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What is the outcome of regicide?
It seems such a simple question, with such a simple answer. You kill a king: a king is dead. Yet recent events have demonstrated, to Lysikor’s benefit and satisfaction, that there are many outcomes of that stark, brutal, absolute breach of protocol. When the divine heka is broken and remade, when a line of succession whip-cracks across history, every subject and every enemy is struck and changed. Nothing is the same after that instant when nothing means anything, when the anchoring truth of necrontyr existence is - for the immeasurable, miniscule moment it takes for the king to be dead, long live the king - gone.
In such moments, all sentient necrons are unbound. No royal will to be done. No protocol to constrain them. No rules, no laws, no masters; no kings, no gods. The king is both the capstone of the structure and its most fundamental foundation. With no king, a necron is - however briefly - free.
This is not mere metaphysics, nor rhetoric. If it were either of those things, Lysikor would not be where he is now, sprawled on the command throne of the Failed Harvest, master of all he surveys: his ship, his constructs, and his own destiny at last. He is no picture of upright, lordly majesty - far from it. His louche demeanour, his slack posture, his decadence: these things are an insult to the protocols he has avoided, evaded, twisted and finally spurned. In the cavernous dark of the voidcraft’s sepulchre, Lysikor - the only unliving simulacrum of a soul aboard - can do as he likes, and he likes to enjoy his success.
Such is the outcome of regicides, plural. Genocide, one might say, given how he came to rank and power, how he made himself indispensable and accumulated the opportunities he’s taken. It is a more abstract question: how many sentient beings with one common cultural marker must one kill for the killing to be considered a genocide? It cannot be “all of them” - genocides leave survivors, and Lysikor saw no value in exterminating the common soldiery. Only those nobility who outranked him, or could succeed those who outranked him, or could protest at the process by which they achieved new status: which, in practice, meant all of them. Every necron capable of thought on XXXX. Genocide of the aristocracy of XXXX feels… fussy, though. Pedantic. Too finite for the grandeur of the world. It is a sustained campaign of murder that exceeds the sense of assassination, but does not embrace the broad sweep of the scythe that genocide implies. It was not a war, not an uncaring and untargeted slaughter. Lysikor chose every one of his targets.
This is the difficulty, he thinks, with being a unique specimen, an achiever like no other. Your every move is the new tradition: it is difficult to categorise oneself in terms that one has outgrown, and still define oneself in a manner that fits, let alone one communicable to others.
Not that Lysikor has to worry about that. His crew - his swarm of canopteks, begged and borrowed and stolen from the ruins of Ithakka’s line - do not understand, nor do they comprehend, but they comply. Indeed, they do so more freely than even warriors: there is no fragmentation of perception requiring focus and direction. They, like Lysikor himself, are unique. They are of one mind: part of the crew, part of the ship. The Failed Harvest is his army. It suffuses all of them, binds them, gives them a gestalt awareness more akin to a tomb world’s nodal matrix than a mind.
And here, on the command throne, Lysikor is part of that mind too.
This is the other reason for his lounge. Communion with the vast autonomous spirit of his ship, with thousands of oculars and sensory probes feeding low-level data, supplementing the Failed Harvest’s own monitor protocols and making them a self-perception, making the ship a thing capable of inspecting itself - it’s exhausting. Sublime, but exhausting.
A necron does not know weariness, in the physical sense. Cold fusion fires where the living heart used to be, and the core flux sings as close to forever as makes no difference. A necron is, however, conscious: aware of itself, and the passage of time, and the emptiness of inactivity, and the sheer extent of expanded perceptions.
Lysikor does not shudder, or quiver, or tremble, when he follows that thought to its conclusion. Only his interstices - the nodes by which he engages with everything outside the closed circuit of his physical form - react at all, and they simply open in reception of the influx. His own ocular dims, setting like a dying sun. He sees through all of the others - every canoptek construct aboard. Through the thrum of interstitial data, coursing into him steadily and without surcease, he feels through the constructs too. Feels them feeling. His perceptions are aligned with theirs, and with the Failed Harvest’s detection and tracking of the constructs within itself, and with -
He is enormous, almost beyond comprehension: khet upon khet across and back and down. He is cold: necrodermis exposed directly to the void, vestigial heat of energetic transfer bleeding out into the massless matterless sea. He is slow: the sharp precision of his deathmarked form is replaced by stillness, momentum, inertia. Yet he is also fast: the void is vast and measureless, and the stars move by but slowly, yet they move nevertheless, as he cleaves through the empty deep dark as a solid and purposeful thing.
He is the Failed Harvest, and the Failed Harvest is him. The autonomous spirit, dissolute and woven throughout the network of canoptek non-minds which inhabit it, had already taken the first inadvertent step towards sentience when it opened itself to that network and perceived itself. Now he has added himself to that gestalt: a mind with drives, goals, a perception of the past and future independent of isolated logs and calculations. A mind that can hold the idea of freedom.
The ship knows what it is. The ship knows what it has done. The ship knows it will never, ever give this up.
Inside the sepulchre, a sophisticated nexus reviews data and makes a decision. The body, huge and cold and hard, kinks its course through each of five dimensions. Vast processing power determines the location of physical things, here and now, there and then, and waits and waits and waits for the moment -
The moment comes, and they lurch forward, inertialess, moving through matter without mass. Only velocity remains, exponentially increasing, accelerating them toward the distant star of choice. Inside the sepulchure, the nexus fires all its expressive nodes at once, coreflux hissing from the ventilation slots in its casing.
For the first time, the Failed Harvest understands delight.