Xenos
Oruscar Dynasty
The Star-Keepers · Gardeners of Creation
XENOS · NECRON · DYNASTY
The Keepers of the Map
The Oruscar are a large and ancient dynasty whose ambition runs not outward into conquest but inward, toward knowledge. Their neighbours are the Sautekh, the Novokh and the lesser Atun Dynasty, and where the Sautekh spread their power across the breadth of the galaxy, the Oruscar drew theirs in tight, holding only a handful of ancestral worlds laden with technological wonders. They are not poor for it. What the Oruscar possess in their guarded vaults is, by their own reckoning, worth more than any number of conquered worlds, for they keep the single greatest archive of cosmic data the Necrons ever assembled, and they have ruled for sixty million years as its jealous librarians.
The Celestial Orrery
At the heart of the crownworld Thanatos turns the Celestial Orrery, and there is nothing else like it in creation. It is a vast device of hologram and necrodermis that projects a living web of every star in the galaxy, each one set in an intricate matrix that records the exact position of every sun in the cosmos. But the Orrery is no mere chart. It is bound to the galaxy it depicts by means the Necrons themselves do not fully understand, so that to reach into the image and alter a region of it is to alter that same region of real space, light years away, in precisely the same fashion. The Oruscar do not hold a map of the stars. They hold a hand upon them.
The Gardeners' Restraint
Such power could remake the galaxy in an afternoon, and the Royal Court of Thanatos refuses to use it so. They name themselves gardeners of creation, and they wield the Orrery with a dispassion that is somehow more chilling than any tyrant's hunger. To them the galaxy is a garden that must not be allowed to grow wild and overgrown, and so they prune it, precisely and sparingly, snuffing a star here or shifting a region there only when their cold arithmetic deems it necessary for the health of the whole. There is no cruelty in it and no mercy either. A civilisation extinguished by the turning of the Orrery is merely a branch that had spread too far, trimmed without malice and without a second thought.
The Feud with Sautekh
The Oruscar's great rivals are the Sautekh, and the quarrel is old and bitter. Imotekh the Stormlord and his expansionist dynasty would dearly love to command the Celestial Orrery, a weapon that could win in an instant the galaxy he means to conquer world by patient world, and the Oruscar will see Thanatos reduced to slag before they let that happen. Much of the dynasty's war-making is bent to this single end: keeping the Orrery out of the grasp of other Necrons as much as of aliens. For all their philosophy of restraint, the Star-Keepers have fought ferocious wars to defend their crownworld, knowing that the thing they guard is the one prize that could overturn the balance of power among the dynasties forever.
Against the Galaxy
To the wider galaxy the Oruscar are a quiet, distant power, and that quiet is deceptive. They do not raid Imperial worlds for slaves or sport, and they do not march to reclaim lost ground with the others' fury; left undisturbed, they tend their archive and watch the stars. But they are also a dynasty that can erase a system by adjusting a hologram, and that regards every living empire as so much undergrowth to be managed. The horror of the Oruscar is one of scale and indifference: a power that does not hate the galaxy's billions so much as it simply does not weigh them at all, and that holds, in a single device on a single hidden world, the means to prune them away.
The Watching Dynasty
As the great tomb worlds stir across the galaxy and the Silent King draws the scattered dynasties back toward a single purpose, the Oruscar wake to their old vigil over Thanatos and the Orrery within it. They are no eager conquerors in the Sautekh mould, but in an age when the whole Necron species is rousing to war, the dynasty that holds a working map of every star, bound to the stars themselves, is a piece on the board that no power, Necron or otherwise, can afford to ignore. The Star-Keepers tend their galaxy-garden as they have for sixty million years, pruning where they must, and waiting to see what shape creation will be allowed to take in the age now dawning.
See also
Sources
⚜ Enter the Interactive Codex →Languages: Türkçe
Unofficial fan project · Not affiliated with Games Workshop · Non-commercial editorial reference under fair use.