 Legacy is a powerful concept, tradition even more so, for some it forms the macro structure for their journey through existence, a pre-existing framework through which to base their acts and actions. It is a guide, a textbook of sorts, from which much can be drawn to inform one's present reality if one is so inclined. What then does it take to be one for whom tradition must be sundered, if it is to survive? Surely this cognitive dissonance cannot be contained within a mind logical, but oh, that is to underestimate the power of a mind driven to accomplish, driven by a dedication unrivaled. Legacy, tradition, sometimes these things must be shattered, lest those who dictate its course destroy it all the worse. Subject of this record, overcame his dedication through tradition in order to deliver it more completely, rising against those he was bade serve, lest their folly doom all that he had built. Know then, that this is a record of the Storm Lord, the Namasaur of Mandragora, the Necrodermal Scourge of the Eastern Fringe, Imotech of the Sortech Dynasty. Necron society, in a continuation of the cultural structures prior to their encasement within their undying bodies, is divided into dynasties. Continuance in mortal perpetuity of the great houses of the biological necron tier, the dynasties are political bodies, allegiance to whom is a matter concerning every single necron in existence. When Zarek, the last of the Silent Kings, released his total control over the command protocols of his species, the dynasties became independent and have nominally remained so to this day. Hierarchical in the extreme, necron society depends on the dynastic structure for this continuance. Allegiance is a matter of code and engrams. Consentience is a matter of status and the degree of independence of thought a necron retains is dependent entirely on their pre-biotransference position in the socio-economic pyramid. The numberless warrior hordes of the dynastic foot soldiers are barely above their canoptic automaton constructs in terms of thought capacity, mere shells of the flesh things they once were. For a warrior, their allegiance to their dynasty is utterly unquestionable. They can no more break with their overlord than a human could spontaneously sprout wings. Rulers of the dynasties are however fully self-aware and individualistic, as are the numerous cryptects, attendants, functionaries, and lesser nobility owing fealty to them. Even in the days of the war in heaven, the complexity of dynastic structures was Byzantine in the extreme. In these days of increasing necron reawakening, they have become even more so, as dynasties aplenty seek to define themselves in this new epoch, conquering, cannibalizing, or subsuming others into themselves. Every Freyron or Freyrak is free to set their own agenda, and will absolutely seek to do so, as it is their divinely ordained right by virtue of their birth and station. Technically, each is expected to owe fealty to the Silent King. In reality, that is another matter entirely. One such dynasty, indeed one that would rise to substantial prominence, was the Sotek. Their beginnings in this newest chapter in the ancient necron species' history were of good fortune more than anything. Their tomb worlds occupied isolated volumes, spread across the eastern fringe of the galaxy, thus placing them in remote regions of the galaxy's own most remote region. The Sotek's nominal volumes had avoided substantial imperial colonization, or Eildari colonization before that. Consequently, the lack of populated worlds meant it rarely drew the attentions of the orcs, or laterally the high fleets of the Tyranids. Across the millions of years that the dynasty slumbered in their stasis crypts, there were of course disasters. The mighty tomb world of Galiga simply vanished, lost the sands of time without any explanation. Atraspar was devoured by a twin supernova event as its binary star system collapsed, while Candetar drew the attentions of the kin of the leagues of Votan, whose extractionships rendered the world into its constituent mineral elements, necron living metal, and all. Whereas such calamities may have spelled the end of lesser dynasties, mighty indeed was Sotek, and when the years of awakening began, each stirring tomb world found several others to begin contact with, all rejoining a slowly but steadily growing kingdom. The dynasty's core worlds had endured millions of years of galactic drift and upheaval almost entirely unscathed, and aside from the to-be-expected level of engrammatic decay and degradation, so too had the dynasty's legions. The nobility of Sotek began to establish themselves, reacquainting themselves with the new status quo of the local galactic regions. Some contended themselves with merely gathering and reawakening their military assets, while others immediately sought expansion of their sub-realms. All however were rating one thing, the reawakening of the dynasty's Phaeron. Shadowed Mandragora, throne world of the Sotek, has ever been the jewel in the dynasty's great cranial ornamentation, but it was a darkly beautiful place indeed. An ominous blasted world, the Ashen Vitreous Sands nevertheless concealed beneath them one of the greatest citadels of Necron power in the galaxy, and formed the perfect seat for the dynastic inheritors. However, though total disaster had spared the Sotek thus far, fate appeared to reap her reward. As revivification began to take hold throughout the stasis crypts of Mandragora, fatal code errors began to cascade throughout the protocols of reawakening. What Knoptek constructs or cryptic infomancers were present could do not to stymie the engrammatic blight. Cascading memetic hazards consumed noble and noble and noble alike in a firestorm. Their minds turned to binauric slurry. First of all, the Deluge claimed the Phaeron themselves, their very name lost to history. The immediate result was a creation of an intense power vacuum, both on Mandragora itself and by extension the entire realm of the Sotek dynasty. The nobility had been awaiting the ascension of the Hierarch to a vacant throne. There was, of course, no heir apparent. The Sotek, before entering stasis, had not considered the perishing of their immortal monarch a possibility. Not that per se, the Phaeron's passing was lamented. The nobility of the Necrons had never lacked for ambition, neither before biotransference and certainly not now. In many cases, the revivification processes had rendered the minds of many of them borderline insane. Previously latent personality characteristics had been heightened. Egotism, obsessiveness, greed, all of these were stoked now by the situation at hand. The politicking began immediately. Power blocks were formed, alliances rekindled, blackmail and threats dispensed, sabotage undertaken, and an incredibly volatile situation emerged that descended all too rapidly into a devastating civil war. Such conflicts were something of a hallmark amongst the Necrons, at least prior to the Great Sleep. That they were to continue subsequently is perhaps no great surprise, but the viciousness of post-reawakening internecine conflict carried an altogether different flavour. More and more of the dynasty's legions had awoken and were awoken in great haste only to be turned upon their fellows. Initially restricted to the crown world, the nobles that began the war turned to more and more of the outlying systems, petitioning or simply threatening their allies in other worlds for military aid. Fewer and fewer of the lesser nobility were able to remain neutral, should they have even wished to. Many certainly threw in their lots with one claimant or another, hoping for some grandee appointment should their candidate emerge the victor. The entire dynasty was threatened with being engulfed by the conflict, until one overlord, a Necron by the name of Fotrek, let her ambitions get the better of her senses. Thinking to subvert the power balance that saw both her holdings and her ultimate aims threatened, she recalled that Mandragora yet contained the unawakened body of its greatest ever Nemisor, Imotec. A term roughly analogous to a Lord Militant, a Nemisor is a high-ranking Necron noble granted total control, beyond the word of their Phaeron or Phaerac, of a dynasty's military forces. Four to obtain such a rank is possible only by individuals that possess unrivaled strategic minds. Recalling, admittedly, fragmented, history mimetics from her flux, Fotrek was recounted with the mighty lists of conquests that Imotec had brought to the dynasty, and resolved that she would discover for herself the location of the Nemisor's crypt, making him her champion and commander, to better cow lesser nobles by his fame and defeat greater ones by his genius. Surely, with such a mind at her back, Fotrek would be the Phaerac of the Sawtec in no time at all. Had Fotrek not suffered substantial engrammatic instability during her reawakening, other aspects of her flux may have warned her against such an attempt to yoke such a clearly single-minded individual to her apparent control. It is of course quite possible that Fotrek, as a lot of other Necron nobility have learned in these newest millennia of their existence, that she did not consider the sheer degree of loyalty that the command protocols of Zarek, last of the Silent Kings, had placed upon the species prior to his releasing of them. Civil war of the Sawtec themselves would simply not have been possible under said protocols. Yet somehow, Overlord Fotrek assumed that the newly reawakened Nemisor, Imotec, would immediately serve she who was his social and political batter. It is fairly clear that she believed he would not do anything other than obey. He in fact did not. Imotec emerged from his great slumber, defined a group of petty, egotistical lunatics, despoiling a dynasty his efforts had helped build. Through a heady cocktail of pride and privilege combined with breathtaking myopia, the nobility of the Sawtec were squandering not only the resources rightfully belonging to the dynasty itself, but that self-same dynasty's chance to become a great power in the galaxy. While the Nemisor had not time to fully acquaint himself with the status quo of said galaxy in this strange new epoch, it did not require a military genius to see the utter waste of dynastic power that this civil war represented. The Sawtec had not lacked for enemies, both Necron and Outsider, when they had entered the great slumber. Surely, reasoned Imotec, these enemies yet persisted as the Necrons did, awaiting a chance to strike, and they were likely joined by others stranger and more terrible still. And yet here was the great and the good of the dynasty, placing their ambitions above everything else. It simply would not do. Imotec had once been a general who had bestowed the stars, besting the Nemisors of other dynasties, or laying ruin to the great old enemies of the Necrons themselves. The rabble of upstart aristocracy that opposed him now, well, they were far less of a challenge. Usurping a resting legion with ancient inviolate command protocols, Imotec immediately launched attacks on the weakest claimants to the Sawtec throne, demolishing their opposition and adding their forces to his own. The aristocrats were yoked to Imotec's own command, subservient to him now forever more. If there was any disquiet the Nemisor possessed over the irony of him choosing to end a civil war by joining it, he did not betray any. Those that opposed him were problems, to be solved by the only way he knew how, rigorous application of overwhelming military power. His loyalty lay to the dynasty, not as it may be embodied by an individual, but as more of a collective idea. The Sawtec would spread across the face of the galaxy. Its glyph was to be marked upon worlds that had been denied to it in the depths of history. That Imotec himself must be Phaeron to do so was not thus personal ambition, he reasoned. It was simple logic. Preaching protocols were a waste of time, self-doubt was purged from his personality buffers. The Nemisor's ascension was nothing short of meteoric. Each defeated noble brought their vassal legions and worlds to Imotec's own, adding to his forces until it became utterly useless to stand against him. Photrak was long consigned to the dust of history now. The remaining petty claimants surrendered, pledging their loyalty to the new Phhaeron of the Sawtec, Imotec, Stormlord of Mandragora. The title of Stormlord is no mere epaphets of an ego. It is a colourful term to be sure, but one that evokes a very real military practice utilised by Imotec. Proprietary Sawtec technology, esoteric even by some necron standards, and kept jealously by the cryptics of his court, allow the Stormlord to conjure great and terrible weather systems that precede his host like an atmospheric bow wave. Green lightning stabs down from rainless clouds, shattering the ground with its impacts, often with a fury that can turn weak-willed enemies then and there. The true vanguard is not far behind, metallically chittering swarms of knoptic scarabs, blot out what little light remains in the skies, descending as some ancient plague. The Stormlord does not wait for either his scarabs or his enemies to be spent. As soon as the clouds of construct insectoids have engulfed his foes, the might of the legions attack. Such tactics are but one example of Imotec's grasp on all forms of warfare. The Phaerons and their nemesors might not actively consider, for example, psychological combat that scarabs may allow for, evoking as they do the fear the biological has for either the mechanical or the insectoid beasts they have supposedly superseded. Similarly, these nemesors who consider the wielding of weather control an unnecessarily theatrical affectation likewise disregard the legends and myths of apocalyptic doom that such phenomena have often become attributed to. Imotec's conduct of warfare is fractal. The synchronicity is typically only conceivable after reaching a terrible, irreversible apogee. If the Stormlord could be said to have any weakness, it is an observed tendency to deliberately court rivals. A curious trait for one so typically direct, Imotec frequently seeks out worthy opponents against which to pit himself, both strategically and altogether more directly. The Stormlord never refuses a challenge to personal combat, seemingly delighting in the often spectacular jewels this has led him to engage in since his reawakening. Indeed, the worthiest of opponents have on occasion been spared. During the Battle of Schrödinger VII, Imotec spared the life of High Marshal Helbrecht of the Black Templars, content to simply slice off the Marshal's hand with his warsythe as a mark of victory. The clemency is not true mercy. Imotec's quirk of desiring strong opponents turns their survival into a mere stay of execution, abating for the defeated into seeking vengeance against the Sautec Phaeron at a later date, so that he may be challenged anew and best them once more. This has, of course, led to the Stormlord enduring defeat at the hands of rage-fuelled enemies seeking said vengeance. High Marshal Helbrecht recouped his 55 years after losing his hand at the fall of the inevitable conqueror. Imotec, however, is eternal. Let his body be destroyed, his flux endures, sleeved into a new shell of necrodermis. While the insult of defeat no doubt stings the Phaeron, the Stormlord is nothing if not patient. He, like the rest of his damnable species, have the spans of millennia upon their side. In these closing centuries of the 41st millennium, the return of the last silent king, Sarek, fundamentally disrupted the balance of power amongst the reawakened necron dynasties and their nobility. It is believed the silent king did not initially reveal himself after returning from his intergalactic self-imposed exile, but rather worked in secret to assess and assay the status of the torporous necrons, working primarily through the triarch Praetorians that still held unshakable loyalty to him, and in full personal disguise, moving amongst reawakened royal courts as a visiting minor noble or cryptic. Bereft of the command protocols he had previously exerted in controlling his species, Sarek was forced to spend centuries slowly inculcating what dynasties he could in his ideals of necron supremacy, and the knowledge that only he could deliver the species to their supposedly rightful primacy. Having formed a new triarch, the silent king ultimately chose to reveal himself at the head of his own newly reawakened, if depleted, Sarek and dynasty, holding territories in segmentum tempestus and coreward in ultima segmentum. The strength of the dynasty, and the silent king, is the work of the ultimate Phaeron's allegiance building. Many a necron dynasty swore to his glyph at the moment of his reemergence, seeing this as a turning point in the species' destiny. Many others, however, set themselves against him, blaming Sarek for all the ills the necrons had endured. The silent king's grandest scheme thus far has been the construction of what the adeptus mecanicus has termed contra-immaterial nodal xenomatrices. The hosting of networks of pylons constructed from Noctolith, an apparently rock-like material that can either channel or repel the energies of the warp itself, the silent king has sought to create whole regions of space that are entirely severed from any connection to the immaterium itself. It has not been until the reemergence of the necrons, and their utilization of blackstone for this purpose, that the mecanicum has been able to link their activities with the presence of ancient monoliths of Noctolith that the Imperium has cataloged since its very birth, such as those that once dotted the surface of lost, lamented Cadia. Schemes of the silent king and his allied dynasties, however, have become much broader in scale than a single planet. The greatest of these zones was discovered by the Imperium at the end of the Noctis Eterna, in the beginning of the era Indomitus, the region now known variously as the Nephilim Anomaly, the zone of silence, or most commonly, the Pariah Nexus. The volume has been nearly entirely severed from the warp. Within the boundaries of its nodal matrices, psychic powers are still utterly, and psychic communication is next to impossible. Worse yet, it has been observed that humans who remain within the Nexus for too long begin to suffer what many have come to term the degradation of the soul itself, a steady bleeding of the self into nothingness, until the quietude becomes so severe that a human is reduced to nothing but a husk. Autonomic bodily functions continuing, but the essence of who they are reduced to dust, sentience bled from them by sinister Xenos technology. It is believed by the Imperium that Sarek, in cohort with Seras, the original architect of biotransference, wishes to harvest these empty human shells in grand culls, with the ultimate aim to use them as new biological forms for necron mines. Thus does the Silent King seek to undo biotransference itself, the guilt of having inflicted this upon his entire species clearly still weighing upon him millions of years later. Immotech, however, disagrees. Never the Silent King's most ardent supporter, the Stormlord believes that biotransference is the one true success of Sarek, granting unto the necrons the bodies they require to not only conquer, but rule the galaxy for eternity. The Silent King by Immotech's reckoning had done nothing but lie, usurp, and abandon his people. Now he was apparently seeking to do the one thing that he had actually done right. The Stormlord made no pretense of bending the knee to the Silent King's demands of dynastic allegiance upon his return. Outwardly, the Satech merely rejected in treaties perfunctorly, but secretly, Immotech had fully permitted client dynasties to militarily clash with Sarek and forces on more than one occasion. Upon learning of the grand nodal matrices scheme, however, Immotech's resentment at the Silent King's return turned from seething spite to outright fury. Action was required, or the work of the Satech, his work thus far, would come to ruin, and the dynasty would be denied its rightful, nay, logical place as the galaxy's true rulers. Thus, even as the Imperium's own Indomitus Crusade had made righteous war upon the Silent King's legions in the Pariah Nexus, the Stormlord has launched several incursions of his own against Sarek. While the armies of the Emperor, more out of necessity than strategy, have made claims within the galactic northwest and southeast of the Nexus, Immotech focused his legions on the northeastern volumes, defended as they were primarily by forces of Sarek's own many satropy dynasts, the defeats of which were essentially assured owing to their fractiousness. Immotech observed every single code of honour embedded within the memetic buffers of living necrons. The Stormlord offered advance notice to every enemy dynast, granting them full warning and opportunity to retreat, as well as the opportunity to avoid full-on warfare between legions by substituting honour duels between elected champions. Statements appended to these entreaties elaborated on Immotech's wish to not deprive the necrons of valuable forces that they would need against the unclean races and invasive aliens of the galaxy, appealing to those he addressed to adhere to the Triarchal Codes, and to reject the species traitor that currently claimed the title Silent King. The Sotek invasion of the Pariah Nexus has thus far been a military and political triumph for Immotech. Wherever he defeated either Sarek's legions or the Silent King's satropies, he has done so with all possible honour maintained, and only under what most necrons would view as sufficient provocation. Sarek, since his return, has relied upon political capital earned millions of years prior, a reputation built off impossible acts during the War of Heaven. He has wagered much upon his nodal matrices scheme and his supposed plan to reverse biotransference. Immotech has ensured to cast himself, while in opposition, as an enlightened conqueror for a new age, a necron to whom the species's new forms were accepted reality, even a gift, to enshrine the necrons as rulers of the galaxy. Despite the obvious emotionality behind the Stormlord's opposition to the Silent King, he has been canny enough to hide it, presenting his dynasty's claims and destiny as a thing of simple logic. The rapid seizure of the now Sotek claimed volumes of the Pariah Nexus has granted Immotech mastery of multiple strategically important dolmen gates, depriving the Silent King of key faster-than-light transit hubs, while bolstering his own. But more importantly, it has introduced the potential for an alternative necron future to the minds of lesser nobles beholden to Sarek. Those that opted to retreat from the Stormlord's advance or those who watched their champions demolished by Immotech's own stunning swordsmanship brought with them word of his peerless honor and good sense, and whispers now abound within the Silent King's court of the deeds of this Sotek Phaeron. As the battle lines now expand further within the volume of the Pariah Nexus, quite what this political firestorm means for the necrons can only be guessed at, but one despairs that the possibilities of whatever the victor will turn against the Imperium. As one waits for yet more word from the fates of the Nephilim anomaly, Ave Imperator, Gloria, and Excelsis Thera. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.