 Memories can be vile, concocted of a morass of feeling and sensation and prone to complete degradation at the hands of passionless time. Yet memories are what inform our very existence. They are, as an ancient dramaturge once penned, what our reason is based upon. For them, we deny reason itself. Recollections of times past inform our present actions and future decisions. We learn from them, or at least we should ever strive to. But memories can poison and infect, place enough time between oneself and the original act, and one can find oneself doubting the veracity of events, or worse, casting it in a completely different light. This is simply the way of things, the product of the meat energy of our crude, if emperor blessed, biological functions. What of the memories of the galaxy itself, or of time itself? Our species, manifest in our destiny though we may be, is but young compared to some of the vile alien forms that squat amongst other stars. The aildari, the orcs, the hurud, these things have traversed the heavens since before even the emperor himself walked upon the then green surface of holy terra. Bay, according to one studies, are remnants of beings yet older still, who in epochs ancient beyond imagination bent every sun in every sky to their will. The mythic tracts of every race speak of a conflict, one that has surfaced in readings time and time again, a war that broke reality in twain and cast the galaxy to ash. Who then could have challenged the void's hideous progenitors? Are they but memories too? No, dearest acolyte. Once they were simply recollections to bring a shudder to the spine, grim portents rendered culturally mythic by virtue of the guilts of time. Recent events, however, have rendered this laughable. The sub-pulcral death that now rises from the ashen sands of a thousand, thousand worlds puts paid to that. The threat of the shambling death that now stalks our galaxy is very real, and thus a study of their origins, if any can possibly be discerned, is vital. I have set about this task not with resolve, but with barely contained terror, for in the dark of my librarian I now fear that there will come a time when Stygian night never ends, where dead stars will spread before us like islands that slumber on the ocean, and when the beings that hid like shadows will emerge to feed on us forever. No then, that this is a record of the most terribly ancient foe the Imperium will likely ever face, a horror from beyond time that rises to reclaim that which they believe to still be theirs. The dead hosts of the Necrons. The species that would eventually become the Necrons were not always as they are now, far from it. They began their existence millions and millions of years before old earth had even formed. The Necronteer, as they were then known, were one of the first sentient species to cast their eyes to the stars of the galaxy, if what histories that still exist can be believed. And that very gaze was one filled with spiteful hate, for their sun was a terrible thing indeed. Accounting for general and localized stellar drift, the system of their birth is believed to have been in the region approximating the current Halo stars, and had at its core a violent and fractious star that continuously spat forth ionizing solar winds and bombardments of radiation storms, which assailed the Necronteer homeworld with deadly ferocity. Quite how it is even possible intelligent life could arise under such conditions can only be theorized, but if there is one thing the foulness of the galaxy's xeniforms has taught mankind, it is that their detestable adaptability knows few boundaries. Little to nothing is known about that impossibly ancient society. What can be scryed tells us that their lives were brief and painful, but their biology only barely able to maintain itself under the punishing radiation of the star. Necronteer society became necrocentric, dominated by the inevitability of their own deaths. Their cities were built to venerate this, vast necropolis revering the departed ancestors with the living, eking out meager existences as temporary earthly residence in vast, tomb complexes, preparing for their own passage to the beyond. The society that emerged was fiercely caste dominated, with the rigidity of their world reflected in the absolute immobility of the social order. The species, resigned as it was to the grim certainty of their fates, nevertheless was driven to escape it, survival instinct giving birth to their first extraplanetary spacecraft. Slow burning antimatter torch engines and stasis crypts allowed the first generation ships to escape the bounds of the hateful star and plunge blindly into the darkness. Slowly, painfully, slowly, the necronteer founded off-world colonies, daring to hope to have escaped their radiation-soaked prison. This optimism soon turned to dust, however, as they found that the millions of years of painstaking evolution under their hated sun had seemingly poisoned their very biology, leaching their alien vitality away, and following them light years from the limits of its own light. It is believed that in tandem with this horrible revelation of their own brittle mortality, necronteer society was being ever more stratified, with the castes of old evolving into unyielding aristocratic dynasties. These dynasties were likewise ruled over by the reigning triarch, comprised of three pharons, sovereigns, to the individual dynastic lines. At the fore of this council was the chosen silent king, known so for the practice of only speaking through the remaining two pharons, allowing the dynasties of the necronteer to speak as a whole, but with a singular voice. As their newfound stellar empire expanded outwards, ever, ever outwards, the triarch formed the singular leadership that the necronteer desperately needed, the core of unity that provided the species with a guiding light in a world permanently hosting the spectres of their deaths. It is impossible to discern quite how long it took, but with technological leaps made possible by their slowly expanding spatial volume, the necronteer came to dominate the much, much younger galaxy. Other sentient races there were, though many were ill-evolved, little better than beasts. But one, one stood above all others, even the now expansive necronteer, over the course of my frankly upsetting discourses upon the origins of these repulsive xenophones that contaminate the purity of our imperium. I have come across numerous references to an impossibly ancient, antecedent race. While it is a sad reality that humanity was not the first, or only, sentient species to rule the stars, tales of one older than even the necronteer or Eldari can be discerned from a dizzying spectrum of sources. The mythic cycles of the craft world Azurani tell of an age of celestial teachers uplifting the primitive Eldari to greatness. Adeptus mecanicus biologis discourses upon green-skinned biology draw conclusions at point to nothing else than that race's deliberate creation as a biological weapon. It would appear that buried within whatever can be uncovered about the origins of the necronteer is as close to the truth of the matter as one can possibly get. This race did, in fact, exist. The first intelligent life, this galaxy of humanities ever harbored. At best Eldari translation they were known as the old ones, or first ones depending on the tense. They did not appear to have a species name beyond this rather vague descriptor, but perhaps none suffices, as the legends regarding them, either Eldari or necronteer, speak of them as being technologically advanced beyond any other race, and to have been so for longer than all other intelligent life had even existed. Today, the necronteer discovered, had long, long ago brought the galaxy under their dominion, for they had forged the paths outside of reality known to imperial scholarship as the web-way. Through means completely unknown and doubtless fowl, these old ones had effectively portioned off a sub-dimension of the imiterium from the rest, creating space somehow between reality and unreality. To have gained mastery over the imperian itself, their psychic might must have been completely unparalleled, and they themselves blasphemously powerful for creatures of flesh and blood. Creeping capillaries of their web-way acted as tunnels, connecting the focal points of their empire together and allowing for safe and secure travel across galactic volumes in barely any time at all, all safe in the treacherous tides of the warp itself. First contact was made at some point, with the necronteer petitioning the vast consciousness of the progenitors as equals, and receiving no such treatment in kind. Communication was trite, with the galaxy-spanning empire of the necronteer impressing the old ones little, observing as they did this upstart species' paltry attempts at space travel and terraforming. But perhaps most insulting for the necronteer was the discovery that, in their masteries of energies both mundane and psychic, the old ones had discovered the secret to perfect immortality, and it was one they simply would not countenance on sharing. The insult, perhaps not even seen as such by these amphibian progenitors, would come to define the necronteer. All that race saw, and could possibly see, was a species that spitefully guarded something that was to their short-lived society beyond value, the key to unlimbering them from the yoke of their tyrannical biology, and allowing them to ascend in foul apotheosis, to that which they no doubt saw as their true potential. Not by any means to extend them sympathy, for such an emotion holds no place when discussing the xenos, but one supposes it must have been the greatest injustice imaginable, that for all their efforts, for all their desperate rush to the worlds beyond their hated star, they had come within sight of the ultimate cure for their ills, only to have it denied, that the only other intelligent species abroad in the heavens was blessed with life eternal, while theirs were cut so brutally short. If the myths are to be believed, it was a poison at the heart of necronteer society from that point onwards. The fractures were small at first, but began to widen. A concept unheard of soon became reality. Civil War In what their histories name the Wars of Secession, the various dynasties of the necronteer, previously so immovably united, began to spitefully war with each other. Knowing they were forever doomed to their petty existences, the necronteer aristocracy became petulately short-sighted, seeking to amass as much material wealth and territory as they could in their uncertain lifespan. Independence was sought, rebellions fermented, and society began to simply dissolve. The triarch, desperate for a solution to what they saw as the doom of their empire, settled upon what may have seemed to be their only hope, an external enemy, and there was simply only one that could possibly suffice. The justification for such a conflict would have been simplicity itself. The Wars of Secession were a direct result of the old ones hoarding of their secret to immortality, and by extending an amnesty to all secessionist dynasties, the triarch, and the latest in the line of silent kings, were able to reunite their race effectively immediately. Thus began the War in Heaven, a conflict that resonates to this very day in the genetic memory of a hundred species. It is likely an impossibility that an accurate account of this war could ever be possibly correlated. For the line between allegorical hyperbole and actual technological capabilities is blurred to the point that the borders between the two can never be established. One will endeavour to try, but suffice it to say it was the first time in history that the galaxy burned. Planets, stars, systems and sectors all were consumed by the terrible might unleashed by the Necronteer, but the efforts of that species were for naught. Despite the technology, centuries had allowed them to develop. The old ones outfought, outdeveloped, and outmaneuvered them at every possible turn. The Necronteer possessed no psychic potential, while the old ones had an entire dimension of impossible energies at their beck and call. Not to mention being afforded perfectly reliable, faster than light capabilities, with their mastery of the webway. The hegemony of the Necronteer, or at least the one they thought they had, was simply shattered, but the old ones annihilating colony after colony with stunning rapidity. They were forced back further and further, reduced to a measly stellar volume in the local cluster of stars surrounding their original, poisonous homeworld. The old ones were not genocidal, though, and they let the Suishis persist, albeit as a crippled former shadow of itself. In the face of such abject humiliation, what unity existed amongst the Necronteer began to fracture once again, as the dynasties began to rage against not their enemies, but also the triarch that had cost them so very much. By bringing them into such a ruinous conflict, generation upon generation had been fed to the thirsting moor that was the war in heaven, all for naught. Unable to maintain their grip over the Phaerons, the triarch despaired to see the wars of secession they had sought to stymie begin anew, greater and more terrible now that the Necronteer had such meager space and even more meager resources to fight over. Faced with the complete and total collapse of their species' society, the triarch cast around frantically for a solution, but the one they would be presented with would incur a cost beyond imagining. The accounts of the fateful moment in galactic history are fragmentary and contradictory. Some related in complex Necronteer glyphoform, others in Eildari legend tracts, yet more in scraps from primordial devil tales from a score of other lesser and thankfully extinct races. What is broadly common amongst all speaks of the desperation of the triarchs, spurring a race amongst Necronteer science casts to seek out a means of defeating the old ones, whether through weapons development, chronometric or dimensional manipulation, exotic energy harnessing or some combination of all three. Such frantic questing led to research being conducted upon cancerous late-sequence stars. Some say that it was a chance encounter on a random star, while some state categorically that it was the star of the Necronteer themselves, one that had cursed them with such pathetically short lives. That latter one is considered to hold more narrative weight in the venerated tellings, but whatever the location, the result was the same. The Necronteer probed the stellar mass in question. Their instruments detected subtle but consistent electrodynamic anomalies diffused throughout a massive area of the star's corona. Going further, the Necronteer realized that this was not just a previously unknown form of energy. No, but it was in fact alive, sentient, a living energy field with a mind dispersed throughout the exotic spectrum spread over a volume greater than a dozen planets. How initial contact with this being was even established is completely unknown. Must have been an almost impossible task given the sheer vastness of the consciousness in question. But established contact was, and through means unknown, the Necronteer communed with the creature that could barely even conceive of their existence. Realizing the sheer incomprehensible power this creature represented, but knowing that their paltry communication would be insufficient to grant the thing full understanding of the physical plane, the Necronteer devised a plan to incarnate the creature. Using the energies of the sun itself, they, through means completely heretical, captured the essence of the star thing and compressed it through an incorporeal bridge of starlight into a shell that can best be described as living metal. Eldritch energies compacted and folded and crushed their way into this hideous vessel, and the being was finally made manifest. The Necronteer dubbed the creature a catan, a word that roughly transliterated means star god or star vampire in their debased tongue. The thing, finally, able to perceive and experience materiality, was to their surprise rapidly able to comprehend this new plane of existence, and spoke of being one of a race of many, many more. Their fleets rushed to coordinates provided by the catan, and their unique energy signatures were scryed for throughout the galaxy. More and more were incarnated, for the Necronteer believed they had found their saviours. That these beings by seeming unbidden choice assumed forms redolent of their half forgotten death deities seemed only further proof that the delivery of the Necronteer was at hand. One amongst them, its necrodermis shining bright gold, its face beatific and open, presented itself as an emissary to the new silent king Zarek. It named itself Mephetran, and it spoke of a war between the catan and the old ones, one that had paralleled the Necronteer's own struggles, for the catan had lost everything at the hands of this hated enemy. Fearing the righteous vengeance of the old ones, their race had fled the material plane for spectrums exotic, hoping that one day they would find willing allies with whom they could make concordance, and return them to the galaxy. In return, professing the gratitude of its entire species, Mephetran announced that the catan would bestow unto the Necronteer that which they had forever sought, but had forever been denied to them. It was a boon they gave gladly to their new allies, in gratitude for the act of kindness the Necronteer had shown them, and as a weapon to bring the war anew to the hated old ones. The account of Mephetran was a lie, but the Necronteer knew it not. The proposal was not immediately accepted, and for many long months the triarch debated with itself, and the pharons of the court, a widespread ceasefire having been called in the aftermath of the catan's incarnation. Many a voice was raised in earnest favour of Mephetran's offer, with the only soul and consistent dissenter being an astromancer of the court, Orican, who prophesied that accepting the boon would forever dam the Necronteer. His lone voice was overruled, for greed and desperation are powerful forces in the hearts of those frantic to cling to life. A year after the offer had been made, Sarek summoned the catan delegation, and formally sealed the alliance on behalf of his species. The catan delighted in the compact, and set to teaching the science and weapon casts all they knew. Weapons technology immediately leapt forward generations, and in scant months the Necronteer were resurgent, sweeping out from their local systems in great hosts to reclaim the galaxy that had once been theirs. At the head of each legion were the catan, unleashing their stellar energies that proved just as horrifically devastating as those first Necronteer scientists had theorized. Worlds burned, stars died, the galaxy wept as the war in heaven came anew. The catans' power drew the eyes of their Necronteer commoners, who began, slowly at first, but then in greater and greater numbers, to worship them as the gods they were named for, believing the old deities had come anew in this alien race. The catan appeared to eagerly accept and revel in this veneration, drawing to their ships and temple cities great crowds of Necronteer faithful, many of which were never seen again. If the dynasties were even aware of these disappearing thousands, they either paid it no heed, or saw it as the price of their stellar reclamation. Whatever the reality, it was a grim portend of what was to come, for the catan's truest gift was about to be realized. Mephetran had not gested when he promised the Necronteer immortality. Through the artifice of combined Necronteer and Catan technology and science, colossal structures were erected on every Necronteer world, soaring over all others and redolent with foul and eldritch energies. These bio-furnaces were the Necronteer's salvation, the Catan said, and bade their allies enter them in their millions to free themselves of the hated weakness of the flesh and become as unto their gods. And so ever these structures functioned is simply begun to the ken of man, but by all that is holy they could not have been anything but the most dire affront to the purity of technology. By means beyond arcane, in the depths of these sepulchral mountains, the biological bodies of the Necronteer were stripped from them, atom by atom, and with it the life energies of their very souls. What shards of mind and soul remained were cast anew in bodies of the same Necrodermis that had allowed the Catan to enter the material plain. The Necronteer that entered were consumed utterly. What exited the temples imploding hordes were the new, undying Necrons. It was not until the silent King Zarek himself had undergone what his Catan allies referred to as biotransference that the truth of the bargain was revealed to him, gazing at his new metallic body. The fully sentient king marveled at the loss of the pain that had once riven it for so, so many years, but despaired in a horror beyond imagining that the gnawing void in the core of his own being, an indescribable yearning from the depths of that hollow nothing for a spark forever lost. Worse yet, he gazed upon the workings of the great temples, and he beheld the Catan dancing within the baleful soul energies of each, glutting themselves on the very life essence of an entire species and swelling to vast, corpulent shapes. Mephetron had deceived them. The Catan, in their moment of manifestation so many years before, had found themselves in possessions of senses far beyond that of mortals. Able to perceive the whispering strands of aetheric energies given off by the bodies of the mortal Necronteer, these senses awoke within them a hunger unlike anything they had ever known, where previously they had drawn nourishment from the forces of stellar fusion. The sheer deliciousness of soul energy could not be ignored, and the Catan drew their plans in secret against the Necronteer to grant unto themselves a feast beyond measure. They had fulfilled their promise to the Necronteer in granting them immortality through biotransference that had in the process glutted themselves on the souls of an entire species. The effect of this feast had rendered the vast majority of the Necronteer population as little more than automata, possessing only rudimentary self-awareness that could easily be overwritten by command protocols embedded into their new mechanical minds. Those who had previously served in higher caste positions, scientists, diviners, military hierarchs, and the pharaohs of the dynasties, these had retained their personalities and minds, largely preserved, although the degree to which they were their old selves varied wildly. The Catan had in effect not only maintained, but completely locked in the old Necronteer castes for all eternity, and had also granted themselves complete control, should they so desire, over their new Necron subjects, the worship of whom they still delighted in. Thus it was, that the Necrons we of the Imperium know were first created, hateful and bitter things, that thawed themselves to star devils out of spite and vindictiveness. It is not, however, the end of their origins, for events even greater and far more terrible were about to occur. Alas, the discourse upon a subject as foul as this wearies me, the Chronicle of the War of Heaven in full must wait for another day, dearest Acolyte. As you depart, however, hold true to the faith of he upon the throne, our surest protector against the unspeakable feldness of these degenerate revenants, Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel are made possible through the incredibly kind contributions of my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash oculus imperia. 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