The Silent King

The Last Silent King

Szarekh was the last of the Silent Kings of the Necrontyr — the line of god-emperors who had ruled the species for the entirety of its biological era. The Necrontyr were, before biotransference, a long-lived but short-lived people: their flesh was prone to radiation-illness from the dying star their species had evolved under, and their lifespans were measured against a backdrop of constant mortality. The Silent Kings were the institutional response to that mortality — a continuous office that outlived its individual occupants and preserved the species' strategic memory across the centuries.

Szarekh inherited the office near the end of the Necrontyr's losing war against the Old Ones — a war that had run for thousands of years, that the Necrontyr could not afford to keep losing, and that the Silent Kings before him had been unable to resolve. He inherited a species facing extinction. He decided to do something the previous Silent Kings had refused to authorise.

The Biotransference

The C'tan — the star-gods, ancient entities that fed on the energy of dying stars — had been the Necrontyr's allies of convenience in the late phase of the war against the Old Ones. The C'tan offered the Necrontyr a bargain: surrender your flesh, accept new bodies of living metal, and you will become immortal — and through your immortality, finally able to outlast your enemies. Szarekh accepted. The Necrontyr were biotransferred, species-wide, in a process the Necron archive remembers as the Great Sacrifice and which the rest of the galaxy would later remember as a genocide its perpetrators committed on themselves.

The Necrontyr became the Necrons. They won the war against the Old Ones — the Old Ones broke the C'tan in retaliation, but the Necrons survived. What Szarekh found afterwards was that the C'tan had not delivered the species he had been promised. The Necrons had bodies. They had eternity. They had lost most of what had made them Necrontyr — emotion, taste, dream, the warmth of being alive. The C'tan had taken those things as the price of the bargain. Szarekh did not learn this until after the fact.

I traded my people's souls for their survival. I did not know that was the trade.

— Szarekh, attributed self-exile

The Triarch Revolt

Szarekh's response, once he understood, was to lead the Necrons in revolt against their C'tan masters. The Triarch Revolt — the war the Necrons fought against the entities who had remade them — succeeded. The C'tan were broken into Shards and bound, by Necron sorcery and Necron engineering, into shapes the Necrons could control. The Nightbringer, the Deceiver, the Void Dragon, and the Outsider are the four major Shards the Necron archive has preserved records of; lesser Shards are catalogued in the millions.

With the C'tan bound and the Necrons free, Szarekh issued his last order as Silent King: the Great Sleep. The Necrons would enter their tomb-worlds, seal themselves into stasis for as long as it took the galaxy to rebuild and the lesser species to develop into worthwhile inheritors, and would wake when the time was right. Szarekh did not enter stasis with his people. He had decided he was responsible for what had happened to them. He left.

The Exile and the Return

Szarekh's exile lasted approximately sixty million years. What he did during it is, by Necron archive, not fully known — some records say he wandered the Tyranid void between galaxies; some say he negotiated with the Aeldari in their pre-Fall imperial period; some say he simply observed the species the galaxy produced while his own slept. The Necrons did not seek him during his exile. They waited.

In the Indomitus Era, Szarekh returned. He came back to a galaxy that was waking — some Necron tomb-worlds had risen, the Imperium had fractured, the Great Rift had opened, the Tyranid swarms were arriving. He gathered the major Necron dynasties under his command and issued a new set of orders: reclaim what was lost during the Great Sleep, contain what could be contained of the C'tan Shards that had escaped Necron custody, and prepare the galaxy — by force where necessary — for the species' eventual full waking. The current Necron campaigns are his. The Triarch Praetorians who walked beside him during the Revolt walk beside him again. He has, in M42 reckoning, not yet announced what victory will look like.