The Deceiver

The Deceiver, called Mephet'ran by the necrontyr who first encountered it, is the most cunning and treacherous of all the c'tan star gods. Where the Nightbringer ruled through terror and the Void Dragon through raw power, the Deceiver has always relied upon guile, lies and manipulation, weaving intricate webs of deceit to achieve ends it could never seize by force alone. It was, by the reckoning of its own kind, among the weakest of the c'tan, and it survived and prospered precisely because it learned to make others do its fighting for it.

The necrontyr named it the Messenger, hoping this most personable of the star gods might bridge the gulf between their people and the remote, hungering c'tan. That trust was catastrophically misplaced. It was the Deceiver who presented itself before the ruling Triarch and offered the Silent King the fateful bargain of biotransference, promising bodies of undying metal with which to fight the ancient enemy. The offer was accepted, and the necrontyr traded away their souls, becoming the soulless necrons, while the Messenger's true design, the harvesting of an entire species' life-energy for the c'tan, quietly came to fruition.

All the while the Deceiver played its games, stoking the necrontyr's smouldering hatred of the Old Ones, manipulating events from the shadows and setting its many puppets to dance upon its strings. It fancied itself the master of every intrigue, the schemer whom none could out-scheme. Yet in the end even the great trickster was outdone, for when the necrons turned upon their masters the Deceiver was betrayed and shattered along with the rest, its essence riven into fragments and imprisoned within tesseract labyrinths.

Even so, none can say with certainty that the Deceiver is truly contained. Scattered rumours and unaccountable events across the galaxy hint that one or more shards of the Messenger yet walk free, spinning their schemes beyond the reach of any tomb world's vigilance. If any c'tan could talk or trick its way out of eternal imprisonment, it would be this one, and that possibility gnaws at even the coldest necron minds. The Deceiver, after all, has always been at its most dangerous when everyone believes it defeated.