40k Lore, The Necron, Mechanical Horrors.

greetings and salutations friends and welcome to the animal warhammer 40k lore today we are going to be talking about the necrons a robotic race created by the godlike katan during the war in their heavens they were originally known as the necron tour back when they were still organic life forms and some of them still refer to themselves as such they are frequently compared with the classical undead factions from other sci-fi and fantasy universes and to some extent this is relatively accurate the majority of the necrons are little more than soulless machines who have been programmed to perform a certain task usually involving you know murdering and such things although calling the incredibly complex algorithms that drive the necron warriors forwards a mere program is almost an insult frankly at the very least it is far more complex than anything we could even dream of creating today and at its most basic level it might be described as a barely sapient machine capable of acting and fighting based on its environment and enemy and make logical decisions based upon these factors and considering the necrons were once organics it might be that it is borderline intelligence is perhaps some small echo of the creatures they used to be rather than just good old-fashioned ones and zeros this theory is further reinforced by the existence of necron commanders that seem to retain the cognitive capabilities of their previous selves although often entirely stripped of certain emotions mostly the useless ones like love compassion or mercy but we'll get back to that first let's start out with some history the necrontier race was a roughly humanoid species inhabiting an area of space known today as the halo stars now they are said to inhabit areas of the halo stars this is a bit of an old new law thing in the new law the halo stars essentially refers to all of the stars on the outside halo of our galaxy which obviously the necrons wouldn't have been spread over that entire area because well you know silly but they certainly occupied a fairly large piece of space somewhere near the edges of the galaxy and they have been around billions of years before we ourselves crawled out of the primordial soup and began harassing each other with sticks and stones but where we were blessed with a fairly mild and life-giving sun the necrontier's home planet orbited a far angrier sort of star whose radiation ensured that necrontial lives were short and painful over the course of tens of thousands of years however the necron tier developed at least marginal resistance to the sun's radiation just enough to start building a society and to evolve their species and from this point onwards the necron tier advanced remarkably quickly technologically speaking the reasons for this was their extremely limited life spans that might sound a bit counterintuitive so let me go into a bit more detail we first need to look at their society it was necessarily built around the idea of mortality as an average lifespan was very short indeed and perhaps more importantly remarkably painful this meant that death was not seen as something to dread but rather as a blissful relief a release from torturous life in the beginning of an eternity beyond the grave such a society naturally start venerating the dead and in a way worship them and by natural extension death itself and so necron terrier cities were like massive mausoleums in which the living were but temporary residents and their truly permanent place were determined by their death and said place was of course determined by their value in life essentially they viewed life as a means of improving their status in the far more permanent state of death imagine for example the major religions of our time christianity and the like they often portray heaven and life after death as a reward for doing good in life the necron interior view of this was much like that just far more extreme this pushed them to always try and excel in life to do something worthy of remembrance and therefore a grander place in the afterlife this desperation to always do new and better things led to an explosive evolution of negrontius society and technology to the point where they began looking beyond their own planet and out into the wider galaxy this of course was always a logical end goal for their race as a whole because well star radiation bad so they would naturally seek to finally find some way to escape from the ravages of the sun and settle new and more hospitable planets unfortunately the galaxy is a remarkably large and relatively desolate space there are very few planets out there in the great void that can outright sustain life without any form of adjustments being made and even if a hospitable planet can be found or technology to create one can be invented there is still the small issue of actually getting to said planet the necron tier were for fairly obvious reasons fairly impatient and so began sending their population into space more or less blindly by constructing massive space fairing crafts that travelled the great void at sublight speeds in galactic terms this would be comparable to crossing the pacific ocean a robot entirely doable and assuming the boat has been built for the task relatively safe but excruciatingly slow and of course this is just the space from one star system to another and with the galaxy being a remarkably hostile place you're quite unlikely to happen across a habitable planet in your first attempt especially when you're essentially throwing ships out there blindly as the radiation from the necron to your star made it virtually impossible to get accurate readings from other star systems and any probes launched from the planet would not only be slow to reach the target and to call back home again but even if and when the probe arrived in the next star system there was no guarantee its communications would be able to make it back home through all of the interference from the big blazing in the sky to further complicate matters the relative slowness of the necron tier ships coupled with the short life spans of the necron tier meant that there was no way in necron tier hell if the crew would survive the journey this necessitated another piece of technology the stasis field as the name implies the field creates an area where the flow of time is almost completely suspended time is not actually frozen but it moves so slowly that it might as well be by placing the crew of these coffin ships inside snace's fields the necron tier could extend the range of their ships to a near infinite level all the ships would require to have on board was enough fuel for maneuvering purposes like you know basic steering and acceleration deceleration along with circa one to two years of supplies captain stasis fields of their own and life support systems for the crew to help out during the initial colonization period this is obviously still a fair mountain of food and water but nothing compared to the amount of supplies necessary to keep the crew alive and healthy for the at the very least decades and probably centuries required to reach their objectives and while slow as balls these colonization efforts were eventually successful and the necron tier established several colonies each colony ruled by a so-called dynasty essentially a ruling family that had absolute control over the colony however these dynasties were subject to the rule of the so-called triarc a ruling body composed of three pharaons one of which was known as the silent king and faeron by the way is the rough equivalent of an imperial sector governor and so can hold dominion over several worlds the silent king on the other hand was a singular entity and the de facto ruler of the necrontier empire this was technically a hereditary title but the extremely limited life span on even the highest members of necrontier society meant that the position was occupied by several different dynasties over the course of its existence so the necron tier had finally reached the stars and freed themselves from the great big shiny in the sky or so they would have liked to believe unfortunately thousands of generations spent living under that burning bastard had quite considerably influenced the necroter on a genetic level damage was far too much to be easily repaired as fixing their bodies would require such extreme means that in all due essence the necron tier would cease to be necrontier entirely and in the culture founded so heavily on ancestral worship this was a pretty bitter pill to swallow they would have to find some way of curing their afflictions rather than removing them and this is when they ran into the old ones the mysterious creators had spread across the galaxy far far quicker than the necrotic could ever hope to do why are there veb ways and while the necron tier empire was still quite large the old ones had secured most of the galaxy and more importantly due to their fetish for new life forms they had secured the best and most fertile planets first to make matters worse as far as the necron tiers were concerned the old ones were also virtually immortal living extremely long lives stretching into the millennia something the necrontier could not even dream of as you can probably imagine the penis envy was considerable additionally the old ones were of the opinion that all life no matter its state was sacred and should not be outright altered and so refused to share their medical technology with the necron tier suffice to say the necrontier were not overly charmed by their new acquaintances shitty neighbors aside though the necrotic empire had problems of its own to deal with seeing as they had little to no real way of travelling quickly between the stars the empire became splintered and disunited the various dynasties decided that they were better off doing whatever the they wanted to do rather than obey the instructions of their far-off overlords as with so many other empires before it and so many after it the necrotic empire was subject to a large-scale internal strife varying from vocal disobedience to outright rebellions and without a reliable way of traveling quickly between the various sectors and their colonies there was very little the central government could do about these insurrections any policing force dispatched from a loyalist sector would take ages to arrive at which point the rebels would either have moved on or dug in and as with most rebellions if there is no immediate and crushing response from the establishment the rebellion quickly grows as far more dynasties realize that the triox back home are essentially powerless and losing control it didn't take long for the silent king to realize the position his government was in and it was a dire position indeed any political means to resolve any conflict had long since been exhausted and military means were simply not practical and so rather than letting the unified necrontier empire slip quietly into oblivion the loss of the silent kings zarek devised a plan he simply needed to present the necron to a race with something they could unify around and more specifically against something that all the various dynasties could agree on wholeheartedly and at the same time a goal that would at least in their minds let them rise above their rivals and solidify their individual prestige and position as it so happened this focus was simplicity itself to locate after all the necron tier had quite recently encountered the old ones a race so radically different from themselves blessed with as many gifts as a necron tyra had curses a race that had also denied the necron tear the secrets of immortality well to put it bluntly it wasn't particularly hard to convince the feuding factions to unite again so hated a foe especially as said foe was well universally hated by virtually all segments of necrotic society and so fighting against them provided near limitless opportunities for self-aggrandizement and glory in the eyes of the public besides the older ones couldn't possibly be that much of a threat they themselves claimed to value all life and abhor its destruction such a race can never stand against the necrontier war machine that had been forged in a crucible of never-ending hardship and conquests and on the surface that was probably true unfortunately war on a galactic scale isn't decided by a few dozen battles and the relatively slow speed which the necron tier were restricted to move at compared to the webway network of the old ones and their various allied races meant that the war would inevitably drag on and in a lengthy war the old ones and their servants held all the cards they possessed the greater number of planets the greater number of resources and production hubs and more importantly they possess the time space and technology to create subject species like the elder and the orcs to fight for them necrotic empire was united once again but in all due reality the necron tier had no way of winning this war in this first phase of the war in the heavens as it is known to the elder the necron interior had some early successes but over the course of a long and grueling conflict they were eventually pushed back and isolated in the very system they had sought so desperately to escape in the face of imminent and total defeat the necron tear began to fracture once more as the various diontes sought their own salvation with many of them arguing for peace with the old ones the war of secession that was so narrowly avoided by the declaration of war against the old ones now come to full and terrible fruition as the various dynasties and the ruling triax waged a war on one another for control of what remained of the necrontier empire divided as they were the necron tier could have been destroyed several times over by the old ones at this point but the old ones value all life and to them the idea of completely destroying another race was virtually inconceivable this left the necron tier isolated and divided with whatever meagre hopes they once had to escape their irradiated hellhole of a home planet crushed forever that however was all about to change with the appearance of an old enemy of the old ones the godlike katans the two races if such a word can be used to describe the kitans or the old ones for that matter were natural enemies the old ones believed that all life no matter how wretched or violent was sacred and the kitans believed that all life no matter how wretched or violent was delicious at this point in time neither the towns or the old ones knew all that much about the other but they knew more than enough to thoroughly despise one another and seeing as the old ones had already a galaxy spanning empire the catans were somewhat on the back foot and at that point in time they hadn't even considered the idea of an alliance with a lesser race or lunch as the catans would refer to them however fate would have it that one of the kitans the one known as the nightbringer was in the right place at the right time it was currently snacking on the neck frontier sun it is possible in fact that the nightbringer was the cause of the necron tears suffering at the hands of their son but relatively unlikely we don't know precisely how long it takes a guitar to absorb all of the star's energy and there would no doubt be massive fluctuations instead time anyways but the necron tier were played by their son from the very beginning and even with the dedication of all their people and resources it will still have taken the tens of thousands of years to develop to the stage they were at the beginning of the war with reliable spacefaring tech and several colony worlds it seems unlikely that the nightbringer would have taken so long to reduce their already weakening sun to a level where life simply wouldn't be sustainable in the necron to your home world at all but again we simply don't know at which rate a catan absorbs energy so it is entirely possible that it was the cause on the other hand there are several different versions of events one claimed that the necron tear came in contact with the katan by accident in another system the eldar claimed the necrontiers hatred for the old ones that drew the nightbringer to them and old miss saxholm down the street vehemently claims it was all the jews fault long story short we don't really know there are many different stories some plausible some idiotic what we do know is that the current asylum king zarak somehow managed to establish communication with the katan a feat no one had managed before as you can probably imagine is it a bit more complicated than shouting out of a window guitars don't think like normal creatures big massive star eating monsters and all they have a very different view on things and experience the world and thereby communications in a very different way a necron tier communicating with a katan could be likened to a goldfish discussing philosophy with a human the name katan by the way comes from the necron tier language and essentially means star god a fitting description so with the basic means of communications established the necron tier ran into another problem the katan simply didn't perceive the world like they did making advanced conversations essentially impossible therefore the necron to develop a suit or perhaps a prison it's a more apt comparison made out of living metal called necrodermis this suit was somehow capable of containing the full power of a katan and it would let them experience the world much like powers mortals do there was one slight complication however you see the katanas had already started taking an interest in the weak pointless creatures they doomed to slow death by eating their son and had found their feelings of dread and terror intriguing but in their current form they couldn't really process that feeling or make any real sense out of it in their essentially limitless existence the dying screams of billions of people were a brief distraction at best a minuscule moment of something different that was all it was but now that they possessed corporal bodies of their own all that changed they had opened themselves up to a whole new world of sights and sounds things they hadn't even had a concept of existing before their new and ironically limited existence one of the catans known amongst themselves as the deceiver had a proposition for the necron tear silent king and his pharaons and i know what you're thinking the deceiver that's a rather unfortunate name for diplomats i bet he didn't get much done and yeah it is a rather unfortunate name but fortunately for him the deceiver truly lived up to his reputation to the point in fact that half of the time even he didn't know he was telling the truth or not and so hoodwinking a few necron tier nobles wasn't so hard actually i should be referring to the deceiver as an it because in this particular case the sjws are correct for once a signing agenda to a star god is a fairly pointless thing so it it is the deceiver told the triarch council that they had been dwarfed the old ones many millions of years ago but were eventually defeated it suggested an alliance the necrontail would provide the kitans with the manpower and racehorses and in return the kitans would lend their considerable power to the necron tier cause and to further sweeten the deal they would use their essentially limitless powers to finally cure the necron tier race of their disabilities and grant them immortality the deceivers stressed that it and its like would not ask any boon for these gifts other than the ones already mentioned in the alliance it was after all in their best interest to ensure that their valued allies were as strong as the katanas could make them of course the necrontial leadership were not complete idiots and found this deal far too good to be true on the other hand what choice do they really have to steal a phrase from joey abercrombie a man lost in the desert takes such water as he is offered and this was quite the oasis everything the necrontier had ever wanted presented on a silver platter with the added bonus of revenge against the hated old ones it was perfect far too perfect it took the triarchy a full year to decide at which point they thought they had figured it all out and there was no conceivable way their new allies could possibly screw them over and in all due technicality they gave them exactly what they promised but before they arm the necrontier for war the katan's powers were virtually unlimited they could simply wave their hands and engines capable of traveling from one star system to another in the blink of an eye would simply materialize their powers were fettered only by their imagination and a creature that has been alive for as long as the universe itself has a fairly vivid imagination small surprise then the majority of the necrontier people began to worship these creatures as gods because while in old conventional sense they were gods unfortunately for their new faithful however these gods had acquired taste for sadism more specifically they had begun to feed directly off the life energy of the new converts incidentally the flavor of said energy energy is greatly enhanced by causing the subject considerable amounts of agony it is quite unlikely that the necrontia ruling council was unaware of this but probably considered it to be a relatively minor sacrifice it wasn't like the guitars were running rampant in the streets and even if they were there was precious little they could have done so see no evil hear no evil and speak no evil and so with the treaty agreed upon and ratified the guitars prepared to uphold their end of the bargain they constructed massive furnace temples into which every single living necron tear was marshed to cons themselves of their weak and frail form precisely what occurred inside the so-called bio furnaces is impossible to guess but i would imagine it involved copious amount of screaming hot metal and the complete absence of a safe word when the silent king eventually stepped out from the furnace in his new metallic body the price the necron tier had paid for their immortality was made painfully clear the silent king's body was indeed reinvigorated the old aches and pains were all gone and he could think clearly without the constant fog of pain for the first time and as long as he could remember but in return for this peace he had sacrificed his and all of his subjects souls and the face of this realization he felt nothing well once there had been necrons here they were now only dead only necrons on the sunny side of undeath however the necrons were now unified in a way they had not been since their original quest for the stars granted that unity was a result of a command chip implanted into every necrons brain rather than good old-fashioned agreement but oh well peace is peace right or at least so the silent king told himself he held ultimate power over all necrons via this control chip the only necrons that were marginally free from his direct control were a few of the old lords and the leaders of the necron race those were they will strong enough to hold on to some last fraction of their old selves during their transformation everyone else had their life spark pulled from their bodies during the process and then devoured by their new allies speaking of allies the guitars had upheld their side of the bargain and now waited for the necrons to do their part and marched out into the galaxy once more the silent king agreed perhaps because he thought that fighting their age-old enemies would once again spark some sort of rage or anger in his dead machine heart or perhaps because he simply didn't have a choice regardless of which the results remained the same with the katanas leading the way the necron armies cut a swath across the galaxy causing death and destruction on the scale never before seen and as trillions of lives were snuffed out the towns grew ever more powerful until they could snuff out entire systems in a moment the roles had been well and truly reversed it was the older ones that now had no conceivable way of winning and lost ground on every front be it to the reality-bending powers of the catans or the endless legions of necron warriors marching in perfect mechanical lockstep as they trampled all the old ones had built over the millennia into dust as you can probably imagine this military expansion led to fairly dark days for the various inhabitants of the galaxy if they didn't get outright murdered their planets were enslaved and forced to provide the necrons with resources and the catans were spots and food entire planetary populations were slaughtered in so-called red harvests to feed the necrons new gods and said gods were pretty agriculture they didn't understand that if you eat the whole population on saturday then there won't be anyone left to eat on sunday in fact they drained the galaxy of light at such a rate that they quickly began to fight between each other for the rapidly shrinking resources available it was this infighting that saved the old ones and let them keep a hold of a foothold in the galaxy a foothold they used to start developing countermeasures races specifically designed to fight the necrons and their masters on equal terms in the previous war the old ones had won due to their superior mobility via the webway network but now a guitar known as nyadra zath or the burning one had devised a way of breaking into the web way using a system of structures called the dolmen gates they were nowhere near as stable or as reliable as the old one's entrances and had a nasty habit of collapsing entirely leaving whoever was inside at the time lost forever between dimensions but such slight reliability concerns notwithstanding these gates had effectively neutralized the only real card the old ones had left to play and so they were forced to resort to more barbaric ways to keep themselves alive using their psionic and biological knowledge they designed several new races to fight the necrons including the eldar and the orcs along with a race that sounds eerily similar to the tyranids personally i am entertaining the possibility that tyranids were indeed designed by the old ones to combat the necrons though i also believe they were designed to combat the necrons indirectly so here's my theory firstly i believe they were created by the old ones based on one of the horus heresy books the pharaoh specifically in which a device designed presumably by the old ones built by the elder is used as a ultra long-range communications device and also as a beacon in the warp much like the astronomicon this device was pushed to its absolute limits and in doing so the device created a massive flare of energy visible from well outside the galaxy and apparently this signal was seen by the tyranids and described in the book as what they had been looking for now this in and of itself is a decent indication but on the other hand maybe the space fairing gribblies were simply just looking for science of life and such a beacon would undoubtedly be a surefire indication that some form of intelligence and therefore probably plentiful life could be found nearby but there is another part to my theory you see the tyranids tend to avoid necron worlds in other words they shy away from the worlds that the necrons were known to have bases on but why would they do that i hear you ask surely if they were designed by the old ones to fight the necrons they wouldn't avoid them ah but here's the real beauty of it i suspect that the termites were created to act as a sort of natural fire lined kind of like what they used to combat large-scale forest fires you essentially empty a white corridor of combustible material and dump tons of water on it to wet the ground in an effort to stop the fire from going in that direction the tyranids may have fulfilled the same basic role they would completely empty large parts of the galaxy of the life force of the catans craved so much thereby directing their attention to other places more fertile ground you might say preferably further away from the old ones granted this would seem to directly contradict the idea that the old ones considered all life sacred but seeing as they were desperate enough to create the orcs a species famously known for their utter and complete disregard for all life including their own i think it's safe to say that the old ones were well past such idealistic concerns as hashtag all lives matter and so if their role was indeed to create these galactic fire lines it would make perfect sense for them to simply avoid necron worlds because if they did detank them they would be providing the catans with the very life essence they were trying to withhold from them theory aside however what we know for sure is that while the kitans vote each other for territory for sport or sometimes just for simple hubris and occasionally to devour one another the old ones plotted and grew their new races of warriors after several thousand years of preparation which by the way is insanely fast considering they were creating entirely new life forms and then teaching them how to travel the stars and fight mechanical undead and star gods that's a pretty damn nice achievement eventually they were ready to strike and this time the young racers and their old masters brought a new weapon to the table psychic powers the power of the warp itself was used against the necrons and what with most of them being sellers machines they had practically no defense against it with no will of their own and no psychics of their own the seemingly invincible necron warriors were left completely helpless and in the span of mere centuries their grip on the galaxy had begun to shatter to combat this the keretans devised a way to close off the material world from the warp using complicated series of warp dampening pylons these structures parts sargon magic and part technology could completely close off access to the warp and at the very least massively reduce its influence on the real world these pylons by the way are the reason why the canadian gate can exist so close to the eye of terror and still provide not only a stable warp route in and out but also a loyal population to guard it ironically katie is probably one of the most chaos-free planets in the imperium disregarding the occasionally chaos invasion of course given time the catans might very well have succeeded with their plans to isolate the real world from the warp unfortunately for them time was the one resource they didn't have in the quest to defeat the catans the old ones are tapped into powers they themselves knew were unstable and unpredictable and one of these unpredictable consequences was about to poke its ugly bulbas head into the galactic arena we are of course talking about the enslaver plague now the enslavers are an odd lot in 40k since they are part of the old 40k lore but too darn cool to simply be retconned out of existence like a certain dwarfish race they are technically demons as they live in the immaterium but also technically real living creatures with physical bodies capable of existing in our world without a constant supply of immaterial energy this strange little contradiction is never fully explained but it is heavily suggested that the enslavers were created at least in part by the old ones or their various subject races this does not however mean that they were created physically though or at least not necessarily as i talked about in my chaos explained the video demons are created and formed from the beliefs and fears of those who create them in this case the fear of enslavement to the necrons and catans as for their physical form i theorized that they were indeed created possibly by the old ones but more likely by one of their subject races to act like a portal for focusing warp energies the old ones had already created several races capable of manipulating the warp so creating a race capable of directly tapping into the warp would seem to be the logical next step at least it would be to a less informed servant race of the old ones problem was that since these creatures were linked directly to the warp they would inevitably shaped by the warp and during this time in the galaxy the walk must have been overflowing with feelings of fear and suffering i hypothesized therefore that the enslavers were affected by and shaped by these emotions just like a natural hand inhabitant of the warp would and so as we discussed in the chaos video they would naturally seek to increase their power by feeding the emotions that empower them in this case fear and more specifically the fear of enslavement alternatively they could just be a massive cosmic coincidence regardless of the real reason behind the enslavers the fact remains that they spread incredibly quickly across the galaxy due to their particular brand of psychic powers which lets the mind control other creatures and tap into the latent connection to the warp that it was so common among the old ones newer creations and turned these creatures into living war portals through which more enslavers could be summoned and as already mentioned psychic arrangements were extremely common in the galaxy at that time so the enslaver play could spread like well the plague and the timing could not be better or worse depending on your point of view the old ones and their subjects were exhausted and the katan's probably even more so especially as the catans had been spending their time quite literally eating each other for the last few thousand years on the other hand for the necrons the enslavers were actually extremely convenient the old ones were finally defeated and scattered their various servant races being wasted to fuel the enslavers and the enslavers in turn eating necron worlds and populations but that's a story of another time whether the old ones were completely destroyed or simply fled the galaxy as unknown but whichever one it is they no longer had any real power over this galaxy and when it comes to the catans well they were greatly reduced in numbers as well as they had been killing each other off for quite a while now additionally the guitars had absolutely no reason to suspect their mindless machine puppets would ever rise against them imagine waking up one morning to discover that you've been taken prisoner by lego figurines and you'll have a rough approximation of the level of what the the guitars experience when the necrons blasted them into star particles with big ass space guns in fact the rebellion itself went pretty well considering it was directed against a race of creatures so powerful they might as well be gods but it certainly didn't come cheap millions of necrons had been destroyed for good in the conflict and despite their best efforts the kitans were not dead per se in fact killing a katan is practically impossible in fact it is a practical impossibility you just can't kill energy and the kitans are essentially energy it just cannot be done with mortal means and so the silent king went for the next best thing and imprisoned the katan shards inside complex dimensional prisons known as tesseract labyrinths and then dumped said prisons into stasis fields to ensure that their occupants remain safely locked away as to the reason why the necrons rebelled well simply put they weren't all too enthused by their new management who had developed a habit of throwing away countless necrons swap lives quote unquote for sport and of course there's still that whole thing with the catans essentially enslaving the entire necron to your race and devouring their souls in the process that kind of antisocial behavior tends to earn you some enemies and so with their star god masters overthrown the silent king and the six or seven necrons left alive with a working brain danced happily into the sunset except for one small detail the old ones might be gone but those pesky eldar were still around and they had constructed quite the little empire for themselves and having learned quite a few tricks from their former masters about the warp and how to control it they managed to not get completely over by the enslavers and with said enslavers being so darn effective they quickly ran out of food and presumably returned to the warp seeing as there's no concrete mention of them getting destroyed leaving the necrons alone and hilariously outnumbered by the very race that had been kicking their shiny metallic asses all over the galaxy for centuries the necrons were fast running out of options but luckily they had one rather unique card left to play the silent king and what remained of his council decided to stick their proverbial heads in the sand and enter into stasis assuming quite correctly that the elder empire would eventually crumble as all life inevitably does i bet you he didn't expect his pointy eared arch enemies to themselves into oblivion but hey whatever works right of course it was still going to take quite a while for the eldar to lose their grip on the galaxy and even the necrons could fall prey to good old-fashioned boredom and so the necron race would have to be entombed into massive stasis complexes where they could wait out the eldar race naturally it took quite a bit of work to essentially convert entire planets into massive stasis tomb complexes with enough room for the entirety of the necron race but extinction is a pretty good motivator and the complexes were eventually finished the silent king ordered his people to sleep for roughly 60 million years give or take a few millennia and after having given the final order to enter the stasis tombs he voluntarily burned out the command protocol from his mind as he felt he no longer had the right to command those whom he had failed to protect interestingly though the silent king himself did not enter stasis and instead decided to wander the galaxy for some sort of meaning to his existence eventually deciding that he would find some way to return the necrons to their original form well minus the radiation sickness obviously as for the rest of the necrons their primary concern was to re-establish their dominance over the galaxy once they awaken which they did in what we now know as the 41st millennium the timing wasn't quite right as the galaxy was still heavily populated by psyches of chaos and pointy earth space elf but it could have been worse i mean they could have waked up right in front of a astartes legion which probably would have been bad news nevertheless there was plenty of work to do the elder had to be destroyed obviously because you just can't trust those bastards and their elf magic chaos had to be dealt with also and that involves finishing the catan's plans to isolate the galaxy from the warp and without their glorious guitar masters they would have to have to do this the good old manual way thirdly the various new races had to be subjugated and that was not a simple task considering the sheer number of monkeys that have popped up over the course of the years but eh the necrons have plenty of time and with their original will and agency more or less kinder restored it's a pretty dang probable bet that the various necron diocese would also have some old grudges to settle with their shiny comrades there is however once again a slight complication even with necron technology the act of sending an entire race into a dormant state for 60 million years is an exceptionally risky thing to do millions and quite possibly billions of necrons were lost to malfunctions eldar retributions or simply just natural causes eg planets undergoing massive changes like large scale tectonic movements destroying tombs or you know particularly large space rocks smashing into the planet etc etc to further complicate matters the necrons were apparently quite at constructing alarm clocks and along with a million other reasons that slowly accumulated over the course of 60 million years the necrons did not reawaken as one people but rather they were awakened almost completely at random a potentially fatal flaw that has forced many necron dynasties to flee their worlds after discovering that they are now awake on a planet filled to the brink with orcs or other uncomfortable life forms and no friendlies anywhere nearby to come help clean house on those occasions that the necrons do awaken with a degree of success however it still takes a very long time for them to become fully operational the process of reviving can be quite complex and time consuming especially for the necron nobility as mentioned previously very few necrons here were able to hold on to their original personalities when they were transformed additionally there were different levels of this transformation the more important necron tier were given better bodies never for better chances of retaining their individuality while the peasant scum almost always became little more than machines this means that unless the ruling class can be awakened the rest of the necrons will simply continue to guard their tombs without ever trying to expand or do much of anything really on those occasions where the shiny clankers of substance are awoken they often find that they will have to wait around while their subjects are also roused before doing much of anything either but when everyone is finally moving about the various dynasties can start to go about their business often in wildly varying ways some dynasties will engage in diplomacy in an effort to regain the previous territory some will focus on rebuilding their worlds and pretty much ignore everything else and some will simply leave to go pursue some other agenda usually though they tend to be a bit more aggressive though again there's a great deal of variety in their methods some for example will fight while strictly following their own rules of conduct and code of honor for example some dynasties consider themselves honor bound to let their adversaries retreat peacefully if they wish and will even give them a reasonable time limit to do so while other dynasties sees this as a quite pointless thing and will use any and all means to regain their former territory as to how successful the necrons will be in this new galaxy is yet to be seen but they should most certainly not be underestimated and that is all for this video on the necrons i have been arch thank you very much for listening and i hope to see you all again soon have a good day

Channel: Arch

Views: 1,151,045

Keywords: Necron, Necrontyr, Arch, 40k, Lore, 40k Lore, Warhammer, The Necrons, Necron Lore, undead

Id: KOLTLGEaLDY

Length: 46min 49sec (2809 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 26 2016