Xenos
Novokh Dynasty
The Blood-Drinkers · The Crimson Host
XENOS · NECRON · DYNASTY
The Warrior Line
Long before the species sold its flesh to the C'tan, the Novokh were soldiers and nothing else. Where the Sautekh prized statecraft and the Oruscar hoarded knowledge, the Novokh prized only the kill, and rank among them was won at the edge of a blade and nowhere else. Sixty million years in the tomb did not soften this; it concentrated it. Their living metal no longer gleams. It is stained a deep arterial crimson, not painted but dyed by the blood of uncounted dead, layer upon layer across the aeons. A Novokh warrior steps from his sarcophagus already the colour of the wound he intends to make.
The Engrams of Slaughter
A Novokh phalanx can stand eerily still, almost mellow, until the first blood is spilled before it. Then something old wakes in the engrams written into each soldier, and the host goes over into a killing frenzy that does not stop while a single enemy still breathes. This is the dynasty's defining horror: a foe that is patient and machine-cold one moment and an unstoppable berserker tide the next. The Novokh feed this hunger deliberately. They take captives from lesser races and herd them away alive, so that when the galaxy is finally scoured clean of warm-blooded life there will still be a supply of victims for the blood-rites. They cannot conceive of an eternity without something left to kill.
How They Wage War
The Novokh do not bombard from orbit and they do not manoeuvre for advantage. They land, and they close. Their order of battle is built around massed Warriors and ranks of Lychguard, the dynasty's elite, who wade into the press with hyperphase blades and dispersion shields and break the enemy line at arm's reach. There is no subtlety in it and no need of any. The Novokh accept losses that would cripple a living army because their fallen rise again, knit back together by their own war-machines faster than the enemy can put them down. A defender wins the first hour against the crimson host, and the second, and the third, and then there is simply no one left to win against.
The Ultimatum at Dhol VI
The dynasty's heartland lies in the Ultima Segmentum, anchored on the crownworld Dhol VI and the still-stirring tomb world Draven. When Dhol VI woke beneath an Imperial hive that had grown over its sealed vaults, the Novokh did not strike at once. An ultimatum reached Planetary Governor Mendican Harrow first, a cold demand for the surrender of a world the Necrons had held before mankind drew its first breath. The horror of the Novokh is precisely that the offer was sincere. They prefer surrender, because a population that yields is a population kept alive and held in reserve, fodder for the bloodletting to come once every other living thing in the galaxy has been put to the blade.
Against the Galaxy
Of every Necron dynasty the Imperium has catalogued, the Novokh are among the most purely terrifying to face, because nothing they want can be bargained for. The Mephrit can be appeased with destruction and the Nihilakh with the return of stolen ground, but the Novokh want the act of killing itself, endlessly renewed. Other dynasties find them useful and appalling in equal measure; the Sautekh have marched beside Novokh blades when a campaign needed a hammer rather than a scalpel, then kept their distance the moment the slaughter began, for a Novokh in frenzy makes no fine distinction between an enemy of the dynasty and an ally who simply stands too near the blood.
The Crimson Waking
Across the late M41 and into M42 the Novokh tomb worlds are coming alive in sequence, and each waking is announced the same way, by a massacre. There is no negotiated emergence and no quiet reclamation; a world simply learns that the red host has risen when the killing starts. As the great Necron awakening gathers pace under the returned Silent King, the Novokh make their grim contribution, the dynasty that needs no persuading to march and no cause beyond the next throat. In an army of immortal machines built for patience, they are the part that has never once stopped wanting to kill, and the galaxy is only now remembering what that costs.
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Sources
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