The Will of Eternity is a tomb that sails, a Cairn-class leviathan of the Necrons wrought from necrodermis that heals its own wounds and remembers no scar. It is not built so much as grown by machineries older than the youngest stars, a wedge of glimmering blackness kilometres from prow to stern, its lightless galleries silent but for the whisper of dormant machine-spirits and the tread of skeletal crew who neither breathe nor rest.
Where it passes, reality itself grows brittle. Its inertialess drives fold distance into nothing, and its portal-arrays disgorge phalanxes of warriors directly onto the decks of enemy vessels, tearing them apart from within before their crews can voice a prayer. Prow-mounted particle whips lash out to gut battleships in a single searing instant, and gauss weaponry flenses armour, atmosphere, and flesh alike into drifting dust.
For sixty million years The Will of Eternity lay dark in the deeps, its overlord entombed in the Great Sleep. Now it wakes, and it comes not to conquer but to reclaim, for it remembers a galaxy that was theirs before mankind's ancestors first crawled from the mud. Against its patient, deathless hunger, the fleets of younger races are as candle-flames set against the dark between the stars.
The fleet continues
