The C'tan, the Star Gods

Before the rise of Man, before even the Aeldari walked the stars, the galaxy was ruled by beings of unimaginable power. Among the mightiest were the C'tan, gods of living energy born in the nuclear fires of the first stars. They were worshipped, feared, and served across a hundred million years, and then, in the greatest betrayal in the history of the galaxy, the very slaves they had made rose up and tore them apart. This is the story of the star gods: how they fed, how they ruled, and how they were broken into fragments and chained as weapons.

Gods of Living Fire

The C'tan did not begin as the metal-clad figures the galaxy would come to dread. In their earliest form they were vast, formless entities of pure energy, drifting through the void and feeding upon the radiation of the stars themselves. A being that could sup on the fires of a sun had no need of malice or ambition; the C'tan were as elemental and as indifferent as the furnaces that birthed them. Immortal and near-omnipotent within their own domain, they were nonetheless bodiless and blind to the smaller life that swarmed the younger galaxy. It would take another race to give them shape, and in doing so, to make monsters of them.

The Necrontyr's Bargain

That race was the necrontyr, a proud and doomed people cursed with short, radiation-blighted lives beneath a malignant sun. Consumed by envy of longer-lived species and obsessed with death, the necrontyr reached out to the star gods they glimpsed in the heavens and offered them a gift beyond price: bodies. They forged for the C'tan shells of living metal called necrodermis, vessels that let the formless gods take solid, terrible form at last. But a physical body could taste more than starlight. The C'tan discovered that they could feed upon the life energy of living things, upon souls themselves, and once they had savoured that richer sustenance they would never again be content with the cold fire of distant suns. What had begun as an alliance of near-equals curdled swiftly into dominion, for a god that hungers makes a greedy and pitiless master.

Biotransference and the War in Heaven

The most cunning of the star gods, the being remembered as the Deceiver, whispered a bargain that would damn an entire species. It promised the necrontyr immortality, an escape from the death they so feared, if only they would submit to biotransference, the transfer of their minds into undying bodies of living metal. Desperate, the necrontyr agreed, and were remade into the soulless legions of the Necrons. But the ritual was a harvest. As their spirits were poured into metal, the C'tan devoured the essence of the necrontyr race, gorging themselves until their power swelled beyond measure. Thus fortified, the star gods and their new slave-legions marched to war against the Old Ones, masters of the galaxy, in the cataclysm remembered as the War in Heaven, a conflict so vast it consumed suns and shaped the fate of every species yet to come, from the Aeldari to the brutal war-forms that would one day become the Orks.

The Named Gods

Though the C'tan wore many faces, a handful loom largest in the galaxy's nightmares. The Nightbringer was death made manifest, a scythe-bearing horror whose passage was so terrible that the memory of it was carved into the psyche of every mortal race; the near-universal image of a hooded reaper is said to be a racial scar left by his ancient slaughter. The Deceiver was the schemer and the liar, a manipulator who set his own kind against one another and delighted in treachery for its own sake. Mightiest and most dreadful of all was the Void Dragon, a being of pure destruction and dominion over machines, believed by some to slumber even now in the deep places of a world at the heart of the Imperium, worshipped unknowingly, whisper the fearful, by the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus as their Machine God. These were not the only star gods to leave their mark. There was the Outsider, driven to gibbering madness by the horror of what its kind had become and cast out to the very edge of the galaxy; and Llandu'gor, the Flayer, whose destruction laid so bitter a curse upon its Necron slayers that they were twisted into the wretched Flayed Ones, doomed forever to clothe themselves in the skins of the slain. Each C'tan was a different facet of the same insatiable cosmic hunger.

The Great Betrayal

For all their power, the C'tan made one fatal error: they underestimated the slaves they had made. As the War in Heaven ground toward its end, the Necron lords looked upon their star-god masters and saw the truth of their servitude. They understood that the C'tan would eventually consume everything, their metal servants included, and that so long as the star gods endured, the Necrons would never be free. And so, guided by the will of the Silent King, whose story is told in the tale of the Necrons and the Silent King, the slaves turned upon their gods. Using weapons devised for the purpose, they shattered the C'tan, not slaying them, for such beings perhaps cannot truly die, but blasting each one into countless splinters of its former self.

Shards and Slaves

What remained were the C'tan Shards: fragments of the once-whole gods, each a diminished but still fearsomely powerful splinter of a star-devouring intellect. Robbed of their unity, many shards are mad, mindless, or reduced to enacting a single fragment of their former purpose over and over. The Necrons imprison these fragments within tesseract labyrinths and stasis-vaults, hoarding them as a warlord hoards a doomsday weapon and unleashing a bound shard upon the battlefield only when annihilation is the goal. When an overlord judges a war worth the terrible risk, a shard is loosed from its prison to stride the field as a Transcendent horror, reality itself buckling and burning in its wake before it is dragged, sated but never freed, back into its chains. Yet the chains are not as sure as their jailers would like. The shattered Deceiver still schemes toward some reassembly of its scattered self, and the Nightbringer's splinters still radiate the primordial terror of death. The star gods have been broken and enslaved, but a broken god is a god still, and the galaxy has not seen the last of their hunger.