 In the fires of war are the destiny of species decided, and for the now damned Necron's, this was more true than most. In order to triumph over their hated enemies, the old ones, they had entered into a devil's bargain with the hideous Catan, energy beings of terrifying power, and as it turned out, depthless malice and cunning. They, once the living, if brief necronteer, were now recast, remade in flesh of metal as the necrons, their very souls stolen from their once-living bodies to feed their new alien masters. Yet their pact, so akin to the ancient Terran legend of the Faustus, was not to be their end, indeed far from it. So then, that this is a record of the continuing war in heaven, and of the machinations of the necrons as they sought to free their cursed selves from the Catan. The silent king, the head of the council of Phaerons that ruled the Necron dynasties, could not deny that biotransference had delivered unto his frail people the immortality they had so desperately craved. They had achieved a unity previously thought incomprehensible to such a fractious species. The necrons obeyed their dynasts without question, and even the Phaerons' command protocols could be subsumed to the will of the Triarch Council. No longer could civil strife plague the species, for they were united as one, one blasphemous whole, united in a purpose only dictated by the few, and, should he deem it necessary, simply the silent king himself. Yet the king despaired. For this had come of the price of a tyranny vileer than any in history, the complete loss of whatever individuality the species had possessed. He bade himself to keep these thoughts to himself, however, lest the Catan discover him, for it now fell upon the necrons to honour their side of the dread bargain. What now burned in the core of the lowliest warrior to the mightiest Phaeron was a deep and all-consuming hatred for life organic, and the old ones that had previously laid them so low. Legions of soldiers, now all but impervious to harm, cascaded out from worlds of the necron dynasties, warriors who no longer needed sleep nor sustenance nor succour. At their van, the Catan, swollen and glutted upon the sole fire of an entire race, wielded reality shattering powers unlike any they had unleashed before. The galaxy burned. Suns were extinguished while Nebulae were devoured, black holes ate entire star systems, every bastion of the old ones and their servant races were assailed by the hosts of the necrons. The Nyadrasath, the Burning One, breached the webway itself, casting his armies into the space beyond space that had previously allowed the old ones such mastery over the material plane. In scant years, the old ones were cast from their lofty heights into loaves of diarist desperation, clinging to the galaxy from fortress worlds, barely holding back the legions of necrons that cared for nothing but their annihilation. The other, younger sentients of the galaxy, abandoned by their protectors, became naught but cattle for the Catan, fed to the star gods in obscene genocide harvests. It was this hunger, the same that had driven the Catan since they had first incarnated, that would become the first step on their path to undoing. The old ones were besieged, consigned to fragments of worlds, and with their power ascendant and none to challenge them, the Catan grew fat from the fruits of the necron conquests. But their hunger could not be sated, and as the harvests of souls grew thinner, they began, whether through desperation, deprivation, or sheer spite, to war amongst each other, sporting with their legions until the conflicts grew so intense, that Catan began to devour Catan. Their competitions were neither straightforward nor quick, and their sport lasted an age of the galaxy. While the star gods battled, the old ones, previously infinite in their amphibian patience, had grown frantic, faced with the loss of everything they held and their own extinction, they began to engineer species from the basest elements to directly face the necrons and their gods. With science arcane and horrific, they danced amongst the DNA of a dozen races, plucking and weaving like horrendous loom maidens. They began, in an act that would damn the galaxy for the remainder of its history, to directly build creatures, with innate connections to the warp, the unreality beyond the veil, a dimension of purest emotional energy. Their new creations could wield with the powers of their minds alone. It appears that they are solely responsible for the elevation or indeed creation of so many of the grotesque aliens that infest a rightfully human galaxy. Texts speak of the Aeldari being shaped by them, and references are made, albeit obscurely, to a race dubbed the Cork. Seemingly beyond doubt at this point, the precursors to the modern greenskins, given one's previous discourse upon that hideous race's biology. The Roshan, the Jokero, the K'nib, all were built by the old ones to serve in their war, living weapons against mechanical hosts. This horrific process took millennia, nurtured in great webway gardens and deep within the few real space realms the old ones still laid claim to. All the while the Katan warred petally amongst themselves, unaware of the destruction about to be unleashed. Eventually even the great minds of the old ones could bear the weight no longer, and they set their new children upon their foes. To creatures such as the Necrons and the Katan, it must be understood that as beings of primal physicality confined to the material plane in their entirety, the powers of the imiterium are utterly anathema. Now rendered soulless, the Necrons themselves possess no connection to that dimension whatsoever. While the nature of the connection between the soul of a sentient and the warp will wait for a later record to be elucidated upon, it must be understood that to the incarnated energy beings of the Katan, warp-fueled energy was not only agonizing to them but ruinously destructive. Few of the old ones powerful but mundane weapons could harm the Katan with their mastery of space and time, but creatures adept at channeling the psychic fury of warp space tore into the star gods with almost contemptuous ease. The Necrons and their masters were sent reeling. The pendulum of war swung against them for the first time since their post-biotransference resurgence. The Katan, far fewer in number now thanks to millennia of wanton feuding, united against these younger races, but were powerless to halt their implacable advance. Desperate, they initiated a grand scheme, frenetically pioneering technology aimed at forever severing the connection between the material realm and the warp itself. The Necrons' scientists wielding an arcane material of their own devising, known as Black Stone, set to building great pylons to cast back the warp and prevent any organic life form from connecting with it in volumes of space near the structures. They could not, however, build such defenses quickly enough, and while these pockets were strengthened with as much haste as the Necrons could muster, defeat appeared to be barreling towards the star gods. In a tale that has already seen so many reversals, there would be yet one more, for fate appears to have been most capricious throughout the millennia of the war in heaven. On the cusp of their victory against the Katan, the old ones were horrified to discover what every race that has dabbled blindly in the powers of warp sorcery has found. The true cost, wielding the energies of that foulest of dimensions. Emotional resonance is at the core of the metaphysical structure of the immaterium, and as our universe sang with the songs of blood and death and pain, so too did the orchestra of the warp cascade with the symphony of horrific discordance. The entities of that no-space became two mirrored reflections of the destruction being wrought, becoming vicious and predatory, hungering to feast on the souls of those who would so recklessly wield psychic energies. Whether or not these were the intelligences of, and subservient to, that realm's current abhorrent pantheon is perhaps a topic for another record, but know that the warp listened, and the warp fed. The thundering emotional cacophony of the warp threw the immaterium into a tumult that has never been known, and as those of us privy to the worst of all knowledges know well, when the warp begins to sing, we of the mortal plane suffer. The old ones, ineffable in their secrets arcane, could not but notice the cracks appearing in the sky of reality, and when they investigated they reeled in the horrors of what they had discovered, as predators from the cathonic nothing void clawed their way into the realms of the flesh. Frantically, the old ones unleashed more and more of their creations against this newer and more terrible foe, battling warp fire with warp fire. In their desperation, it is believed by xenobiologous adepts that they created the first instances of the jokerro and the modern greenskins, but it would be for naught. Their strongholds were assailed, their technology was useless, and their psychic power was only damning them further. The old ones hegemony was thrown into chaos, yet it was not, as any imperial scholar worth their salt may suspect, the demonic hosts that would prove the final undoing of these galactic progenitors, but the entities known to some as the enslavers. Quite what these creatures, in fact, are, is a subject of much debate, as there are some that name them Xenos, while others insist they to be maleficarum, demonic entities beholden to no particular aspect of the dark pantheon, and subsumed entirely to baser predatory instinct. Whatever their actual origins, their nature is quite simply beyond horrific. All hunters born of the immaterium require the presence of a ciker within the material plane through which to enter our world. Those known to us as demonic exploit cracks in the sky to whisper and promise power or wealth to mortals, subtly usurping their way into incarnation with honeyed lies. Enslavers are altogether more brutal. Should one manage to make its way into the materium, it will immediately dominate through psychic force any mind of the hapless ciker responsible, bringing forth a deluge of its own kind to suckle upon the minds of all sentient creatures within reach. All within their thrall become utterly helpless, subsumed entirely unto the enslaver's will, and will perform any act, no matter how heinous or self-destructive, should the enslaver will it. History, if such a term can be used for this time, records their arrival in the galaxy. A galaxy, it must be pointed out, ablaze with psychic powers unleashed witlessly. They were akin to a plague, tides and tides of these things, conquering planets in days or hours, faced with a complete epidemic not even they were immune from, a complete loss of all their material domains besides, the old ones were simply defeated. The totality of this remains, curiously, a complete mystery. It is not possible to determine whether they were driven to extinctions through the combined losses to Necron, Catan and Enslaver, if they utilize their technology to leave our galaxy behind or simply departed the material forever, retreating to some deep and forgotten corner of their webway, or perchance ascending to become beings of pure energy as some of my more radical colleagues seek to speculate. Humanity, or rather what minds were even aware of their existence in the first place, knows not whether they are rightfully dead and buried, or yet cling to life somewhere and somehow, biding their terrible time. Should the Aeldari or even the Necrons know, they have yet to reveal anything. For the purposes of one's own records, I should like to consider their blasphemous light extinguished, let their alien bones rot, a testament to their own towering arrogance and stupidity. They are better as a lesson anyway. But what of the Necrons? Well, would that their stain have ended alongside their enemies? But alas, it were not so. They had endured, albeit in a much reduced capacity, by their losses to both the old ones and their servant races. With the latter being ravaged by the enslavers, the Catan despaired at the loss of so much of their mortal crop to these immaterial invaders. For who now could they glut their immense hunger upon? Little could they can, but this would soon no longer be an issue for them, for as the Catan frantically consumed what remaining species they could, Zarek, the silent king, had been conspiring. Biding his time and believing at his core that the rule of the Catan was an insult to his species, a constant reminder of the horrible bargain the Necron tier had made, the silent king yearned to throw off the yoke of their alien domination. Yet patient was he, this Xenos monarch, for he knew that even to pit his formidable might against the Catan at the height of their power would have seen both he and his species annihilated, exterminated by the spite of their once gods. The silent king knew that the old ones and their progeny must fall, and the sole harvests groan thin before their liberation could be achieved. Now, in the wake of the enslaver plague, the time was right for revolt. The Necron hieroglyphics, the tale of this insurrection, do so with tenses and adjective forms redolent of justice and scorn. For by their telling, the arrogant Catan saw nothing coming until it was far, far too late. The Necrons had fashioned in secret weapons of great and terrible power for this purpose alone, devices that channeled the very fabric of reality at their hated tyrant things. The Catan, beings of power so immeasurable as to be loci of the material plane itself, could not be destroyed, but they could, nevertheless, be broken. Across the galaxy, the Necron legions turned on their starmasters, shattering each into thousands of individual shards, each a fragment of the whole containing a fraction of the original Catan sentience, essence, and power. These were locked into tesseract labyrinths, devices that purport to be able to fold space, into impossible angles, and trap the shards of Catan essences in an ever-twisting dimension pocketed off by arcane technology from our reality, by the tools of their own sciences, and the hands of their own creations where the star gods brought low. Such a fall from such lofty heights of hubris, well, it possesses a wonderful fable-like quality, would that such lessons had been taught to all Xenos. The Necrons were now, once again, masters of their own revolting fates, and in the guttering fires of the War of Heaven and the Enslaver Plague, no doubt took wicked vindication in the triumph of their science, over not only their erstwhile Catan masters, but also in the catastrophic demise of the old ones, brought to extinction by the very psychic powers that had once elevated them so far over the wasting Necron tier. Yet it was a victory that brought in reality naught but ash. The galaxy was a much-changed place, ravaged by years of a war unparalleled. The corpses of dead worlds hung suspended in the corpses of dead systems that haunted the corpses of dead sectors. Still, the Enslavers rampaged ever on, subjugating hundreds of species. Only the hardiest of the old ones' creations remained. The Orcs, the Jokero, the Eldari, all fighting for life with a tenacity that even the Necrons may have begrudgingly admired. The Silent King and the Phaerons were much, much diminished. The strength of their dynastic legions bled away by the war and now the Plague. Pragmatically, the leadership settled upon a radical solution. The entire species would place itself as one in stasis, the logic being that the inferno of the psychic races would gutter out as their powers and the Enslavers both consumed them. Let the Necrons rest as these young races scrabble desperately for survival, for they were now ageless, undying, free from the limitations of biological life. They had patience and they had time. Both, the Silent King felt, would ultimately deliver them to their rightful place as lords of the galaxy. He ordered all remaining Necron worlds to be converted entirely, their cities wrought anew into vast Cyclopean tomb complexes. Threaded throughout these halls were stasis crypts, large enough to contain every single Necron, an entire species willfully burying itself in billions upon billions of sarcophagi, to await the age of their coming dominion. The legions marched again, not forth across the stars, but deep below the crusts of a thousand, thousand worlds. The Silent King himself is recorded, somehow, as having been the last to be interred. Necron hieroglyphics stating he bade the galaxy a farewell that was redolent with the promise of an eventual return. Thus it was, the tale of the Necron's foul origins concludes, that the species interred to their great rest, left to slumber only under the eyes of their cold, unliving slave machines. Would that they had remained so entombed, buried forever beneath shifting sands to never again blight the galaxy with their malignant tread? Would that it were so, but alas? It has been over sixty million years, but the Imperium now realizes the threat that emerges from beneath, the sheer scope of this alien horror. It is impossible to discern which of these two worlds was the first to awaken, or precisely when, but slowly they are returning to life, the Canoptek constructs, stirring the metal bodies of their Necron masters to wakefulness, with cold and clean decisiveness. While far from precise, this grand awakening appears implacable, legions of metallic Xenos rising from the grave sand of a million more worlds, to snuff out our stars and impose themselves as rulers upon our little galaxy. They believe themselves are masters, these wretched idolons, what foolish and decrepit things they are too deluded to choked upon their rotten memories of an age-long dead, that they know not that they should stay dead alongside it. Let them rise, only to find our Imperial guns and our Imperial steel level against them as they shamble out of their pits. Let them be cast low under the sons of a newer era that is ours by divine emperor given right. Davae Imperator. Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel is made possible through the incredibly kind support of my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash oculus imperia, if you want to kick me a buck or two to help keep the lights running and the scripts flowing. 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