Happy Halloween, human mortals of /Qst/, from Overlord Nintjyr of the Voekhet Dynasty. On the 20th of April 2020 on your human calender, the human perpetual Cupanon on the board /tg/ blessed us all with the original Warhammer40k isekai. Neckberdia picked up the series, bringing Cupanon a larger audience, that included I. Many imitators followed in Cupanon's steps when he departed to give us stories of how they would have wrangled the setting with different staring positions, one of whom being my Dynasty's very own royal Cryptek High Transmogrifer Ishskar, who found himself possessed by a human soul that slipped out of chronological alignment by 12 million years into the past. Ishskar's story introduced so many to the Necron faction, and kindled in me a love of literature I didn't know I had. In honor of Cupanon, Ishskar, the official writers of black library, the friends I've made in this community, the audience who took part as background characters in Ishskar's story, the writers of the many isekais, the hobbyists who keep Warhammer40k alive, and my hailing Dynasty of Voekhet, I bring you the haunting retelling of the Necrontyr species, and the legions of the cold undead machines they became...This story is pieced together from all the official lore I can gather, Ishskar's OC Necron Dynasty of Voekhet, and melded together cohesively by me with a little liberal conjecture.link to Ishskar's Conclave (discord server): https://discord.gg/2V2q8NSFBut first a few disclaimers. Don't use this as a substitute for official lore, or do I'm not your Overlord. On top of my conjecture, be aware I am also going to be a unreliable narrator slanting the optics to favor my faction. Feel free however to use this as a jumping off point to explore official lore on your own!Now, play your preferred spooky background ambiance on loop, dust off the sarcophagi of your ancestors, set your RGB steups to green, and enjoy.
>The Necrontyr were one of the three original species of the milkyway galaxy who mattered.>The other two being the life-worshiping amphibians called the Old Ones, and the ever famished star parasites called the C'tan.>Of the three, the C'tan evolved first.>They emerged in the raging primordial sea of the big bang, where entropy was high and hydrogen abundant in the void.>Their constituent parts rolled in the sea of plasma, competing with derivatives of itself for survival in an abstract orientless ecosystem that extended in all directions.>The competition pushed the energy organisms onwards to take on ever more complex forms and functions. >The galaxy expanded in time, and with it, the hydrogen vapor underwent condensation, collapsing into galaxies and stars.>The first stars generated immense magnetic fields and heat by burning the hydrogen in their core, mass transmogrifying the hydrogen into helium.>With the void between the stars thinning, the energy organisms were forced to adapt to the change in their environment by becoming star parasites, endlessly seeking out the magnetic signatures of stars as a beacon to new hydrogen to consume.>In the process of a C'tan slowly flaying a star's magnetic flux for energy, immense amounts of radiation are released.
I can't wait
>Stars die when their core is expended, collapsing helium and heavier elements.>The death of a star is explosive, releasing its hydrogen mantel and core as a mist back out into the cosmos.>The freed hydrogen collapses back into new infant stars to repeat the process.>The vaporized core's heavy waist matter condenses around those new infant stars to make orbiting constellations of rocky bodies.>From the primordial ooze of one such rocky planet evolved the Necrontyr, and on a different rocky planet on the other side of the galaxy evolved the Old Ones.>The Old Ones gave themselves the overly honorific title of "Old One" out of arrogance, believing themselves both the first, and thus the pinnacle of all life.>They most certainly were not, on either account.>The title of oldest belongs to the C'tan, while the honor of Pinnacle belonging to the Necrontyr.>The Old Ones were witches, blessed by having evolved in a region of both material and empyric stability.>In time, the Old Ones transcended into entities of pure empyric energy.>They went on to seed soul bearing life throughout to galaxy, grooming the Empyrean in their own image through the souls of their clients.
>The Necrontyr were not so lucky.>Their far-flung primordial ancestors had their evolution stunted by the C'tan who dinned on their home star like a colony of termites.>No multicellular life could persist long on that cursed planet world without turning cancerous.>Life finds a way however.>Multicellular life on that young planet gave up on trying to repair damage or neutralizing unsalvagable cells.>Instead, life evolved to take cancer in stride, slowing the spread and growth of tumors just enough to ensure reproduction.>In this Hellish context, the Necrontyr were born.>The Necrontyr, being of a completely diffrent evolutionary stock from the Old Ones, thus developed an entirely unique strain of soul with a different composition and texture.>While impotent in the art of witchcraft known to the Old Ones, the Nectontyr soul was still strong in other ways.>Their souls eminated an electromagnetic field on a parallel dimension, similar to the ones emanated by celestial bodies processing in orbits around the galaxy.>Perhapse the Necrontyr evolved such a oura in an attempt to repel some of the cancer causing particles.>Unfortunately, the truth will forever remain a secret.>The soul was never an area of study for the Necrontyr before their extinction.
>The Necrontyr have two phases in their lives.>Childhood, and dying.>The youth are the best at suppressing cancer, as their immune systems are energetic enough to keep pace.>The tumors begin to outpace the body's suppressive ability in adolescence, manifesting as small easily removable lumps on the skin.>The appearance of those lumps on your skin were your sign as Necrontyr that your time as a child has come to an end, and that it is your time to prepare for death.>The dying phase is always marked with horrific pain that only gets worse untill the bitter end.>The Necrontyr shaped their culture and religions accordingly.>Life was seen as nothing but an opportunity to prepare for death, and as such, every Necrontyr lived as if they were already dead.>They carved out and lived in the tombs they would be sealed in, and they slept in the coffins they would be buried in.>Death was a fact of life that commanded acknowledgement at the instant you gained self awareness.>If you wanted immortality, you spent your life for future generations, giving them a reason to hold onto your memory and defend your tomb.>This eternal contract between the living and the dead served as the foundation for the Dynasties.>Necrocracy.>Feudal serfdom was the system the Necrontyr were born into, and by the ancient gods of the universe as their witnesses, even the lowest of slaves laboring in even the most undignified of positions would sooner die than turn from their oaths to their ancestors.>The Necrontyr lived a subsistence lifestyle, tending to the same crops their ancestors did a hundread thousand generations or more back, dispite having the technology to do better.>The Necrontyr across the generations refused to embrace new ideas on governance or lifestyle in order to maintain their spiritual connections to the dead.
>The Necrontyr's cast of scientists were a bunch of solitary essentric inventors called the Crypteks.>The Crypteks horded their achievements and secrets from each other and everyone else to demand recognition and reward for their crafts, thus their name.>Crypteks share their secrets only through marrige, in an equal exchange of secrets, or with their students called the Apprenteks, who would make their own advancements on top of their master's technologies before passing them on to their own students, making the diffusion of technology across Necrontyr society occur at a glacial and irregular pace.>In time, the Crypteks invented scientific methods and technologies so advanced as to be perceived as illogical magic to any beings not clued in on the nature of the Crypteks.>The Crypteks disproved the existence of all-powerful gods, a feat that was believed impossible by most species under their flawed scientific postulates which required falsifiable tests to be conductable.>Through their labors, they showed that all you need to make the impossible a reality is a mind genius enough to envision it, and a madness wild enough to pursue it.>Because of the greed wich which the Crypteks horded their sciences, the Necrontyr civilization was too atomized to ever make any real use of it, unlike the other civilizations such as the Old Ones who shared their discoveries freely and through it blossomed quickly across the stars.>Not that the Necrontyr knew it.>The Necrontyr had the models to predict other life across the galaxy, but yet had no encounter with them due to the Necrontyr still being caged to their homeworld.>Compound technological inheritance accrued over the cource of millions of years permitted the individual Crypteks to fashon void crafts all on their own.>That was when the Necrontyr left their radiation baithed world to find more hospitable planets.>Leaving their evil star however did nothing to quell their raging tumors.>Evolution had already decided the arch of the Necrontyr species, and every individual born therein was doomed to follow it to the bitter conclusion.
>Due to their belief that all life serves the dead, the High Ruling Triarch Council decreed through the Edicts of Experminatiom that all life is to be brought to extinction, to the exclusion of those that can be proved useful to the dead.>The first species given pardon were the Necrontyr race themselves, who's purpose is the guarding of the honor and tombs of their ancestors.>The next to recieve pardon were the subsistence crops which feed and supplied the Necrontyr.>The cash crop grains, rices, roots, beans, lumber, medicinal herbs, and fiber.>The luxury fruits, berries, and vegetables.>The third pardon were the species immediately neccessary to facilitate the life cycle of those subsistence crops.>These would include the Scarabs and the Spyders, which served to convert the waist and inedible parts of the crops into useful fertilizer and meat.>The fourth to recieve pardon were the auxiliary creatures.>Wraiths, Tomb Stalkers, and Skolopendra, just to name a few, deemed employable as either entertainment, livestock, beasts-of-burden, and/or war-beasts.>In recognition for their service to the dead, these species were glorified, taken to every world the Immortal Empire touched to serve the dead evermore alongside the Necrontyr.>The beasts were further glorified by the creation of the Canopteks, machine inheritors of their living progenitors' form and instincts.>Every other species on our homeworld were purged from existence, with even their historical mentioning being purged to deny them the immortality of memory.
>As the Necrontyr spread across the stars, they took their assumptions of death with them.>They discovered planets with new unrecognizable sapient life.>By the compulsion of their morality, the Nectontyr set about the extermination of every discovered world's life, but not before combing it for useful organism which could serve the expanding Dynasties.>The amount of feral worlds they crossed in need of sterilization defied the Cryptek's statistical estimations, which lead them to the suspicion that a higher intelligent seeder species was at play.>Their assumptions were confirmed at the first encounter with the self proclaimed Old Ones who fashioned themselves as the gods of all life.>In acknowledgement of their omnipotent power to modify life at will, the Necrontyr humbled themselves before the Old Ones, begging them to take the Necrontyr on as one of their mortal subjects in exchange for the secrets of Immortality, or at least relief from the pain of their last years.>The Old Ones judged the Necrontyr as unfit inheritors of both, due to their opposing philosophies reguarding life and death, condemning the Necrontyr species to eternal suffering.>The Necrontyr, consumed by envy and indignation, declared war on the life-gods, determined to bring the Edicts of Experminatiom passed by their ancestors so many generations ago to their final resolution.>If the Old Ones would not serve the living, then the Necrontyr would make the Old Ones join the dead.>The war was posthumously named "The First War in Heaven", though the Nectontyr of the age knew it as "The Last Cleansing".
>War-time controls gave the Silent Kings and Triarch Council of that era unlimited power to defy any tradition and lay out new norms.>The Triarch sought out many Crypteks' technologies to claim as the collective property of the Immortal Empire, such that every Cryptek could fashion tools of war no matter if their specializations would have otherwise limited them to the exclusive manufacturer of useless luxury products.>The diverse Canopteks models were standardized into a single line, one for each servant species, optimized with the best of each variant while remaining faithful to the original species.>Phase and Dispersion technology, due to it's cost of manufacturing, was made an accessory of the nobility, put into the production of close-quarters melee weapons and shields respectively.>For the common soldiery, the Gauss Rifle would be their equipment, capable of emitting a beam of corrosive energy to flay alive targets one molecule at a time.>To shuffle the soldiers around, the Monoliths with their dimension-rending cores offered mass teleportation between other linked Monoliths.>For armor and fortification, the living metal necrodermis reknits itself after damage, rendering any strategy that depended on fatiguing the metal over time impotent.>The Necrontyr, with their newfound unity and shared eldritch weaponry, punched far outside their weight class and ripped victory from the jaws of defeat consistently whenever a fight was to be had.>When facing a foe their tools could not best, the Crypteks would invent on the fly a new technology that could.>The Old Ones had the advantage in the void, as their ships shunt through the Empyrean to cross distances faster than light, while our vessels remained stuck at sub-light speed travel.>They stayed outside our reach while letting us have their worlds, determined to not dignify us with the acknowledgement of glorious combat.
>The Old Ones when finally forced to acknowledge the Necrontyr's campaign mearly responded by pulled the rug from under the Necrontyr.>Every world touched by the Old Ones prior to the Necrontyr's settlement of it had undetectable Empyrean access gatesways sewn into the fabric of reality nearby.>These gates were all part of a galactic interstate known as the Webway, a construction of the Old Ones to give them easy and immediate access to all of their servant species.>The Old Ones weaponized their Webway to appear anywhere the Necrontyr were exposed to strike with impunity.>The Necrontyr simply could not be on every planet, not without also being stretched thin.>The Necrontyr, one planet at a time, were isolated and purged with no more dignity than routine pest control.>The Necrontyr tried breaching the Old Ones' Webway to even the playing field, but the Webway was itself a living organism.>It revolted against the Necrontyr's sciences that tried to pry it open, and amputated any successfully breached gateways from its whole.
>The Necrontyr were purged back to their home system by the end of that painful war.>The Old Ones could not have given the Necrontyr a greater insult if they had tried.>They made a made a mockery of the Necrontyr's proud sciences and their martial honor by treating them like children unworthy of a fight.>They backed the Necrontyr under the cancerous star they strove so hard to excape from.>And finally they denied the Necrontyr death, choosing instead to leave the Necrontyr alive on their birth planet to wallow in the shame of failing to complete the will of their dead.>Supposedly, the Old Ones claim to have left the Necrontyr alive out of a respect for all life, not wanting to bring any species to extinction.>The claim is betrayed by how they left the Necrontyr to suffer under their poisoned birth star instead of backing the Necrontyr into a more hospitable system.>Many Cryptek Datamancers in the Immortal Empire alive at the time came to believe the Old Ones just wanted the Necrontyr to continue to suffer as punishment for the war, but it can't be known for absolute certain.>The Old Ones were ever cryptic creatures that never spoke straight, much like all witches with manic egos do.>Whatever path the Old Ones wished for the Necrontyr to take with our second chance at life, they didn't communicate it in a way we could understand, if they did at all.
>The Necrontyr, refusing to learn their lesson, left their home system once more to recolonize their lost territory.>The Necrontyr found their once perfectly terraforned desert planets reverted, again covered in the lush machinations of the Old Ones.>The Necrontyr redealt with the foliage and fauna just as they dealt with all life on their planets once before.>In this time of recolonization, the Crypteks invented the Inertialess Drive, allowing the Necrontyr to travel as fast as they could plot around space debris, enabling effectivly instantaneous galactic travel.>It was the first step of many that future generations of Necrontyr would need to exterminate the Old Ones.>But by itself, the Inertialess Drive was good enough for unifying the Immortal Empire through trade and communication, while hastening recolonization efforts.
>My home, the Voekhet Dynasty, would be founded late into the Necrontyr's second space race.>Our founding Phaeron, Djoser, having taken his seat as an Overlord as a child, was disgusted by the stagnation he saw in his birth dynasty of Mere'hman.>With too many rungs of corrupt leaders standing between him and the throne, Djoser turned his assets from his birth Dynasty, believing its cource a dead end, and set out to the stars to build a new Dynasty in his own image.>"Voekhet" is what he named his Dynasty, roughly meaning "spoils of the pioneer.".>Knowing the fate of his fledgling dynasty should it turn complacent, Djoser commanded the Lords and Overlords under him to fund their Crypteks with all the spare taxes they could.>He then ordered that the Cryptek Conclaves be forced to compete with each other fairly, not by espionage or political maneuvering.
>The opportunities the funding provided drew in new Crypteks from across the Immortal Empire near and far, and the merit based rewarding of funds kept those Crypteks making ever better wonders to awe the Lords and Overlords with.>Billions of deben in strange elements, millions of constructs, Canopteks, tomb systems, weapons, and thousands of void ships were all exported to other Dynasties by time Phaeron Djoser died.>These things Phaeron Djoser traded for planets to add to our territory, and for shipments of populations to settle the purchased worlds.
>Djoser is what every Dynasty deserves, an excellent founding model for future rulers.>Every Phaeron and Phaerokh of the Voekhet since has followed his example, bar the odd abhorrent pretender who was swiftly deposed.>Djoser, having as it turned out been born helplessly sterile, was entombed alone without heirs.>To honor him, his successors built for him an opulent tomb constructed of pure wealth as thanks for the riches he passed on to the living.>In his tomb were one-of-a-kind creations, novelties made for no other reason than to be beautiful, mindtwisting, and expensive.>Employed in the defense of Djoser's tomb were all the savage beasts he had captured and tamed himself during his many world cleansings to make way for Necrontyr settlement; Their minds broken down atom by atom for digitization by an army of Crypteks and translated into mirroring canoptek bodies, prepared to defend the resting place of their conquer forever more.
>In our Dynasties peak, we composed roughly 350 billion Necrontyr and just over 28 and a half trillion of the greater Canopteks and constructs of all shapes and sizes combined, excluding Scarabs and novel Scarab equivalents.>Our warfleet was the envy of dynasties ten fold our population.>In the grand scale, we were still a small dynasty, but we had made it far enough that none could deny our right to independence, not without staring down the prospect of a very costly war.>Meanwhile, the Mere'hman had collapsed long ago, reduced to a vastle of the Nihilakh Dyvanakh, and forever settling themselves in the minds of the Voekhet elite as a reminder of the consequences of losing your hunger for wealth.
>It was around the middle to late era of the Voekhet's existence that the Technomandrikes came into existence.>When some Crypteks' need for grandeur surpasses their inheritance, they get together to trade secrets.>Such activities are welcomed by Necrontyr society, as it gives a larger pool of higher skilled Crypteks for the Overlords to call upon.>The Technomandrikes took this to the extreme; A Cryptek Conclave formed of many hundreads of thousands of Crypteks of varying background, all putting asside their individual egos for the privalege of being part of a greater design, pooling together their skills into a single pool of shared knowledge.>Necrontyr society watched on in great apprehension, filling with both hope and fear in equal measure.>The Technomandrikes broke from the tradition of eons to carve a new path, one that if strode with grace would carry the Necrontyr to a new dawn of technology.>Crypteks would labor not for the recognition of one Overlord, but for the recognition of trillions, bringing about the ascension of the Necrontyr into technological omnipotence by the merging of countless lines of development spanning millions of years into one.>The Technomandrikes had no such lofty ideals.>Their ideology in reality was one of unfiltered avarice, forging for themselves a mercantile identity with no respect for the dead of their clients.>Notice how I said clients and not Overlords.>The Technomandrikes would make oaths to noone, and would sell their services to whoever would pay them.>They routinely armed both sides of the same conflict, and dared anyone to respond with indignity knowing their enemies would get a discount on their next purchase.>They were extortionists, racketeers, going from Dynasty to Dynasty, Overlord to Overlord, and offering their services knowing their offer couldn't be refused, least the same offer be given to the Overlord's adversary.
>The trajectory of history everyone saw coming should the Technomandrikes be left unimpeded was a dark one.>Every future Necrontyr born would be thrown into a materialistic arms race, and if unable to keep up would be left behind by a society that cared not for any value nor individual, living or dead.>Necrocracy traded for technocracy; A society comprised of the haves and the have nots, where ancestors are forced to watch on in horror from behind the vail of death as their impoverished children kill each other jocking for the scraps of survival their Cryptek masters rationed out to be just enough to maximize their surplus.>The Dynasties wouldn't have it.>The Immortal Empire wouldn't have it.>The dead wouldn't have it.>The mold forged by the Technomandrikes was an evil one, and it needed to be broken before more Conclaves could be cast in their foul image.>The order was decreed by the young Silent King Szarekh, to purge the Technomandrikes down to their last soul, and to seize their technologies and ill gotten gains.
>At around the start of the purge, and at the Voekhet's peak, I, Overlord Nintjyr, was born.>I was simple minded.>Learning was difficult, as I had no theature of the mind for envisioning theoreticals, nor the intelligence for problem solving.>I could only recite what I had memorized, which was itself complicated by my eternal impatience reguarding subjects that bore me.>I resigned myself to never have a throne dispite being in line for it, as I believed my ascension would only harm my ancestors' legacy.>Fate however would chose for me.>All else who could have taken the throne in my place perished before their time, leaving me to either take the throne, or have my legacy divided between other families.>I chose to take it, and I pushed forward to learn in spite of my disabilities.
>Meanwhile, on the Necrontyr's homeworld, their Crypteks were hard at work studying their evil star, trying to figure out what made it so special, so horrible.>It was so massively disproportionate in radioactive emissions compared to all stars the Necrontyr studied in former Old One territories.>The answer was realized when the Necrontyr discovered the star parasites, the C'tan.>They were things of pure energy, coils of magnetic flux wound so tightly that the laws of reality bent in its wake to whatever the parasites so desired. >Three realizations were made.>Firstly, that the Old Ones hunted the C'tan from their territories to protect their worlds.>Secondly, the Old Ones had left these termites to feast on OUR star, instead of destroying them when they had us at their mercy, not even bothering to tell us over open communication channels that that existed, a gesture that would have taken no energy nor risk on their part and done nothing but engratiate ourselves to them.>And finally, that these were the creatures the Necrontyr would need to finally kill the Old Ones; Beings of energy to fight beings of energy.>The C'tans would be employed directly as tamed warbeasts, or, if the C'tan proved not so harnessable or intelligent, they would serve as simple batteries for powering our strongest god-killer weapons.
>The Crypteks forged mobile containment vessels in the likeness of the Necrontyr using the best technologies at their disposals, and lured in a lone C'tan using a artificial magnetic signature more pronounced than most star's.>What exactly the Crypteks' plans were to control the C'tan obviously failed, because the first C'tan, locked in its new form, immediately took control of it and set about seeking more cosmic magnetic signatures to consume.>The Necrontyr's cosmicly magnetized souls were the closet thing the C'tan smelled to star matter within immediate reach, so it reached for the nearby Crypteks, and ripped their souls from their bodies, devouring them in the most agonizing death any mortal could face that left no possibility of an afterlife.>The rogue C'tan tasted mortal experience for the first time, and was immediately addicted.>Breath.>Drowning.>Bravery.>Fear.>Love.>Hate.>Indifference.>Growth.>Resignation.>Pleasure.>Pain.>Pride.>Shame.>Vitality.>Sickness.>Birth.>Death.>Nostalgia.>Regret.>Comradery.>Betrayal.>And most importantly...>Divinity.
>The lone enlightened C'tan, never wanting the cacophony of mortal experience to end, set about consuming as many Necrontyr as it could, as quickly as it could.>The constant injection of the drug that was the Necrontyrs' collective lived experience resulpted the mind of the C'tan into the analog of a Necrontyr.>The C'tan began to question its own existence, just as all mortals do.>From its own metal body, power, and hunger for souls, it concluded that itself was a god, more specifically, an incarnation of the Necrontyr's supreme god Aza'gorod, The Night Bringer, god of death.>It resculpted its vessel to take upon itself the vissage of said god, and continued to feed on the Necrontyr, believing himself to be the rightful recipient of his people's souls.>The Necrontyr, seeing the form it took on, began praying to Aza'gorod, begging him to stop.>Aza'gorod knew that a proper God always listens to the prayers of his subject, even if he doesn't act on them.>Eventually, their conversations ended with uncountable other C'tan recieving their own bodies and godly identities from ancient Necrontyr mythology.>The C'tan looked towards the future, and seeing a galaxy full of life, saw the military aid of the Immortal Empire as pivotal pieces in consuming all the souls therein.>The weakest of the C'tan, The Messenger, The Deceiver, Mephet'ran, made a deal with the Silent King Szarekh to grant his people immortality and the power to wage war against the Old Ones.>It was an alliance made in Heaven.
>The Engramancer Crypteks understood the concept of recreating a Necrontyr's mind in computable math.>The issues was scale.>For simple beasts, it would take only a year to recreate the memories and instincts of beasts.>For a sapient Necrontyr, It can take a thousand or more High Engramancers decades to fully map all the complexities, which is far too slow to ever be viable, even for a Phaeron who could call upon those kinds of resources.>The C'tan answered this.>They would consume a Necrontyr's soul, and then the C'tan would instantaneously recreate in metal a new mind forged of the experiences that danced on their taste buds, birthing a artificial Necron from a Necrontyr's death.>In addition, installed within the minds of every manufactured Necron would be the Command Protocols, binding all Necrons in absolute loyalty to the hierarchy upon which sat the now sick and elderly Silent King Szarekh in supreme control.>The process of conversation from Necrontyr to Necron was called "Biotransferance".>Marching with the Necrontyr into the furnaces of Biotransferance were our ever beloved beasts.>They would all share the gift of undeath with us in the unfatiging Canoptek units our Crypteks had sculpted in their image so long ago.
>What noone expected was how the C'tan left us Necrons so horribly hollow.>The C'tan left a starving hole in our beating reactors in the shape of our lost souls.>Any digital analog of pleasure derived from the flow of dopamine was left out of our new minds.>We became sociopaths that couldn't feel anything positive no matter how badly we wanted to, condemned to suffocate without lungs to breath, yearn without a heart to melt, and cry with glass eyes that couldn't shed.>We escaped the agony of the body ravaging tumors just to fall into a brand new Hell of sensory deprivation.>To dwell on the hole inside us was to submit sour minds to madness.>The only thing that could shield our minds was the distraction of a higher purpose.>The ongoing preparations for war left us with no shortage of that.>Maybe the C'tan did this to us for the religious theatrics of our undeath, but most likely they did it out of pure malice given the contextual evidence of them leaving us Necrons with all the mortal capacities to feel pain.
>Something finally broke in the now undead mind of the Silent King Szarekh.>Everyone who ever had the Necrontyr at their mercy preyed upon them in some way.>Revenge was the only proper reprisal for what the C'tan did to us.>Szarekh was however powerless in the face of the C'tan in their ascendancy.>Every world whos’ population was converted to Necrons made the C'tan immeasurably stronger on the glut of our souls.>Designing weapons that could exploit the C'tans' weaknesses would take time, as they were still so poorly understood, so we held our audio emitters and obeyed the C'tan.>Under their orders, we waged war on the Old Ones, and corralled defeated populations for the C'tan to feast upon.>The rematch between the Old Ones and the Immortal Empire would come to be known as the Second War in Heaven.
>The Old Ones were nearly powerless in the face of the Immortal Empire's newfound might.>Necrons, once destroyed, simply translated away to be reconstructed.>Warships equipped with the Inertialess Drives outpaced the ships of the Old Ones and their servant species with ease.>The C'tan Nyadra'zatha, The Burning One, devised a way to breach the Old One's Webway in a way that could not be amputated from the whole, creating the Dolmen Gates.>The C'tan Mag'ladroth, the Void Dragon, invented the gloom prism, and with it silenced the Old Ones' witchcraft with a triumphant roar of reality's laws.>All of the advantages the Old Ones once held over the Immortal Empire in the first War in Heaven were completely nullified.
>The Old Ones' prized witch pets, the Slan, which had evaded combat against the Nectontyr using the Webway alongside their masters, found themselves forced to face us least we prevail murdering their beloved creators.>The Slan, While effective in numbers at defending their masters, simply took too long to reproduce to keep up with the attrition of war against a foe that never fatigues nor dies.>The Old Ones, in their desperation to save both themselves and their Slan, created disposable thrall species dedicated exclusively to war on their behalf.>They uplifted the Aeldari, who's perpetual soul and ability to reincarnate from death would serve as their contest to our undeath.>They created the Krorks, a fungal species who when killed multiply by releasing a cloud of spores which grow into more krorks, and who's reality defying technologies are made functional by only the limitations of their imagination, which presses itself on real-space directly without any use of the Empyrean, giving them the ability to make functional copies of all our technologies which can't be nullified by our empyric-supressing gloom technologies. >There were so many other horrors, but these two were the most notorious thorns in our sides due to their reproductive capabilities.>The Old Ones followed up on the creation of their disposable races by the construction of void fortresses able to rend back open the Empyrean which the Void Dragon sealed away.
>We and the Old Ones went back and forth in every way, an ever shifting front line in a cosmic dance of martial and technological adaptation.>The disposable races adapted fast, but our Crypteks adapted faster, nor could the Old Ones in their omnipotency top the reality defining powers of the C'tan who had been evolving their abilities over the cource of billions.>Every move by the Old Ones and their thralls was one of desperation, to buy more time to derive some tool that could defeat us.>They got close many times, but their efforts came too little, too late.>They slept on every chance they had to do right by the Necrontyr or exterminate the C'tan, and now the two oldest races in the galaxy were united against them.>Their end was here.>We were coming for them.>They didn't flee the galaxy because they knew we would follow them to the ends of the universe if neccessary to enact justice. >Clinging to their Webway was the best of all feeble chances they had.>It was only a matter of how long the Old Ones could drag out their execution for.
>Dispite overall Immortal Empire superiority, the Voekhet suffered greatly in the Second War in Heaven.>The Voekhet's peerless stores of technologies saw us broken up and used by Silent King Szarekh as augments for other dynasties.>We were storm-troopers, ment to take a beating to buckle foes before the less wealthy but more populous Dynasties would move in to clean up.>We lost everything serving in this roll, going from 350 billion Necrons to 3 billion, and from our stores of 28 and a half trillion Canopteks and constructs to nearly nothing.>It was a statistical miracle I survived that time.>Our Dynasty was finally given mercy by Silent King Szarekh, who allowed us to retire from the war to avoid the extinction of a peoples and culture who fought so hard and lost so much to serve the Immortal Empire.>We spent our rest rebuilding our navy, and reforging our Canoptek and construct legions with generic units, losing the famous Voekhet's Canoptek diversity in the name of efficiency.
>In the end, the Immortal Empire won the Second War in Heaven.>5 million years is how far the Old Ones got.>The Old Ones by our hands were brought to extinction, and all their many slave species in fear of losing their souls to our gods scattered like insects in our wake.>The C'tan with their newfound victory brushed off the responsibilities of war to we Necrons, retiring to gorge themselves on the mortals the Immortal Empire had ensnared within its expanding territory.>With our gods distracted on the feast, and the Old Ones lost to the extinction they so rightfully deserved, Silent King Szarekh brokored a secret pace with the remaining organics beyond our territories and turned our efforts to what needed doing more.>We had perfected the technologies neccessary to destroy the C'tan, and under the cover of a false war the C'tan still believed we were waging, we were ready to deploy them.>It was only a matter of timing.
>The moment came when the C'tan turned upon each other in a disgusting display of fratricidal cannibalism.>Most of the C'tan would die in this feast.>The C'tan who survived the free-for-all came out weaker than they started due to the injuries they sustained trying to consume their lessers.>The only C'tan to have left this conflict with a net positive amount of energy was the Night Bringer, the Void Dragon, the World Shaper Yggra'nya, and the Deciever.>The status of the Outsider Tsara'noga was unknown, having vanished from galactic affairs entirely shortly after it started consuming pieces of other gods.>We paraded our C'tan killing weapons before our remaining gods, and the C'tan in their boundless arrogance believed we had created the weapons in their honor.>Then we activated the weapons, shattering the largest 4 simultaneously into more manageable sizes.
>The Dynasties negotiated among themselves under Triarch supervision to determine who would be tasked with defeating and capturing which C'tan shards.>Many things where considered in weighing how much a Dynasty deserved.>There was how much a Dynasty contributed to the war and suffered, both absolutely, and in relative terms.>The Voekhet did middling on the absolute metric, but it crushed the metrics on proportional losses and contributions.>In respect for all we had given, we were both preserved as a Dynasty, despite our small size qualifying us to be rolled in with another Dynasty, and were awarded an exclusive charter to take all of the Outsider for ourselves.
>When we found the Outsider floating in the void, we had expected from him the same behavior that other C'tan displayed.>Instead, at first encounter, he was entirely docile.>He made no attempt to command nor repel us.>We assumed the pacivity of the Outsider was explained by the Outsider never learning of our betrayal.>Phaerokh Savarekh took advantage of the perceived ignorance to place all of our Dynasties' ships into strategicly advantages points around the lonesome star god.
>Once the devices were activated, the Outsider lashed at us with everything it had, like cornered prey fearing for its life.>The Outsider unleashed unimaginable cosmic forces that destroyed our greatest war vessels instantaneously; Vessels we had anticipated the Outsider attacking first, so refurbished specifically to resist him.>We were not ready for this.>We had expected to face a pathologically ego-centric C'tan, holding back out of misplaced pride, refusing to acknowledge us as an equal with the unleashing of his full might.>At least not in the initial phases when he was at his strongest as a unified whole.>Our Dynasty's ruling Phaerokh Savarekh didn't give any order for disengagement dispite the apparent unconquerability of the Outsider.>I feared that this would be the end of my Dynasty, but I held true to my commands.>Dispite my expectations, the Outsider did finally fracture.>A miniscule fragment was torn off the Outsider's whole, but still with the power to flatten worlds.>Phaerokh Savarekh ordered us to release the larger C'tan to focus on the shard.>The larger Outsider fled immediately upon its release, caring not for the sliver he left behind.
>With our full arsenal focused on corralling the shard, we succeded in silencing his ability to command the forces of the universe, and then cast him down to the surface of a nearby world where we could entomb him properly within a Sarcophagus.>Even without the ability to contort the universe, he was still a god.>The shard began suicidally autocannibalizing itself for power.>Atomic radiation bathed the land from the self-flaying.>If we could not contain the shard while it was still strong, there would be no shard left for us to contain.
>The Canoptek Scarabs swarmed in their trillions trying to build a sarcophagus around the shard to contain his power, and to stop it from harming itself further.>The Sarcophagus was being destroyed by the shard faster than it could be built, and the Canopteks were dying as fast as they could be funneled in.>The Necron armies and autonomous machines were sent in to blast the shard and weaken him, but found much the same fate as the Scarabs; Being erased from the fabric of existence with the might of a neutron star's gamma ray, doomed to never again be reanimated from death.>It mattered not.>We had Warriors and Immortals in their billions to spare wearing down the shard.>What we didn't have was time.>The shard was thrashing against the magnetic restraints on the horizon and in orbit holding it in place, and by the calculations of our Crypteks, predicted the shard would break them before the shard could be contained.>Between our heavy weaponry continously defying thermodynamics by generating energy from nothing, and the C'tan weaponizing its bleeding star material, the planet quickly transformed into a hell world.>Streams of molten aluminum gushed up through gravel around our feet with every step, while muldslides of rock drifting on liquid tin made plotting paths for our ground units an ever evolving logistical problem.>Those information feeds we revieved back on our ships from the surface were artifacted at best, and a useless corrupted static mess at worst due to all the interferences.>Necrons who survived the later stages of this event on the ground have almost no or distorted recollections of it.>Those up close to the C'tan suffered the worst, getting off with entire blots of old memories erased, or enduring permanent personality changes sustained from engram damage.
>Phaerokh Savarekh made the ultimate gamble of commanding her best units to the front.>Direct Approachment from orbit was a death sentence, and interferences made translation unreliable, so we were dropped hundreds of miles away out of the reach of the Outsider, and made to march inward under the cover of the horizon.>I approached the battle armed with my greatest artifacts and flanked by all my High Crypteks and elite formations.
>Ethermancers, Harbingers of the Storm, Crypteks who's trade is weather manipulation, are normally employ by Overlords to call upon their enemies cataclysmic hurricanes, terenchial sideways downpours, and living lightning.>In this battle against the Outsider however, their role was inverted.>Ethermancers used any influence their tools gave them over the planet to calm the raging magnetic firestorms shredding sky and land.>While the Ethermancers made ground travel possible, it by no means made it safe.>Like ripples in a bucket splashing over the side, all it took for the storms to break through the Ethermancers' imposed calm would be a crossing of multiple fronts.>When it did, legions would vanish in balefire as their internals began to melt away.>Some vanished translating away for repair, others vanished following self-destruction protocols set to trigger following unrepairable damage.>Those translating away for repair didn't even have a guarantee of salvation, as the translation process depend on the same interstitial relays that our failing communications did.>If a Necron's translation was interrupted, their signal would be scattered on dimensions beyond reality, left in the endless voids never again to know material form.
>In my personal retinue of elite units was a Cryptek, High Plasmancer Montuhotep, Harbinger of Destruction, who would use his mastery of energy manipulation to siphon away heat from his vicinity should the storm penetrate our Ethermancers' bubble.
>Approaching the shard, our minds were assaulted by the Outsider with madness.>The shard taunted us with flashes of our mortal lives, and the souls it stole from us.>The things the shard showed us, and the way it showed them, made us realize the Outsider wasn't simply enraged by our betrayal, but terrified to the limits of cognitive capasity.>When it had eaten pieces of its brothers, the pieces did not digest within him.>Instead they lingered on, driving the Outsider to madness.>The struggle of the consciousness within himself drove the Outsider's great awakening to basic Necrontyr empathy and morality.>The rest of the C'tan never developed either, as they had no childhood in which to temper their selfish impulses to find higher purpose beyond instant gratification.>The guilt over what the Outsider had done to the Galaxy's mortal creatures and to his own C'tan brethren drove the Outsider to flee from galactic affairs is an attempt to seek penance in isolation.>The Outsider, with his newfound mental maturity, was not blinded by ego like the rest were.>The Outsider saw us for what we were; The monsters it created.>He knew what we were going to do him if we could.
>We pummeled the shard harder and faster with our elite units, and began succeeding in carving out more manageable chuncks for containment within smaller sarcophagi.>The shard ended up segmenting into 8 pieces before it would subdivide no more.>But the many shards still fought on.>A Cryptek of the inner Voekhet court, High Transmogrifer Ishskar, took the initiative in making sure we would collect them all.>Taking the risk of entering direct striking distance of a C'tan shard, High Transmogrifer Ishskar measured the resonance of the C'tans' energy and twined a chord of the same frequency for his Harp of Dissonance.>High Transmogrifer Ishskar then repurposed a damaged Heavy Sapaptek Construct's core as an amplifier, and blasted the first shard with his new chord.>The blast itself was a level of immensity above the already glowing world, as the atmosphere between the C'tan shard and High Transmogrifer Ishskar was briefly converted into pure C'tan star matter.>The shard's body's natural resonance was overloaded, and it began to shake itself appart.>His body began to bloat as he lost the ability to maintain homeostasis, involuntarily set on a trajectory for supernova.>The Scarabs prevented this by using the pause in the shard's attacks to finish constructing that sarcophagus that would contain its power.>The scene was repeated 7 times, ourselves protecting High Transmogrifer Ishskar behind the legions of our bodies.
>This was not the haul we had wanted.>We recieved far less and paid far more than we expected, but still, we profited, if one would be charitable enough to call it that.>Our Dynasty's Necron population by the end of everything was down to an abysmal 2.8 billion.>200 million Necrons perished at the hands of the Outsider for what our Plasmamancer Crypteks could had replicated with lesser technologies if given enough time.>Maybe it would had been worth it for the satisfaction of delivering a C'tan to justice, but the Outsider was still free.>We didn't look for the rest of the Outsider, because we decided it wasn't worth it.>The battle was a complete humiliation.>That's all everything was.>We threw our Dynasty in the grinder of the Second War in Heaven, all for the reward of another grinder to throw ourself inside of.
>Arriving back at our home world, we had nothing left to do.>For the first time, in a limited capacity, I was my own master again, and I had no idea how to respond go it.>I could line up a million orders for my lessers, but that would still leave nothing for me to occupy my mind with once the orders were finished sending.>With no goals given to me personally to work towards by my superiors, seconds become grinding years.>A Necron without a mission is doomed to insanity.>I made my temporary mission the better understanding of my undead peoples, so that I may better serve their needs.>I was not prepared for the revaluation I had been so long been blind to.
>I learned these Necrons are not the citizens who had once cried my name in life.>The Necrontyr populations of the serf and soldier casts are gone.>The Necron Warriors and Immortals they became are just their animate coffins.>Everyone had their mind stripped down to only the essential components necessary to hear out and follow orders, plus those skills deemed useful in their new roles.>Only the Overlords and their most valued servants got to be the exception, retaining the memories and personalities of the full Necrontyr they once were.>How I couldn't have known it sooner humiliated me deeply.>I had assumed everyone were their full selves, having willingly surrendered themselves in absolute obedience to me just as I did to my Overlords above me.>But no.>Without a master to puppeteer them, most Necrons revert to nothing.>Each Necron knelt as I passed, and now knowing it was all on empty code rather than as any real show of respect hurt me deeply.>Sadness turned to even more spitefulness against the C'tan, but the C'tan were already defeated, or decreed a lost cause like with the Outsider, so I had no outlet for this new consuming fire of hatred in my reactor.>With no external target to project my own negative feelings onto, I had no choice but to lay them at my own feet and blame myself.>If I had been smarter, I could had funneled my wrath into the battle against the Outsider instead of being strapped with a hatred without closure.
>Rage turned to survivor's guilt and imposter syndrome.>I still had no real skills that could qualify myself for Overlord.>I had only ever done as told without any initiative on my part.>So many Necrontyr were more qualified than me for the position of Overlord, yet it was them who got their brains stripped while I kept my useless one intact.>Only now were the true ramifications of things setting in for me, and the true weight I carried commanding billions of oblivious Necrons to their final deaths.>I could accept who I was no longer.>I went to High Psycomancer Meritites and demanded he make me smarter, so he did.
>When the last of the stray C'tan shards were contained by all the Dynasties, we were given the command to sleep by the Silent King Szarekh, to wait 60 million years for the time when the galaxy would become sterile from organic life's own failings, where upon we would inherit it, and find for ourselves new souls to claim and bodies of flesh to house them.>Then, as apology to his race for the pact he signed with the C'tan, Silent King Szarekh severed the Command Protocols, returning to the Overlords and Phaerons their free will, and fled the galaxy to seek penance.>Sleep became my next obsession, to snooze out my undeath and have my promised mortality back as quickly as possible.>But before that however, Phaerokh Savarekh commanded our Crypteks remain awake long enough to manufacture a quota of Canopteks, constructs, weapons, and naval vessels to compensate for at least some of what we had lost against the Outsider.>What exactly had transpired in that time of manufacturing, and how the assets would be divided up, I have no idea, nor had I any care to learn or petition for a share.>The hole in my reactor where my soul should be was eating me alive, and I would not endure it any longer than necessity.
I hope you've all enjoyed my retelling of the Necron and Necrontyr's history so far! If you are here for the vaguely plausible cannon~ish lore, you can stop here and take this as my auto-eulogy. Leave with the closure that I met a peacefully end in my sleep, along with the rest of the Voekhet Dynasty after all 3 Voekhet Tombworlds we crammed our populations into were destroyed at the hands of celestial phenomenon, occurring somewhere in the last 12 of the 60-million-year Great Slumber. I thank you from the bottom of my reactor for reading this far. For those who are here for Ishskar's isekai, the story of the Voekhet doesn't end here! I have a short final epilogue to put the Voekhet back in play!
>Dispite my high station, the politics of the inner circle of royalty eludes me.>The same High Transmogrifer Ishskar who slew the Outsider shards interrupted my slumber 12 million years early.>Of what my Datamancers have come to piece together, sometime after High Transmogrifer Ishskar's premature awakening, or before entering the Great Slumber, High Transmogrifer Ishskar perfected a universal reanimation protocol that leaves a Necron brain with no engrammatic damage from premature awakening, something that should be impossible.>The drawback being, this highly elaborate data-chant which serves as the catalyst of reanimation can potentially take decades of preparation to awaken a single individual.>Once completed, this cumbersome ritual also reverses any damage which may have been accumulated during slumber, and restores the memories and personalities of the Necron long thought scrubbed by the C'tan.
>While a miracle of Necron sciences, it couldn't be practical.>If High Transmogrifer Ishskar did nothing but awaken Necrons, only a fraction of the already small Voekhet Dynasty's population would rise before the time of the awakening begins.>Certainly a prized asset, even in its limited form, without doubt.>With that skill, High Transmogrifer Ishskar could have traveled the breath of the galaxy and reaped a mighty profit reanimating key prized individuals.>Instead, he chose to remain here in the embrace of the Voekhet Dynasty, and continued perfecting his technique.>The fruit of this effort is the so named "resonance cascade".>It is a state of being High Transmogrifer Ishskar can enter and maintain for so long as he has a bottomless supply of energy to siphon from.>As long as he maintains this state, he will emit a wide-range reanimation protocol, instantly reanimating Necrons and restoring any mind his energies comes into contact with.
>It has uprooted our culture.>We have our citizens back, the people for whom we Lords and Overlords were made responsible for the preservation of their honor.>In light of everything, I, and some other Overlords and Lords, have elected to return to our Warriors the peasantry right and our Immortals the veterans' rights they once possessed in the days of flesh.
>Another side-effect of the resonance cascade is the mass proliferation of artificial intelligence.>High Transmogrifer Ishskar, in his pursuit to make his data-chant universally compatible with every Necron mind no matter how neuralogically divergent, ended up also making it "restore" the missing personalities in machines that never had one.>The cultural reaction to this has been mixed, to say the least.>As our culture holds it, artificial intelligence cast from any mold but in honor of a dead Necrontyr should be exterminated as an the insult to the dead.>Some Lords and Overlords have responded by destroying and remaking their awakened machines, either in offense at the thinking abominations, or in fear of reprisal from the Ruling Triarch for breaking laws against possessing non-Necron intelligences.>Some Necrons on the opposite side of the debate have promoted the embracing of the awakened machines as a slave cast to be given the chance to prove useful.
>Most however, including myself, have taken the far more hands-off approach of cautious opportunism.>Whatever the whims of the inner nobility and the triarch come to, is what we shall abide by.>Neither Triarch nor our Phaerokh Savarekh have made any open push against or for these specimens, so neither shall I.
>Every Psycomancer Cryptek with the slightest hint of talent in their ranks have been tearing at both their own awakened minds, and the minds of the awakened machines.>Some seek to replicate High Transmogrifer Ishskar's data-chant, while others seek to understand the simulated personality matrixes running in the processors of our machines.>Tests of the machine's loyalties in virtual scenarios show them to be effectivly Necrontyr in psychology.>They obey orders unto death for the glory of their Dynasty, but if lead to believe they are following inadequate masters, they will begin conspiring to kill their Lord or Overlord and replace them with a Necron they deam more suited to the role of leadership.>In every way, it is perfectly in line with our culture, but the problem is, it is OUR culture.>The Canopteks, constructs, ships, and Tomb Minds should have no place in it.>Letting an inadequate leader remain in power will drive any Dynasty to ruin, yes, but the responsibility of maintaining our Dynasties is ours to bear alone as the inheritors of the Necrontyr.>Not any others.>We have learned from the Star Gods to never share the picking of our fate with any other, no matter how much like us they may think or dress.
Thank you all for coming! This is the end of storytime, but not the end for me. I'll be back later to grapple with the political turmoil Ishskar's action have set in motion. I've also been informed by my High Datamancer Thutmuse of a new virus spreading in the upper echelons of Voekhet Nobility! I don't believe it, but High Datamancer Thutmuse has never lied to me yet, and I've been wrong every time I bet against him. I can only hope upon the graves of my ancestors that he starts being wrong now. Progress on the followup is going well, with a word count quadruple what I have posted here. When it's ready, you'll get a notification by a @all notification lurking of Ishskar's server https://discord.gg/9eRhxRjd. Surrender your flesh and join the Voekhet's Canoptek Scarab slave cast quickly! The link expires in a week, after which you can expect only extermination for prolonged unwelcome intrusion on Voekhet territory.
>>6126996Very nice, OP! Really reminds me of ye olde /tg/ storytimes, an art that might have been lost in its original board.
>>6128231Bravo!Very fine work indeed.
Can someone please post a new link to the discord. I am looking forward to reading any new threads.
>>6133654You caught me on a good mood organic. I'll spare you of cleansing this time and grant you what you seek. https://discord.gg/Tx2HDyHg
>>6133684Thank you!
