Part Ten - The Endless Sleep of the Necrons

The Silent King had made his bid for the galaxy, and it was not quiet or subtle. An evergrowing portion of the Segmentum Solar had been becalmed, their connection to the Warp cut and the Imperium of Man was nigh-helpless to stop him. Though portions of the Indomitus Crusade fought to save those left or to attempt to keep the hordes of Necron Warriors at bay, Roboute Guilliman felt helpless as the ancient race pushed forth further and further towards Terra, where even the Emperor of Mankind would be placed in mortal danger. Yet the Imperials owed not their Primarchs or any Space Marine Chapter or Guard Regiment thanks for their survival, but rather salvation had come from the oddest of places.

Ghazghkull Thraka was a powerful Ork, rivaling near the potency of the Beast of old. His indomitable power had aroused trillions of Orks with promises of endless scraps and how to put Gork and Mork on top of the Warp God food chain. He promised the Ork species that he knew just the place...Holy Terra, home of the God-Emperor of Mankind and his finest defenders. As he gathered an endless amount of reinforcements and warships, he plunged deep into the heart of Segmentum Solar, but he had found a new battleground. The Necron's Pariah Nexus had become not a becalmed death sentence for the galaxy, but rather the perfect battlefield for ultimately the fate of the galaxy.

As Necron Warriors without count moved to defend their only true bastion, an absolute unending tide of green simpletons invaded the occupied land of Segmentum Solar. Even the Necrons' ability to resurrect themselves in the same battle proved entirely unhelpful when being trampled by an absolute stampede of Ork Boyz. To the few Imperials trying to quell the Silent King's gamble for power, it was a ludicrous sight to behold, but not an entirely unwelcome one. They had gathered their forces, and simply left the fallen sectors to the horrifying fate they were involved in now.

Szarekh was displeased, to say the least. The Necron Empire's perhaps final chance at surpassing its height was being trampled on by the idiot decedents of their old foes, the Krorks. To make matters worse, as the pylon nexus keeping the Pariah Nexus' becalming power operational fell to the insane mustering of belief to Gork and Mork, more and more forces got involved in the carnage. Rogal Dorn and his Imperial Fists Legion moved to the borders of the fallen nexus and fortified it on behalf of the Imperium, ensuring neither Orks nor Necrons would escape the meat grinder towards Terra, and a few Aeldari Corsairs braved the intergalactic war in an effort to loot the now-undefended Imperial-held worlds. Endless hulks of defensive sector fleets sat in orbit of becalmed worlds, that were undestroyed due to the non-violent means of death that the nexus inflicted, that were ripe for the picking.

Even the Drukhari became involved, sending in Kabal after Kabal to scour the fallen sectors for any worlds which remained un-stilled but left to die by the Imperium of Man. Though the bounties were not plentiful, causing the mad rush to the disabled Pariah Nexus to slow somewhat, there were certainly millions of innocent Imperial civilians wishing that the Orks had come, not the heartless wretches of Commoragh.

The Necrons were not done, however. Their growing empire had been shattered by the Orks, humans and even their old foes the Aeldari, but the Silent King would not be denied. Using what remained of the Nexus, he funneled a psychic signal throughout the galaxy, and hundreds of thousands of worlds across the galaxy cracked open, unleashing billions of unthinking horrors out of their tomb. They were directed to ignore their own worlds for now, for the war for the Necron Empire was more important than any Dynasty's old squabbles. Once the Orks were bested, the Primarch was beaten away from their borders and the Aeldari were punished for looting their prey's corpses like scavengers, the rest of the galaxy would be enveloped in the Pariah Nexus, and then the Necrons would truly claim the Materum as their own.

The Silent King's call awoke almost every Necron Tomb World, and the Imperium bled for it as a myriad of threats capitalized on the crippling of so many planets. Chief among them was Chaos, who brutalized the wounded Imperium non-stop. But it was the Necrons which truly scared the Gods. Sending their most loyal champions, Lorgar and his Word Bearers Legion, the Chaos Gods hoped such a force would be enough to disrupt the Silent King's ability to defeat the Orks and expand the Pariah Nexus, which was perhaps more anathema to them than even the God-Emperor.

As the former Lord of the Necrontyr's war on Ghazghkull Thraka's WAAAAGH! burned brightly, it was Lorgar who helped turn the tide. Though there were no humans left to convert and there were no souls to offer to the Gods, the First Heretic did his job adequately, corrupting the majority of the Necron Lords with a form of scrapcode, plunging their minds into chaos and data overload, slowly driving them into the path of the Necron Destroyer. Though this granted the Szarekh a degree of reinforcements, it was nowhere near as useful as the great generals and minds of the old Necrontyr were suddenly lost to madness and bloodlust. Cursing the Gods, the Silent King watched as his final attempt to save his people fell into chaos as Ghazghkull Thraka continued his Green Krumpzade into the Pariah Nexus. World after world was lost to the Orks and the Silent King declared the game lost.

A final decree as Overlord of the Necron People was given, to flee the Milky Way Galaxy in search of a new land to rule. No Necron took the information well, and though many fought the idea, Szarekh used the long thought lost species-wide Command Protocol over the Necron Race, or at least those linked to him by the Pariah Nexus' call, to force them to obey. Placing this fleeing Necron Empire under the command of Asmothep, one of his Phaerons, Szarekh faced down Ghazghkull, as the self-acclaimed Primork. In his final days, Szarekh had been succumbed by the feeling of absolute failure - his damnation of the Necrontyr, the fall of their initial Empire, and now his failure to help the galaxy reclaim it - and fell into the trap of the Destroyer Lord. Though many debate over whether his fall was due to the natural self-blame he drowned himself in, or whether the great trickery of Lorgar had finally corrupted the mightiest of the Necron Overlords, none could truly say, but what was irrefutable was that the Silent King had more than mutilated his necrodermis body into something comparable to the Prophet of Gork and Mork. The size of a Canoptek Doomstalker and with all the combat mechanisms he could scrape from his abandoned empire, Szarekh the Destroyer King awaited his now-mortal foe.

Ghazghkull, realizing this would be the fight of his life, charged his foe with the usual Ork lunacy, but with complete and utter joy. Content with dying now, both warlords fought and clashed for nearly three hours, necrodermis and Ork machinery being torn apart evenly. Though the pockets of Orks left kicking around the galaxy claim that Ghazghkull beat the Silent King over his head with his own tripod leg, reality and fact tells that the warlords came to their death together. He had rigged his body not to be transported back to inner healing sanctums of his Tomb Worlds, but to leave him broken and dead. Ghazghkull was little less than a dissolving head, hit by a dozen heavy gauss weapons before the Destroyer King had died. With a toothy grin, Ghazghkull faded away, dead beyond the Painboyz ability to fix.

With the death of both warlords, Rogal Dorn saw his chance and pushed in, wiping out much of Ghazghkull's WAAAGH! and the few Necron stragglers left. The Nexus was reclaimed, if only partially. There was not enough time to reclaim all of the fallen sectors before Dorn and his Legion were required elsewhere as The Thing That Was Once Abbadon began the Second Siege of Terra.

Millennia later, the Pariah Nexus is far more quiet than the rest of the galaxy. Known as the place of desperate scavengers and secrets best left buried, even the most bold and the closest of Imperial remnants keep their distance from the Silent King's old realm. Like the ghost houses of old, it is lifeless, more terrifying in principle than in practice, unless one digs too deep on one of its many worlds. It is a monument to folly, to the old races clinging to power yet plunging them into ruin all the same. Yet many scavengers try to brave the sectors for ancient Imperial treasures, goods and ships, never to be seen again.

For all the worlds the Silent King enraptured with his plan and sentenced to the deep reaches of the void between galaxies, there were some left inactive, untouched, or ignored. Most notably of the stragglers was Trazyn, lord of Solemnace. Trayzn the Infinite remained as he was, giddy with his new items given to him by the Emperor in exchange for the clone of his son Fulgrim. Placing up signal jammers as soon as he heard the plea of Szarekh, he and his Tomb World heard not his commands and remained on their world of Solemnace, thieving from the corpse of the Imperium and the other species.

The Infinite had come into contact and, of course, combat with plenty of other species, most often the Sicarian Realm. Cato Sicarius, self-appointed God-Emperor of Ultramar, found much pleasure and much trouble when dealing with the Necron Overlord. He had approached the Space Marine warlord in M49 with the offering of the Arbitrator, Roboute Guilliman's old sidearm during the days of the Horus Heresy. Luring Sicarius with such an offering, he snuck a squad into the Realm of Sicarius's capital of Macragge to steal a pillar of marble named the Pillar of Foundings that had stood since the founding of Ultramar itself, before even the Emperor had rediscovered his Avenging Son. The artpiece was defended by a trio of Vanguard Veterans, who pushed back his Kill Team of Ophydian Destroyers and Necron Immortals.

Sicarius and Trazyn were still discussing the terms of the agreement and the beauty of Macragge when he received the news of Trazyn's treachery, and he dueled the mad collector in an effort to defend the honor of his realm, and its security. Trazyn fell in combat to the petty emperor, though it was only four hundred years later when he realized that the crazed Necron was not yet dead, coming after the same artifact with a squad of Deathmarks and Triach Praetorians, succeeding this time in the theft. Declaring Trazyn to be a Greater Daemon and an enemy of the Sicarian Realm, he sent out search parties to find his Tomb World...to no avail for nearly three millennia.

Indeed, it is well-known among the miniscule community of Necron Tomb Worlds in hiding across the galaxy that he placed both the Arbitrator and the Pillar of Foundings side by side in his display dedicated to Ultramar, alongside a handful of Astartes Legionnaires and Battle-Brothers from across its history, including that of Marneus Calgar himself...