Maeleum Datum : 405.M34
Though the Imperium was badly wounded by the Howling, the consequences of the Cacodominus' demise were not limited to Humanity's domain. Some were immediate, such as the damage suffered by the Craftworlds of the Asuryani, and the daemonic incursions that overwhelmed scores of xenos worlds as their psykers succumbed to the Howling. But others would be far more sinister, and far more obscure.
Far to the galactic East, in the cursed and abandoned region known as the Ghoul Stars, a antediluvian xenos race had slumbered for aeons. Its existence was recorded only in the most ancient legends of the Eldars, whose ancestors had fought against them a war that had shaken the very foundations of reality and given birth to the Primordial Annihilator, over sixty million years ago. They were the Necrons, who had abandoned their frail, sick bodies of flesh for eternal bodies of living metal at the suggestion of the Star Gods, the C'tan, only to realize that the Star Gods had deceived them and feasted upon their souls during the process of biotransference, leaving the immense majority of the former Necrontyr as little more than mindless automatons directed by their noble caste, which had retained their minds but lost their souls all the same.
Following the end of the War in Heaven, the Necrons had risen against the C'tan, led by their Silent King, and broken the power of the victorious Star Gods. The C'tan had been sundered into shards, which had been imprisoned within Tesseract Labyrinths and Vaults, their energies drained to fuel the great engines of the Necron Dynasties. Yet the War in Heaven and the rebellion against the C'tan had left the might of the Necron Empire spent, and so the Silent King had ordered his people into the Great Sleep : a slumber of aeons, during which their remaining enemies would succumb to entropy, leaving the galaxy ripe for reconquest when the Dynasties awakened once more.
The Larkorakh Dynasty was one of the greatest of the Necron Empire, and its worlds rested in the Ghoul Stars, left mostly intact by the passing of geological epochs. Within immense crypts, billions of Necron warriors slumbered, while the nobles of the Dynasty rested in ornate sarcophagi and the Canoptek machines and artificial intelligences of the Crypteks maintained the tomb-worlds, protecting them from entropy and intruders. Great planetoid-sized engines and vast flotillas of tomb-ships, which had last been used against the fleets of the Old Ones and their thralls, hung in the infinite void between stars, protected from detection by powerful dimensional veils.
Many slumbering Necron Dynasties had been ravaged by the Great Sleep, their tomb-worlds destroyed by cosmic events or their maintenance systems succumbing to entropy. The Larkorakh Dynasty, by contrast, had escaped the ravages of deep time relatively unscathed. But when the Howling shook the galaxy, entropy's revenge was terrible.
On the crownworld of the Larkorakh, where their Phaeron and his court slept within the Dynasty's most secure crypts, the death-cry of the Cacodominus echoed across quantum frequencies that had been silent since the end of the War in Heaven. Deep beneath the catacombs laid the great Tesseract Vaults, where were imprisoned the C'tan Shards entrusted to the Larkorakh Dynasty after the great rebellion against the Star Gods. Greatest and most dangerous of these Shards was a fragment of Aza'gorod, the Nightbringer, who had strained against its bonds ever since its defeat.
These bonds were strong, but not even the technology of the Necrons was proof against the passage of deep time, and the Shard of the Nightbringer had ever so slightly weakened them over the ages. It would have taken billions of years for the Shard to break free of its own, something it was bitterly aware of, but such was its hatred of the Necrons who had betrayed it that it continued its efforts regardless of their perceived futility.
When the Howling reached the crownworld, those tiny faults became the doom of the Dynasty. The bonds of the Tesseract Vault shattered, and the C'tan Shard was unleashed in the middle of the Larkorakh's greatest tomb-world. Unwilling to risk being returned to its prison, the Nightbringer Shard immediately turned on the other fragments of the Star Gods that had been imprisoned alongside it, dragging them out of the Tesseract Labyrinths serving as their own prisons only to then devour them and increase its own power.
Once this echo of the great cannibalistic feasts which had marked the end of the War in Heaven among the C'tan as they turned against each other before the Silent King even launched his rebellion was over, the power of the Nightbringer Shard had swelled to the point that it had become that which the Necron Crypteks fearfully referred to as a Transcendent C'tan. Though still only a pale shadow of the Star God's power at its apex, the Nightbringer had become a figure worthy of the name of god, and its revenge was only beginning.
The Silent King, architect of the great Necron betrayal, was beyond its reach at the moment, but the Larkorakh weren't. The defenses of the Dynasty had protected the Phaeron and his nobles for millions of years, but they were of little use against a Transcendent C'tan already inside. Within days of its liberation, the Nightbringer had usurped control of the Artificial Intelligence managing the tomb-complex, its divine power more than a match for even the strongest Cryptek encryption.
Emergency protocols forcefully awakened a small group of Crypteks and a single Overlord and his personal legions, but their efforts to return the awakened god to its prison were met with abject failure. After amusing itself with destroying and rebuilding them again and again until their minds had completely collapsed, the C'tan simply wiped out their personalities, transforming them into enslaved automatas, little different to the billions of Necron Warriors who slumbered in the lesser crypts of the crownworld.
The next targets of the Transcendent C'tan's ire were the Phaeron himself and his court. The Nightbringer didn't even give them the chance to realize their doom, instead wiping out their personality engrams before awakening their bodies of necrodermis as its servants. The highest nobles of the Larkorakh Dynasty were wiped out, reduced to puppets of a vengeful god, and the awakening of the entire crownworld began shortly after.
Thankfully for the galaxy, the process of awakening a tomb-world from the Great Sleep was a long and complex one, even with a Transcendent C'tan at the helm and no care at all given to preserving the personality engrams of the Necrons. It took years before the crownworld was fully functional, during which the Nightbringer travelled to the other tomb-worlds of the Larkorakh in the Ghoul Stars and conquered them as well, wiping out the minds of their nobles and beginning the process of awakening.
Slowly, over the course of decades, an entire major Necron Dynasty was awakened, enslaved once more to the dark will of a fragment of the Star God whose evil had been inscribed unto reality itself. At the command of Aza'gorod, millions of Necron Warriors were transformed into Destroyers, their bodies remade into forms more suitable for the extermination of all life. The Transcendent C'tan took particular delight in visiting this ignoble fate upon the nobles of the Dynasty, defiling their artfully crafted and enhanced bodies by twisting them into cruel parodies of their former grandeur. It scoured away the markings of the Dynasty, removing all traces of its sigil from their creations.
The slumbering fleets were awakened as well, great flights of scythe-shaped crafts that mustered in orbit above the crownworld, piloted by dead-minded Lords. These, the Nightbringer had left with a flicker of awareness : just enough to serve it well in their appointed task, and perhaps enough to scream at their renewed slavery to the Star God. It was similar to the fate it had inflicted upon the Larkorakh Crypteks, who retained all of their skills in the Necrons' techno-sorcery, though they were now driven by the same all-consuming appetite for destruction as their loathsome deity.
Arsenals that had slumbered since the darkest days of the War in Heaven were roused. The World-Engines were activated, their activation passphrases extracted from the memory banks of the Phaeron. Meanwhile, the Nightbringer fed as its slaves laboured, leeching off the energy of the Ghoul Stars – but in its diminished state, and clad in necrodermis as it was, its feeding was dramatically inefficient. Entire stars had their lifespans halved, billions of years of nuclear fusion drained away, for less than a millionth of the corresponding energy to settle in the Transcendent C'tan's hungering maw. But the Nightbringer cared not.
This rampant feeding, and the miscarried awakening of the Larkorakh, did not go unnoticed by those who kept watch over the eternal. The Praetorians of the Triarch, these elite Necron warriors and enforcers of the race's ruling council who had remained awake during the Great Sleep, had their own ways of monitoring the Dynasties, and despite the caution of the Nightbringer Shard, they eventually realized something had gone horribly wrong.
At the same time, the Seers of Craftworld Alaitoc, which of all the Asuryani remembered the most of the lore the Aeldari of old had accumulated on their ancient foe, sensed a terrible, empty darkness rising in the galactic east. Parties of Rangers were sent to investigate, as this was happening far from the Craftworld's usual roaming regions in what the humans called Segmentum Obscurus, while the rest of Alaitoc prepared for war.
Neither the envoys of the Praetorians nor the Rangers of Alaitoc returned from their investigations, and all the while the visions of doom and the disturbances in the stellar patterns grew worse and worse. Until, one hundred years after the Howling, but a few days after Roboute Guilliman received a message from his brother Sanguinius recently returned from the Warp after his confrontation with the Cacodominus, the Nightbringer decided that it was ready to begin its great harvest.
Once more, the Star God would feed upon the souls of the living. Once more, it would lead the silent legions of the Necrons against the races of the galaxy, bringing terror and desolation to all. It would reclaim the power that it had once possessed and more – for it couldn't sense any of its kindred at work in the galaxy, and the Immaterium-spawned entities the mortal races called Gods were powerless against it.
So began the calamity that the Imperium would come to call the Pale Wasting.
AN : IT IS NOT DEAD THAT WHICH ETERNAL LIES !
Thank you all for your patience where this story is concerned. It never was the most popular of my works, and the difficulties of keeping several timelines straight in my head mean that it has taken a backseat for the entire year of 2021. But now, I finally have an idea of where this story is going. Furthermore, I don't intend to start my next story, Ciaphas Cain : Warmaster of Chaos until this one is done, precisely to avoid not updating anything for so long again.
You can therefore expect regular (if still very short) updates on this story in the foreseeable future. I am aiming for at least one per week until the story is done. There are several arcs/events/periods I want to go through, plus any "one-shots" which might pop up in my imagination in the meantime. If you have ideas for the latter, don't hesitate to tell me in your reviews.
This chapter contains my own theory as to the nature of the "Pale Wasting", which is a canon event about which very little is known. I believe what I have written here fits what little information we have to go on, and it is a homage to the "Oldcrons", that is to say the 3rd Edition Necrons, back when they were soulless automatas enslaved to not-shattered C'tan bent on harvesting all life in the galaxy for their dark masters. While I like the current characterization of the Necrons, I do miss their terrifying, eldritch-horror beginnings.
Zahariel out.