Chapter Text
The necrons are a proud race. The fought against the creators of magic and won. They are also cursed race. In their struggle against the Old Ones, they sold their souls to the Star Gods in exchange for the immortality they so craved. In return, their souls were devoured, and their consciousness placed in shells of necrodermis, a material beyond reckoning.
Marshaling their limitless knowledge of the material universe against the warpcraft of the Old Ones, the galaxy burned. Fearing their demise, the ageless Old Ones created warrior races to fight on their behalf. They failed.
When the Old Ones were defeated, the necrons turned against their Star God masters. They shattered them into shards of unimaginable power, imprisoning them as power sources or abominable war machines.
In the time of peace and turmoil after the wars against the gods, the Silent King, the unifier of the necron race suffered guilt. It was he who thrust his people, then called necrontyr, into the fires of biotransference. It was he who trusted the word of the Star Gods. The blame for his people’s plight rested squarely on his necrodermis shoulders.
In penance, the Silent King traveled to the void between stars. But before he left, he commanded his endless metal legions to sleep, and so they did.
Now, humanity has awoken and spread and died and now rises anew. With it, the warrior races of the Old Ones fight to reclaim what is theirs. And underneath their feet the Tomb Worlds of the necron dynasties slowly wake, heralding the return of the Silent King.
Within each dynasty are distinct social strata that mirror their feudal origins. Though the necrontyr suffered early deaths under their cruel suns, and waged war against each other before they were united, there were still peons, scholars and lords.
Now, in metal bodies, the lower classes retain not even the slightest shreds of sentience. They are robots. Unthinking. Unfeeling. Proud warriors are little improved. Perhaps they carry with them the battle shouts of their companies or retain just a bit more sentience. Still, there is little difference between them and the common necron soldier.
Honor guards, lords, scholars, however. They retain much. Yet even as they speak with eloquence or remember with lucidity, they are more cursed than those they command. Not all necrons awoke from their slumber. Those that did suffer greatly. Some lost the ability to form new memories. Others succumb to base instincts.
The most common illness is an inability to escape the past.
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When Hordak stepped through the Dolmen Gate, ordered as he was to die for his Phaeron, he did not feel regret. He did not feel sorrow. He did not feel. Hordak only marched.
When the Gate failed to spit him out on the front lines on Tamar, only then did he allow himself to remember.
Hordak remembered sorrow. But he remembered duty first. So he marched, nonexistent lungs straining to breathe in an alien atmosphere.