Jump 042: Warhammer 40k - Necrons

Jump 042: Warhammer 40k - Necrons

Location: Upon The Forge
Identity: Necron Lord
Drawbacks: [+1700] Faded Glories And Ancient Emnities, Sixty Million Years, Soulless Husk, Madness, Still Mortal, Immortal Hubris, Ruins And Dust, Only War: Eldar, Mandate of the King, Remnants of Heaven

[200/2700]  Surviving The Great Sleep
[Free]      Will Of Lords
[Free]      Bickering Dynasties
[Free]      Pride Unbowed
[Free]      Kingdom Come
[300/2700]  My Edicts Eternal
[400/2700]  My Commands Unquestioned
[500/2700]  Honored Above All
[700/2700]  The Immortal Lords
[800/2700]  To Treat With Death
[900/2700]  Relentless
[1000/2700] Vagaries Of Design
[1100/2700] The Living Metal
[1300/2700] Conquer Eternity
[1900/2700] Broken Godling
[2000/2700] Primordial Minds
[2100/2700] Ancient Beyond Reckoning
[Free]      Dynastic Decorum
[2200/2700] Artifact Arsenal
[2400/2700] Precious Materials
[2700/2700] Galactic Wonder: The Aeonic Forge

I have lived a very long time. I have watched empires wax and wane. I have seen the greatest of minds brought low, and the meanest of creatures rise to ascendancy. I watched my people war with gods, retaliate by creating their own, and then slay them when they turned upon us to cause our extinction.

I am the Last One.

I was born on the homeworld, while our flesh and blood forms still strode across its surface, but nowhere else in the galaxy. My mother sang to me as a child, teaching me of our peoples' heritage. Of the blazing azure star which we were born under, rising from the dust and fighting for every day of survival on a world that seemed bent on killing us with plague and cancer. Our people clawed their way to the stars, finding the much of the galaxy so much more habitable than our birth world. Planets teeming with life, whose animals lived longer than we did. Oh, our wisest minds learned how to modify our bodies in many ways to extend our lifespans, to augment our immune systems, but it only postponed the inevitable; one might have lived to see grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren if lucky, where before one would be hard-pressed to raise a child to full adulthood - if the child could live that long.

I, as all did, learned to bear the flensing knives of the chiurgeons that extracted tumors that all suffered. I was healthier than most; many of my peers did not survive to adulthood and joined their ancestors in the great tombs. Once, when our empire was more than a single star system, there were countless such tombs; even outside the harsh light of our star, our lives were short and often cut shorter by the ravages of our biology. Every city had one, where our revered dead would be interred, and it would be no surprise to any outsider how prominently they were, even in our every day lives.

As I recovered my father would comfort me, teaching our peoples' history. Of our people first colonizing the nearby stars in primitive ships, then learning to go faster than light and building new dynasties in the heavens for the Triarch to rule over, some holding dozens of worlds, eventually leading to the War of Succession between rival dynasties. Of meeting the Old Enemy, their forms so unlike ours, but their minds unmistakably sharp. Of engaging them in diplomacy at first, then discovering that they held none of the honor that our people did. Of appealing to them for their aid in helping remove the horrors that plagued our species, with their mastery of the genetic sciences, being rebuffed at every turn, and things degrading to open warfare. And of the War in Heaven, where they systematically used their servitor races to dismantle every dynasty among the stars and locked us in the star system of our birth, all our habitable planets horrendously overpopulated as a result, occasionally throwing their servitors at us as a sickening game to them.

As I aged, I learned the sciences at the side of my grandfather, himself a cryptek. While I was certainly intelligent, to my regret at the time I hadn't the spark of genius that he had. What I did have, however, was a body that was reasonably healthy and resilient. A body that was still young, which put me in the perfect position for being part of an experiment. I was of course one of many chosen, but our brightest had discovered the Star Gods, as they called the C'tan, a tongue in cheek term that gained popularity. By this time we'd been able to communicate with them in a way, and we sought to give them a more contemporary form than the energetic forms that swam through stars as we might swim in water.

One of the ideas was to give them our bodies to possess. The experiment, so far as anyone else was aware, failed terribly. The C'tan who attempted it was wounded, though it hid the injury. Most of those involved in the experiment did not survive, though I was one of the lucky exceptions, and the only one who survived more than three days. And all of this did not matter, as mere weeks later they puzzled out how to grant bodies to the C'tan out of living metal.

In this time, for a handful of years, the C'tan walked among us as seeming equals, happy to uplift us to a better state. Our technologies underwent rapid advancement - what should have taken hundreds of years changed in weeks. Thousands of years in months. After the span of barely more than a decade, the C'tan gave us the final solution to our infirm bodies: biotransference. Like the C'tan, we would inhabit bodies of living metal, and never again would we have to experience the weakness and pain. Never again would we grow old. Even if we were rent limb from limb, biotransference would allow us to restore our broken forms to health again. And billions upon billions willingly marched into the biotransference centers.

The first signs that something was wrong were when, instead of watching the joy and celebration one would expect from those who underwent the process, they were cold and uncaring. But it was an adjustment period, the C'tan had said, and billions continued to march forth. The Silent King, the phaerons under him, the lords under them, all underwent biotransference in the first wave. No one had considered that it wasn't voluntary until those who were converted began dragging those who were not to the chambers.

In a single horrific day, I watched my entire race annihilated, turned into soulless husks of what they formerly were. The process I underwent had not failed, you see - a piece of the C'tan was indeed grafted into me. With the wisdom I gained from that slice of a star god, I fled and used my newfound knowledge to hide from the all-seeing sensors that sought to find every last survivor, living off of scraps and finding myself in surprisingly good health. Moreover, the more time I spent getting used to the fragment of the C'tan that had merged its consciousness with mine, the more I found... unexpected abilities. The ability to manipulate the technology that comprised those around me, to ensure they saw what I wanted them to see - a Lord amongst them. The lower ranks seemed to not notice anything out of the ordinary. The upper echelons... well, some realized that I wasn't quite the same, but waved it off. And somehow I evaded the C'tan themselves, as I suspected I would be unable to hide my nature fully from them.

Laying low forever was impossible, though; I attracted the attention of the Silent King, Szarekh himself, who saw me as a Lord of unknown disposition. He who saw fit to grant me the disposition of his choosing. Unlike the other Lords, I did not desire to retake a lost dynasty, and so he granted me other duties that were befitting my apparent station. This was how I found myself placed in charge of building a modern fleet - the conversion of our star into a forge. While I was far more intelligent with the c'tan shard's augmentation, I was still not sufficient on my own to undertake such a grandly scaled project, I was given whatever I needed to make it happen. When all was prepared, our azure star went dark, its layers falling in on themselves. Very carefully applied gravitic pulses kept it from going supernova, and slowed its spin until it inexorably came to a stop. The remaining light coming from its surface slowly faded as it grew continually smaller, its matter degenerating into primordial subparticles and beyond. That degenerate matter was restructed and put to use - the star itself clad in living metal and converted into the first and only Aeonic Forge that the universe ever saw.

With the full conversion of the Necrontyr completed... the Necrons set forth to bring the war to the Old Enemy. At first we took no actions, though the Aeonic Forge steadily built up fleets and war materiel. While the warriors were quiet and grim, as they ever were, the Lords and Overlords were chafing at the bit to be set forth. It was not long until provocation was brought to our door in the form of the Old Enemy's servitors being sent at our home once more, though, except this time we had the Aeonic Forge; shifting into its weaponized form, the output of a star lanced across our star system and obliterated the entirety of their fleet in short order.

With that, the War in Heaven began in earnest, and our fleets streamed forth. The Old Enemy's servitors engaged us, but were no match for tens of centuries of advancement compressed into a handful of years. While the Old Enemy still had the advantage in logistics via their Webway, once Necrons were on the ground nothing but the utter annihilation of the army could stop them, for they could be whisked from battle when damaged, repaired, and sent back to the front lines they had come from. The Necrons began retaking the worlds that the Necrontyr lost, unliving and unchanging, as if they were to be eternal monuments to the lost population.

Such impudence, the Old Enemy decided, could not be permitted to stand. Their servitors were given greater weapons and means and struck back, but even then they continued to be pushed back, the Old Enemy refining their slaves and throwing them into the fray once more. When they took to the field, the Necrons' star gods met them in combat, but neither could truly fell the other; the Old Enemy would retreat into the Webway, the C'tan would teleport from the field, more of the Enemy's slaves would join the battlefields, and slain warriors would be resurrected to fight again. And the pattern repeated, world after world.

As the Old Enemy's tools of war advanced, so did the Necrons'. The fleets I made were continually more advanced, designs for weapons pouring in from hundreds or thousands of crypteks. The Forge's design was copied in smaller scale, with Aetheric Orbs being deployed onto the battlefields. Servitors were made hardier, new races dreamed into existence, and in the end the battle fronts began to grow stagnant, barely shifting, destruction wrought on an unimaginable scale, stars winking out of existence. The most advanced of the enemy were fielded against us, two races in particular who were the hardest to overcome. The Aeldari, who could make liberal use of the power of the immaterium on a scale seldom seen but for the Old Ones themselves, and could even sing unreality into being to use as weapons. The Krork, who could overpower our dampening devices by changing the local resonance of the sea of souls, with a rich genetic knowledge of weaponry even if it wasn't as advanced, their presence spread insidiously through spores. And of course, the war-minds that the Old Enemy had created in the Sea of Souls, weaponizing the immaterium itself.

The end of the war was an unexpected thing, in truth. All the seven worlds of the home system had been converted into world engines, taken into battle by the Silent King himself and his most trusted. Most had been destroyed in the war, but two survived; from the homeworld-turned-warworld that was home to the Szarekh and his dynasty, a cunning plan was hatched. A new War of Succession, if a false one, where dynasties pitted themselves against each other in warfare that ultimately saw nearly no permanent damage. The Old Enemy's webway, previously untouchable, being pierced by the most advanced weapons and allowing the raw stuff of the immaterium to flood into the twisted corridors and corrode them. Their war-minds corrupting each other and themselves just as they had previously corrupted our mortal forms and technology before the Necrons' ascent, congealing into sleeping giants deep within the sea of souls, their unnatural dreams making the immaterium more turbulent than it had ever been.

Into this, one C'tan broadened his culinary horizons, and the others rapidly followed suit. They who had consumed the souls of our people and so many servitors found that the most delectible souls were each others', and they began to destroy each other in an orgy of violence. The Necrons' warfronts fell silent, allowing Szarekh to move into the next phase of his plan. In the aftermath of the C'tan self-destruction and fragmentation, the greatest minds found ways to begin imprisoning them, whether putting their shards to use or simply chaining them. Only four C'tan were remotely close to intact, but whether in a tesseract prison or lulled to sleep by other means, all C'tan and their fragments were leashed and the masters were now the prisoners.

The destabilization of the Webway had unforeseen consequences, however. The reason the war front had fallen silent was the Enslaver Plague; whether a warpborne race or one of the Old Enemy's servitor-weapons, it was unknown, but they spared no sapient species but the Necrons as they couldn't be affected. The Old Enemy, desperate to escape being bound in potential enslavement, disappeared; it took much digging in the times to come before I found they had shed their mortal forms and left the result barely-sentient so that they would not be affected, their intellects fleeing past the deepest levels of the webway and into the empyrean itself. In the end... they chose to reinforce their existence in the immaterial, merging with the stable war-minds and mantling the gods of the Aeldari and other races, finding out too late that belief not only reinforced them but also shaped them, having their own wars with each other in unreality to settle their positions.

The Silent King, now able to see the breadth of the devastation to the galaxy and the destruction both intended and not, was overcome by grief. The order was put out for the Great Sleep, ostensibly intended to let the Necron reconquer the galaxy once the Enslaver Plague had starved itself out. Yes, the hopes were that one day biotransference could be reversed, an appropriate race serving to bring them back. Hopes that the Old Enemy would starve and wither. All the Dynasties prepared their tomb worlds and shuttered them, and the homeworld was itself sent among the stars and out of the galaxy, Szarekh wandering the black in self-exiled penance.

There is, of course, a reason I said 'Necrons' rather than 'my people'. The Necrons are an unliving monument to the death of my race - ghoulish, walking corpses. Technological zombies. Whatever the other effects of that C'tan shard merging with me - those largely seeming an instinctive feel and control over all aspects of technology - it also seems to have stopped my aging process and left me at my prime, as I found shortly after the War in Heaven began; else, I'd have been dust long before it even reached its zenith, let alone its conclusion. I've had no tumors to try to self-excise, and I seem in fact in a state of perpetual perfect health. While the Necrons have gone into their Great Sleep, I remained intact aboard the Aeonic Forge, watching the galaxy be consumed over the following centuries by the Enslaver Plague. It finally began to die out well over a thousand years later, world by world, often causing the extinction of entire intelligent species as a result. The Enslavers, starved to death after glutting themselves.

This was arguably not the worst of things - the Necrontyr realized that most of the intelligent life in the galaxy outside of our homeworld was seeded by the Old Enemy, and indeed this may have served as part of why we received such a cold greeting from them, in retrospect. They had been playing God for hundreds of millions of years, pitting their servitor races against each other for their own sick entertainment just as they had pitted them against us. But this gave me a project to engage in, one worthy of my species. The Old Enemy was beyond my reach, but spread across so many of the worlds of the galaxy, many of their servitor races lived on.

I had to be subtle, lest the Old Enemy realize what was going on and find a way to retaliate, or smoke me out. And so I learned to apply the right technologies to disguise myself. To hide in forms unlike my own. To infiltrate the species who played their part in destroying the Necrontyr's empire, or at least those who remained after the War and the Plague had reached their conclusion, as they rebuilt their societies .. in most cases. Whispering words in the ears of some. Directly arranging incidents in others to keep their societies from rising as they were in the past. Sabotaging the ecologies of their worlds. Nudging asteroids, in a couple of cases. In short, throwing away everything I had ever learned about honor, for the Old Enemy had none and thus their servitors deserved none in turn.

In these cases, my self-appointed task often concluded in a matter of centuries. In other cases, however, I was forced to take a much longer view. The Krork, especially, were one such case where a long view was needed. Manipulating them was horrendously difficult. Far from impossible... but very tricky indeed. They truly were a work of art from a certain point of view, and finding a way to sabotage them even as they kept rebuilding their societies from scratch was quite tricky.

I should have simply annihilated them outright, but I have a perverse pride in what I did to bring them down. A Krork could, given a century, spawned a population in the millions from his spores, strip-mined a planet, and built a fleet of elegant starships armed to the teeth. While I couldn't remove everything... I did do quite a bit. The trade-off was increased sensitivity to the empyrean, unfortunately, but the old Krork and the new Ork races were highly incompatible... and highly competitive. The otherworldly psychic fields interfered with each other destructively, and in time, the more adaptive but more primitive Ork race destroyed its predecessors. Unlike the Krork, the psychic sense of an Ork would cause them to gravitate toward each other - and the Krork were just close enough that Orks would flock to them with the expectation of fighting a war. Or a waaaugh, apparently.

I still honestly do not understand why the red ones go faster.

Over the countless millennia, I found myself slowing down. I most often travelled through the darkness between worlds near the speed to light to avoid detection, my only permanent companion a small salvaged shard of a C'tan in the form of a small pet that would often laze about and shift its form to suit it. Sometimes when it suited me, I would live entire lives with the species I had targeted to see whether they might have passed beyond being a potential threat or whether they should still be eradicated. Most often it was the latter, especially when they worshipped the gods that were in truth more than they appeared... but a handful were worth leaving be. Some of those lives, I made friends, even took lovers.

Some of those lives where I had made friends, the species had to be eradicated. And as much as it might have pained me, I hardened my heart and still did what had to be done. I am not sure whether I should feel I am honoring the commands of the metallic zombie that was once my king, or whether I should feel like the scum of the universe. But I did what I must do.

At times, I found developing races and sowed seeds for the future. I had visited many slumbering tomb worlds and acquired the necessary tools of course, and fabricated them myself in the cases that I could not do so, but manipulating genetic lines to be psychically null or outright psi-hostile with pariah genes was... an interesting bit of work to do. Most decidedly not my specialty, no, and mistakes were made at times of course, but... I managed to keep my presence concealed above all other concerns. And some of the species that I spared survived, even thrived.

The only hiccups I ever had were with the Aeldari. Indeed, they were the most vexing of my targets, and so their fall from grace had to be equal to the hubris that they displayed... and the Aeldari Empire's hubris approached that of the Old Enemy themselves. Not entirely surprising as their creators-turned-gods likely reinforced such a mindset, but it was distressingly persistent despite their empire rising and falling, waxing and waning repeatedly over the course of sixty million years. Not every fall was by my hand, of course. In truth not even half of them were. But I gained a great familiarity with their society, watching it follow the same pattern every time. Watching them re-learn how to use the tools of their forebears, that they had inherited the vast majority of from the Old Enemy even if they'd put their own spin on things.

With the often-subversive help of other races that were psychically active, I'd come to understand a great many things. I'd learned the true nature of the Old Enemy and what they had done, piecing information together over the course of millions of years, carefully killing off the species that worshipped them and watching through others' eyes as they starved and fell to the wild predators in the empyrean. I'd found the worlds that the degenerate Old Enemy's shells had been left on, and worked to sabotage the Slaan society - nothing so overt as direct obliteration, but certainly enough to attenuate their connection to the immaterium. They were still able to exploit it, certainly, but no longer were they on the level of the Aeldari.

Ah, the aforementioned Aeldari. As the latest players on the galactic block began their rise, their empire was stable, if not as large as it had been in some past cycles. But this time, I had a plan to break their power. The touches I had to give as an outsider were limited, but well within my means: ensuring they recovered all of their old technologies. Encouraging peace where prudent through other races, and seeing to it that they realized exactly how precious every aeldari life was, that they ought not be risked in war at all. In time, their military might was in the hands of machines, and ennui threatened to bring their empire down.

In truth I hadn't intended it to take the path it took, I had intended to split their empire. At first it even seemed like it would work - exodites left, while their society seemed to gradually be spiralling downward, kept intact by high technology. And then... serendipity. You see, the Eldar had learned of the Webway this time around from the Slaan, before I locked them into a cycle of inevitable degeneracy that they would not break out of. Commorragh was a key part of their empire. But being in the Warp... well. The power of belief is a very tangible thing, and the stronger a race psychically is, the more power that belief holds. Within the Webway, that power is amplified. As their society spiralled down, violence was as common and hedonistic practices were widespread.

With the proper groundwork laid... it was easy to nudge a handful of individuals to spread ideas throughout the Aeldari population. Cults began to spring up. Ideas began to circulate. Their gods had forsaken them, wouldn't talk to them... and so they would create a new god. [spoiler]With blackjack. And hookers.[/spoiler] And so they embraced this, their cults getting increasingly violent as they tried to force the creation of a deity, their military engines serving to capture and sacrifice their enemies to this end in addition to the Aeldari deaths.

I truly did not expect to succeed beyond my wildest dreams.

Moreover, I did not expect the widespread storms as the Empyrean boiled over, the Aeldari Empire largely disappearing into them as their souls were harvested by their newborn god, the activity bringing the other three nascent superintelligences within the immaterium to full wakefulness as opposed to the semi-lucid dream state they had been in before. The congealed result of war-minds, warpborne creatures, and the raw stuff of emotions had already been intact enough to be active in the forms of Khorn, Nurgle, and Tzeentch. But with the birth of Slaanesh... oh, there was power in the now-roiling warp to spare, as they consumed the Aeldari pantheon. My long-sought revenge against the Old Enemy at the hands of their most intact servitor race.

From there... well. Moving between tomb worlds to wake them up. It seemed unnecesary to exterminate all life, even if it would be the simplest way to quell the warp, but surely the way should be prepared for Szarekh's inevitable return from exile and all should be in readiness when the time of waking comes. And I hold in my hand the Orb of Eternity.

I have known from the very start that the end of my time here would be kneeling in front of the Silent King, the Orb of Eternity in my hand, restoring his self to him. But until now I never realized how close that day was. Soon, I can finally leave this accursed galaxy.

Sixty million years.

I thought I was old when I survived to the modern era in the guise of Gilgamesh.

I have a new appreciation for time, now.