consciousnesses and became ever more aware of their new mode of existence, they came to appreciate the pleasures available to beings of matter and the other realities of corporeal life. The deliciously focused trickles of electromagnetic energy given off by the physical bodies of the Necrontyr all about them awakened a new hunger in the C'tan very unlike the one they had once sated using the nourishing, but essentially tasteless, energies of the stars. So it was that one of the C'tan came before the Silent King Szarekh, acting as the forerunner to the coming of his brothers. Amongst its own kind, this C'tan was known as the Deceiver, for it was willfully treacherous. Yet the Silent King knew not the C'tan's true nature, and instead granted the creature an audience. The Deceiver spoke of a war, fought long before the birth of the Necrontyr, between the C'tan and the Old Ones. It was a war, he said, that the C'tan had lost. In the aftermath, and fearing the vengeance of the Old Ones, he and his brothers had hidden themselves away, hoping one day to find allies with whom they could finally bring the Old Ones to account. In return for this aid, the Deceiver assured, he and his brothers would deliver everything that the Necrontyr craved. Unity could be theirs once again, and the immortality that they had sought for so long would finally be within their grasp. No price would there be for these great gifts, the Deceiver insisted, for they were but boons to be bestowed upon valued allies. Thus did the Deceiver speak, and who can say how much of his tale was the truth? It is doubtful whether even the Deceiver knew, for trickery had become so much a part of his existence that even he could no longer divine its root. Yet his words held sway over Szarekh who, like his ancestors before him, despaired of the divisions that were tearing his people apart. For months the Necrontr debated the proposal amongst themselves. Through it all, the only dissenting voice was that of Orikan, the court astrologer, who foretold that the alliance between the Necrontyr and the C'tan would bring glory but destroy forever the soul of the Necrontyr people. Yet desire and ambition swiftly overrode caution, and Orikan's prophecy was dismissed. A year after the Deceiver had presented his proposition, the Triarch agreed to the alliance, and so forever doomed their race. For their part, the Necrontyr soon awestruck by the discoveries of their new allies and the C'tan moved to take control over their benefactors. The powers of the C'tan manifested in the physical world were almost god-like and it was not long before the C'tan were being worshipped as the Star Gods the Necrontyr had named them. Perhaps they had been tainted by the material universe they had become a part of, or perhaps this had always been their nature even when they were bound to the suns they fed upon, but the C'tan proved to be as cruel and capricious as the stars from which they had been born. They revelled in the worship of the Necrontyr and feasted upon the life energies of countless mortal slaves.Biotransference and the Rise of the Necrons
"When the Silent King saw what had been done, he knew, at last, the true nature of the C'tan, and of the doom they had wrought in his name."
—Excerpt from the Book of Mournful Night
Armed with weapons of god-like power and starships that could cross the galaxy in the blink of an eye, the Necrontyr stood ready to begin their war against the Old Ones anew. But the C'tan had another gift for their mortal subjects. They offered the Necrontyr a path to immortality and the physical stability their race had always craved. Their diseased flesh would be replaced with the living metal of Necrodermis that made up their Star Gods' own physical forms. Their discarded organic husks would be consumed and their cold, metal forms would then be free to pursue their great vengeance against the Old Ones and the rest of a hateful universe, freed forever from the weaknesses of their hated flesh. With the pact between the Necrontyr and C'tan sealed, the Star Gods revealed the form that immortality would take for the Necrontyr, and the great biotransference process began. Colossal cyclopean bio-furnaces built by Necrontyr artifice roared day and night, and into these, the Silent King's peoples marched according to the terms of the pact he had made with the C'tan. What blasphemous procedures the Necrontyr were subjected to within the raging bio-furnaces cannot be known, but certainly, each was stripped of flesh and of soul, his body replaced by a shell of living metal animated by what remained of his guttering self. Above each furnace swooped and dove the ethereal true-forms of the C'tan as they glutted themselves on the cast-off spiritual detritus and life energy of an entire species; growing ever stronger. It was only when the Silent King himself emerged from the bio-transference process and looked upon what had become of his people that he saw the awful truth of the pact he had made. As Szarekh watched the C'tan feast on the life essence of his people, he realised the terrible depth of his mistake. In many ways, he felt better than he had in decades, the countless aches and uncertainties of organic life now behind him. His new machine body was far mightier than the frail form he had tolerated for so long, and his thoughts were swifter and clearer than they had ever been. Yet there was an emptiness gnawing at his mind, an inexpressible hollowness of spirit that defied rational explanation. At that moment, he knew with cold certainty that the price of physical immortality had been the loss of his soul. With great sorrow, the Silent King beheld the fate he had brought upon his people: the Necrontyr were not but a memory, and the soulless, undying Necrons had been reborn in their place. Yet though the price had been steep, biotransference had fulfilled all of the promises that the C'tan had made. Even the lowliest of the Necrontyr were now blessed with immortality -- age and hard radiation could little erode their new mechanical bodies, and only the most terrible of injuries could destroy them utterly. Likewise, the Necrons now enjoyed a unity that the Necrontyr had never known, though it was achieved through tyranny and the complete loss of individuality and emotion rather than by consent. The biotransference process had embedded command protocols in every Necron mind, granting Szarekh the unswerving loyalty of his subjects. At first, the Silent King embraced this unanimity, for it was a welcome reprieve from the chaos that had consumed the Necrontyr Empire in recent years. However, as time wore on he grew weary of his burden but dared not sever the command protocols lest his subjects turn on him seeking vengeance for the terrible curse he had visited upon them. Thus the Necrontyr became the Necrons, cursed to the eternal servitude of their Star Gods. The C'tan feasted upon the entire Necrontyr race's life energies even as they made the transfers, leaving behind only the ghostly echoes of the Necrontyr's consciousnesses. Only a few of the most strong-willed Necrontyr retained their intellect and self-awareness, and even they were but shadows of their former selves. They had been purged of so much of what had made them unique individuals. The Necrons cared not at all for their loss; all that mattered to them was that they would live forever without disease or death as their Star Gods had promised. The Necrontyr species was united as never before. The process imbued in every one of the Silent King's subjects the command protocols with which he would rule over them with an iron hand. The entire species was his to command, and so it fell upon the Necrons to honour their side of their terrible bargain. Renewed by their devouring of the life energies of an entire species, the C'tan were unstoppable, and with the legions of the Necrons marching in their wake, the Old Ones were doomed. Only one thing truly remained of the old Necrontyr, their burning hatred for all the other living, intelligent species of the universe. Legions of the undying living metal warriors set out into the galaxy in their Tomb Ships and the stars burned in their wake. The Old Ones' mastery of the Warp was now countered by the C'tan's supremacy over the physical universe, and the ancient enemies of the Necrons suffered greatly in the interstellar slaughter that followed and were driven from the Galaxy.
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