Necrons

Long before humanity crawled from its cradle world, before even the eldar strode among the stars in glory, the beings called the necrontyr ruled a scatter of harsh, radiation-blasted worlds. They were a proud but dying species, their bodies withering under the light of their own sun, and their envy of the long-lived eldar curdled into a hatred that would shape the rest of their history. Desperate for permanence, the necrontyr struck a pact with the star-devouring c'tan, entities of near-godlike power that promised deliverance from death itself.

That deliverance was a lie wrapped in a gift. The necrontyr were stripped of their organic bodies and poured into immortal frames of living metal, becoming the necrons. In exchange, they became slave soldiers for their new c'tan masters, and in the millennia of war that followed, the necrons' minds and souls were eroded until only cold fragments of personality remained. Their empire crushed the nascent eldar civilization in the War in Heaven, but the cost was the near-total loss of what had once made the necrontyr people rather than machines.

The Great Sleep and the Silent King

Fearing betrayal from their own creations, the necron nobility turned upon the c'tan, shattering the star gods into fragments and binding the shards into weapons and prisons. This treachery was orchestrated in part by the Silent King, Szarekh, who then led his broken people into a self-imposed hibernation lasting more than sixty million years, hidden within tomb worlds scattered across the galaxy, waiting for a signal that never came from their king, who had fled into the void in shame.

That sleep has now ended. Across a thousand thousand worlds, tomb complexes are stirring, their dynastic overlords rising from stasis to find their once-glorious empire fallen to ruin, overrun by the very younger races the necrons once considered vermin. Some dynasties wake with clear purpose and cold, calculating patience. Others emerge with minds corroded by the ages, their personalities reduced to little more than echoes and obsessive fragments of the beings they once were.

An Empire Divided Against Itself

The necrons are not a single unified force but a fractious galaxy of independent dynasties, each ruled by its own Phaeron or overlord and each nursing its own ambitions, grudges, and doctrines of war. Some dynasties favor overwhelming firepower and technological supremacy, others prize honor and ancient ritual, and still others have embraced a savage, almost feral hunger for battle that unsettles even their own kin. This disunity is both a weakness the younger races might exploit and, perversely, a reminder of the individuality the necrontyr fought so hard to preserve.

What unites them is an unshakeable belief that the galaxy belongs to them by ancient right, and a species-wide dread of the c'tan shards that still slumber in stellar tombs, waiting to be reawakened or exploited by whichever dynasty is bold or foolish enough to try. As the tomb worlds empty and the legions of the dead march again beneath the void, the younger empires of the galaxy are only beginning to understand what it means to fight an enemy that cannot truly die, only be inconvenienced.