Szarekh

Szarekh was the last of the Silent Kings, the hereditary rulers who spoke for the whole necrontyr race from the head of the ancient governing Triarch. It was during his reign that the necrontyr, a proud but short-lived people withering beneath the light of their own sun, made the fateful pact that would define the rest of their existence. Seduced by the promises of the star gods known as the c'tan and counselled by the honeyed lies of the Deceiver, Szarekh sanctioned the great biotransference, the mass exchange of frail flesh for immortal bodies of living metal.

The gift was a curse in disguise. The process granted deathlessness but tore from the necrontyr their very souls, dulling their minds and hollowing out all that had made them a people rather than machines. Szarekh grasped the enormity of his error only when it was too late to undo, and the guilt of it would haunt him across the ages that followed. When the War in Heaven at last turned against the Old Ones, he chose his moment and struck, leading the necrons in a sudden revolt against their c'tan masters and shattering the star gods into fragments to be sealed within tesseract labyrinths.

Having broken the tyranny of the c'tan, the Silent King could not bear to rule the ruined people he had betrayed. He severed the command protocols that bound the dynasties to his will, granting them their independence, and went into self-imposed exile in the black gulfs between the galaxies, there to atone and to prepare distant reaches for his people's eventual return. For sixty million years he wandered, silent and alone, a king without a throne.

His exile ended with a discovery that changed everything. In the intergalactic dark, Szarekh encountered the vanguard of the tyranid hive fleets, and understood at once the doom they represented: should the great devourer consume the galaxy's biomass, the necrons would lose forever any hope of one day reclaiming living form. Driven by that terror, the Silent King has returned to the galaxy of his birth to reunite the squabbling dynasties beneath a reforged Triarch, gathering the phaerons Hapthatra the Radiant and Mesophet the Shadowed Hand to his cause. Where once he doomed his people, Szarekh now labours to save them, an ancient and terrible sovereign racing the extinction of all life to redeem a sin sixty million years old.