Chapter Text
Vargard Obyron observed in customary silence as his lord played a war board game older than many species that must now roam the galaxy.
Nemesor Zahndrekh whistled with a faint mechanical disharmony as he moved dark stone pieces across the ancient wooden board. The Nemesor insisted the board was authentic—crafted in the courts of the Necrontyr long before the biotransference, long before their empire had burned across the stars. Obyron had never questioned the claim. Zahndrekh’s memory for such things was often uncannily precise, even when the rest of his mind wandered through ghosts of a vanished age.
They stood upon an open plateau atop the main tomb complex of Gidrim. Beneath them in the earth, the world’s ancient necropolis stretched in tiered terraces of black metal and emerald-lit pylons, vast structures buried in stone where countless legions still slumbered. Scarabs there drifted through the air in glittering swarms, tending to maintenance routines that had continued without interruption for sixty million years.
Zahndrekh had insisted they come here because, as he had declared with courtly satisfaction, he wished to feel the sun upon his skin.
Obyron had not felt the touch of sunlight in millions of years, and he doubted the faint yellow star of Gidrim offered anything particularly pleasant. Its light was thin and weary, casting long pale shadows across the plateau. Yet Zahndrekh was his Nemesor, and obedience was the first principle of existence. Protection the second.
And so Obyron stood, motionless sentinel behind his lord, as the Nemesor conducted a spirited contest against himself.
Zahndrekh appeared cheerful. The whistle continued as he shifted another piece across the board with exaggerated deliberation. Occasionally he leaned forward as if studying a clever stratagem devised by his unseen opponent.
But Obyron had observed Zahndrekh for many years.
He had known him when they had been flesh and bone Necrontyr, long before the terrible bargain with the star gods. He had watched him march proudly into the biotransference chambers. He had served him through the final campaigns of the War in Heaven. And he had watched him awaken again as a soulless machine.
Zahndrekh was bored.
Beneath the cheerful whistling and theatrical contemplation lay a subtle lethargy—a slowness of motion, a placid rhythm in his gestures that spoke of an eternity stretching endlessly ahead with nothing to fill it.
Only a few decades had passed since the Nemesor had awakened from the Great Sleep.
In that time Obyron had hoped, briefly, that the disorientation would fade. That Zahndrekh would eventually perceive the galaxy as it truly was.
But the Nemesor still believed himself Necrontyr. He saw others as Necrontyr as well. The passage of sixty million years had not altered Zahndrekh’s conviction that the Necrontyr empire endured.
Obyron had attempted, carefully and with all due tact, to explain the truth.
Each time Zahndrekh had simply waved the matter aside with patient indulgence, as though humoring an overzealous subordinate.
And since the Nemesor retained all other cognitive faculties—his strategic brilliance, his impeccable command of warfare, his sense of honor—Obyron had eventually ceased pressing the matter.
He had come to accept it as a quirk of prolonged dormancy.
Even the perfect constructs of the Necrons were not immune to flaw. Some lingering defect in the engrams, perhaps. A subtle corruption introduced by sixty million years of slumber, or a final jest left behind by the accursed C’tan.
Few Necrons had awakened upon Gidrim. The tomb world’s reactivation protocols were cautious, rousing only those necessary to restore basic dynastic functions.
And fewer still had returned from beyond the galaxy.
Without the command of the Triarch and the guidance of their dynasty’s Phaeron, Gidrim existed in a state of quiet suspension. They waited. They maintained the world.
They preserved its legions, its armories, its ancient halls, until the Necron empire would once again rise to claim the galaxy that had once belonged to them.
Until that day, there was little to do. And so, inexorably, boredom settled over Gidrim as the decades passed.
Even Nemesor Zahndrekh’s peculiarities were not sufficient to dispel it.
A warning ping reached Obyron through the interstitial link that bound his consciousness to Gidrim’s orbital arrays, interrupting his lassitude. The constructs stationed there had detected an object descending toward the planet at considerable speed—on a direct trajectory for the surface.
The Vargard examined the data as it streamed across his ocular overlays. Odd.
Necron detection networks were not easily evaded. The scrying engines that watched Gidrim’s orbit had functioned flawlessly for millenia. For something to approach so closely before being noticed was… unusual.
The object was small. Oval in shape. Its dimensions suggested a pod of some sort. More curious still—there was a life sign within it.
Obyron had never been a curious being, not when he had been flesh, and not now that he was metal. Curiosity had little value unless it pertained directly to duty. And his duty was simple: defend the Nemesor and the world of Gidrim.
With scarcely a thought he issued the command. Nothing unclean would touch the planet’s surface.
He watched as targeting runes blossomed across his vision. Far above the tomb world, orbital gauss batteries pivoted in perfect synchronization. Emerald beams lanced through the void and struck the descending object.
There was a flash of green fire.
And still the thing came down.
The pod emerged from the glare intact, its trajectory only slightly altered as it plunged toward the upper atmosphere of Gidrim.
Huh.
Obyron grunted. The sound emerged as a metallic growl vibrating through his voice emitter.
Across the plateau, Nemesor Zahndrekh raised his gold-plated head from the ancient war board.
“Something on your mind, old friend?”
Even as the Nemesor spoke, Obyron was already directing the tomb world’s defenses. Surface pylons began awakening across the deserts of Gidrim, their targeting arrays aligning to triangulate the pod’s descent and destroy it before impact.
“My Nemesor,” Obyron said evenly, “a foreign object was detected by our scryers in planetary orbit. I ordered it destroyed, but it survived the attack. It is now entering the atmosphere.”
He paused for a fraction of a second as the final data point arrived.
“It appears to be a pod. A life sign has been detected within.” The last statement he added almost as an afterthought. He would soon regret doing so.
Zahndrekh sprang up from the board with surprising animation.
“A pod with a life sign?” the Nemesor exclaimed. “You cannot have it shot down, you daft fool! What if there is some poor fellow in it?”
He began pacing the plateau, cloak plates clinking softly with each step.
“Does it read as one of ours? Are there any ships nearby?”
“No, my lord,” Obyron replied. “The vessel is of unknown origin.”
Even as he spoke, he halted the firing commands. The pylons powering up across Gidrim’s surface fell silent, their targeting routines suspended.
Above them the pod continued its descent, a faint streak cutting through the upper atmosphere.
Zahndrekh’s oculars flared with interest.
“Well,” he declared brightly, “that just adds to the mystery, does it not?”
If the Nemesor had still possessed lips, Obyron suspected he would have been smiling.
The intrusion had clearly dispelled Zahndrekh’s boredom and stirred that adventurous spirit which had once made him a legendary commander in the ancient wars.
Obyron knew what was coming next and he prepared himself.
Zahndrekh clapped his hands together, metal striking metal with a burst of sparks.
“I have it! We shall see this intruder for ourselves!”
“My lord,” Obyron said quickly, “I can investigate this threat personally. There is no need for you to concern yourself.”
He already knew the effort was futile.
Zahndrekh shook his head. With a flicker of emerald light his staff appeared in his hand, summoned from its dimensional sheath.
“Nonsense,” the Nemesor declared. “I shall see what this is myself.”
Obyron very much wanted to sigh.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The pod streaked across the sky, trailed by fire.
Its silvery surface gleamed in the faint yellow light of Gidrim’s sun as it tore through the upper atmosphere. Friction kindled a sheath of flame around the descending vessel, a burning comet cutting across the pale morning sky of the tomb world.
It was shortly after dawn.
Across the deserts of Gidrim the first light of the system’s weary star spread over the planet’s silent plains. Long shadows stretched from the ancient pylons that studded the landscape like the gravestones of a civilization that refused to die. The vast tomb complexes slumbered beneath the surface, their labyrinthine halls lit by cold emerald luminance that had burned without interruption for sixty million years.
The sky above them, empty for epochs beyond counting, now bore a single intruder.
The pod descended with terrible speed, its guidance systems adjusting its angle with precise bursts of energy. It cut through thin cloud layers and drifting dust currents alike, leaving a long scar of smoke across the morning horizon.
Below, the world watched.
Orbital constructs tracked the object’s descent with mechanical patience. Surface pylons rotated incrementally as their targeting arrays calculated firing solutions that would no longer be used. Far beneath the crust, slumbering legions of warriors remained unaware that something living approached the tomb world.
—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The command barge skimmed soundlessly over the grey plains of Gidrim, its anti-gravitic engines stirring only the faintest disturbance in the dust below. Wind rushed past the craft in long, restless currents, tugging at the thin banners of particulate sand that crawled endlessly across the tomb world’s barren surface.
Wind.
When Obyron had first awakened from the Great Sleep, there had been none. The airless world had lain exactly as it had for sixty million years—silent, still, and perfectly suited to the needs of the Necrons, who required neither breath nor atmosphere. Air was an inefficiency, a relic of organic weakness.
But when Nemesor Zahndrekh had awakened, he had immediately demanded that the tomb world be made suitable for what he had called “proper living”. The Canoptek scarabs had obeyed their lord without hesitation, reshaping environmental systems and awakening ancient atmospheric processors buried beneath the crust. Slowly, methodically, Gidrim had regained the thin envelope of air it had not possessed since before the War in Heaven.
Zahndrekh now stood proudly upon the forward platform of the command barge, his golden death mask lifted toward the sky as if he could savor the wind against a face that no longer possessed nerves to feel it.
It had also been the Nemesor’s insistence that they travel to the crash site by transport rather than translocation. Zahndrekh had declared that he wished to behold the landscapes of his world with his own eyes.
Obyron saw little value in the scenery. Gidrim was a world of endless grey stone and metallic outcroppings, broken only by the occasional rise of ancient pylons whose green luminescence marked the bones of the tomb complex below. But the Nemesor had spoken, and obedience was the Vargard’s first principle.
And so the barge flew.
Behind them the silent forms of several Lychguard stood rigid upon the craft’s rear platform, the few warriors Obyron could spare from the still-sleeping legions beneath the world. They held their hyperphase weapons upright in ceremonial readiness, just as Zahndrekh had insisted.
Ahead, the crash site came into view.
The impact had carved a wide crater into the stone plains, perhaps twenty cubits across. At its center lay the pod, half-buried in shattered rock. Its silvery hull glimmered faintly beneath the pale sunlight of Gidrim’s star. Swarms of Canoptek scarabs already crawled across the crater’s edges, their delicate limbs skittering over the fractured ground as they examined the wreckage.
Obyron had consulted the tomb world’s scryers during the approach. Nothing had emerged from the vessel. Yet the life sign remained within.
“Well,” Zahndrekh called brightly over the wind, “is our mysterious intruder alive still? That was quite the entrance.”
“Yes, my lord,” Obyron replied evenly. “The life sign remains.”
“Marvelous.”
Without another word the Nemesor leapt from the barge’s platform into the crater below, landing amidst the broken stone with a metallic impact that sent fragments skittering across the ground.
Obyron followed immediately, the Lychguard descending in disciplined silence behind him.
The pod’s silvery hull still emitted faint tendrils of smoke that twisted away into the wind.
Zahndrekh approached it with open curiosity.
“Hmm,” he murmured, resting a metal hand thoughtfully against his chin. “Quite the exotic design, is it not? Though still pleasing to the eye.”
The Nemesor was not entirely wrong. The vessel bore little resemblance to any Necron craft Obyron had ever encountered. Its contours were sleek and smooth, its shape almost organic in the way it curved and flowed without visible seams. If Obyron had retained any aesthetic sensibilities from his living days, he might have found it pleasing as well.
“If I may, my Nemesor,” he said, stepping closer to a raised section along the pod’s hull that appeared to be some form of access point.
“Yes, yes, do go on,” Zahndrekh replied, waving a hand impatiently while his glowing oculars remained fixed upon the object.
With his warscythe held ready in one hand, Obyron grasped the protruding section of the hull with the other and tore it open with a single decisive pull.
The metal gave way easily.
A burst of lingering smoke spilled outward from the pod’s interior, carrying with it a faint chemical scent that Obyron’s sensors quickly identified as organic in origin. The wind caught the vapors and scattered them across the crater.
As the smoke cleared, Zahndrekh emitted a sound like a gasp.
Within the opened vessel lay a living creature. It was small, soft and frail in appearance.
Obyron’s cognition matrices searched through the remnants of biological memory preserved within his ancient engrams and reached an immediate conclusion.
The creature was an infant.
For one absurd moment—a fraction of a second during which a biological heart might have stuttered in disbelief—Obyron wondered if it could somehow be a lost Necrontyr child, miraculously preserved from the distant past.
The notion collapsed under the weight of reason almost instantly.
Even the faded memories of flesh made the truth obvious. The Necrontyr had been leaner, harsher in form, their features shaped by a world of radiation and suffering. This being bore none of those traits. Its skin was smooth and pale, its proportions entirely alien to the species Obyron had once belonged to.
This was an unclean organism of unknown origin that had no rightful place upon Gidrim.
Obyron turned to observe his lord.
Until now Zahndrekh had remained perfectly still, staring silently at the infant. Would this finally be the moment when reality pierced the Nemesor’s long-held delusion?
Zahndrekh’s oculars suddenly flared brightly.
“Blood and Starfire,” he exclaimed with genuine wonder. “He’s beautiful! One of the comeliest children I have ever seen!”
Before Obyron could react, the Nemesor reached into the pod and lifted the small creature gently in his metal hands.
Obyron felt a powerful urge to intervene—to seize his lord’s wrists and prevent what he was certain would become a catastrophic decision.
“Look at him, old friend,” Zahndrekh said warmly.
The infant gazed back at the Necron lord without the slightest trace of fear. Its eyes were a vivid purple, wide and observant, studying the golden death mask before it with quiet intensity.
Zahndrekh turned the child slightly as he inspected it.
“Certainly this little one belongs to some noble Necrontyr dynasty of famed beauty,” he mused thoughtfully. “The Nihilakh, perhaps?”
The infant’s eyes moved constantly, absorbing every detail of the strange figures surrounding it. For a being so young, its gaze possessed an unsettling alertness.
Then the child reached out with small hands and placed them against Zahndrekh’s golden faceplate.
The Nemesor laughed.
Obyron found the entire scene profoundly absurd. The immortal, soulless ruler of Gidrim stood cradling an alien organism like a proud parent. It was an outcome the Vargard should have anticipated the moment he mentioned the life sign.
Now a slow dread began to build within Obyron’s cognition matrices.
He knew exactly what Zahndrekh would say next.
“We shall keep and care for him, of course,” the Nemesor declared cheerfully. “He will be my noble ward until his dynasty can be reached.”
Then the alien smiled.
It was a small, uncertain expression, the simple instinctive smile of an infant. Yet it seemed strangely deliberate, as though the creature sensed something in the tone of Zahndrekh’s voice even if it could not understand the words themselves.
Its tiny fingers tightened slightly against the Nemesor’s golden faceplate.
Obyron prepared himself for a task that might rival the war against the C’tan.
Obyron began to suspect that his engrams had finally succumbed to terminal error, and that the past hour was nothing more than a hallucinatory cascade brought on by cognitive degradation. Sixty million years was, after all, a considerable span for even Necron systems to endure without fault. It would not have been entirely unprecedented for memory matrices to fracture under such strain.
He ran a full diagnostic sweep through his engrammatic archives and sensory arrays. Every report returned without error.
No corruption was detected. No logical cascade had begun. His processors remained perfectly stable.
Which left only one conclusion.
Nemesor Zahndrekh of the Sautekh dynasty was currently standing upon the command barge of Gidrim while holding in his arms a living alien infant.
Obyron briefly considered what the other nobles of the dynasty might think if they were to witness such a spectacle. The thought of how the phaeron himself might interpret the scene was even less appealing. He decided not to pursue the line of reasoning any further.
Fortunately the problem would likely resolve itself. The organism would perish long before any higher-ranking Necron authority ever became aware of its presence.
Obyron suffered in silence as the command barge skimmed back toward the main tomb complex.
The Lychguard stationed along the rear platform watched the proceedings with hollow, unmoving stares. Nothing of their personalities had survived the biotransference. They were perfect guardians, but empty ones. There would be no private consultation from them on this matter, no quiet exchange of concern among comrades.
Only silent observation.
“You see here, young one,” Zahndrekh was saying animatedly, “this is Gidrim. Gi-drim.”
The Nemesor pronounced the name slowly, as though instructing a court pupil in proper diction, while gesturing broadly toward the grey expanse rolling past beneath the barge.
“A harsh land, I admit,” he continued cheerfully, “but there is a beauty in it as well. A noble austerity, one might say. The tomb beneath us possesses everything a Necrontyr of proper standing might wish for.”
He paused for a moment before adding with a laugh,
“Well—everything except some suitably exciting battles. We shall tour all of it, you will see.”
The small creature appeared intensely focused on his every word. Its wide purple eyes followed Zahndrekh’s gestures toward the landscape with avid attention, as though it were attempting to take in every detail of its surroundings.
Obyron’s sensors registered the infant’s biological processes with uncomfortable clarity. The creature possessed a dual heartbeat and a steady pattern of respiration, the soft rhythm of lungs drawing air in and expelling it again.
The sound produced a deeply unpleasant sensation within Obyron’s awareness, like the imagined movement of scarabs crawling across his necrodermis.
He ran a quick diagnostic on his kinesthetic sensor arrays. All systems reported normal.
The sensation remained.
Obyron forced his attention elsewhere before the observation of breathing triggered the dangerous reflex buried deep within his ancient engrams—the long-extinguished instinct to draw breath himself.
Necrons were cold metal at the surface, even if the energy cores within them burned hot.
The infant, however, seemed entirely unconcerned by this reality.
Obyron possessed little knowledge of alien species beyond the accursed Aeldari and the brutal Kroks. But he felt certain that this pale creature with its attentive violet eyes must rank among the strangest organisms to roam the galaxy now.
Zahndrekh continued speaking, blissfully unaware of the turmoil within his Vargard’s thoughts.
He described the ancient history of Gidrim with enthusiastic authority, recounting battles fought upon its plains in ages long past. It was a familiar speech, one Obyron had heard many times before when the Nemesor wished to instruct visiting officers in the glories of the dynasty.
Yet the moment felt strangely altered.
The presence of the watching alien child transformed the scene into something entirely unprecedented.
Zahndrekh was in the middle of recounting how he had come to be lord of Gidrim when the creature’s attention shifted away from him and settled instead upon Obyron. The Vargard returned the gaze without reaction.
Unbidden, the alien’s bone structure and facial features were analyzed by his internal systems. Every detail of the small face—from the pale, smooth skin and round cheeks to the symmetrical features and large, luminous eyes—appeared optimized to provoke a positive and protective response in the observer. The proportions were almost mathematically precise in their effect.
It had clearly succeeded in the case of the Nemesor, through his distorted view of reality Obyron could only wonder how the creature appeared.
Obyron, however, had never been a being given to aesthetic appreciation, and pity had long since vanished with the loss of his soul. He stared back impassively through his death mask, emerald oculars locked against the infant’s curious violet gaze.
“And that,” Zahndrekh concluded at last, his tone warm with self-satisfaction, “is how I won the right to be Gidrim’s lord.”
He looked down at his small charge.
The alien appeared to abandon its silent contest with Obyron. Its lips pursed slightly, and it turned its white-haired head toward the Nemesor before resting it surly against Zahndrekh’s shoulder.
“Ah, do not be downtrodden, young one,” Zahndrekh said kindly, patting the creature’s head with fingers capable of crushing necrodermis. “Obyron is a dour fellow at times. But he is fine company, I assure you. He will protect us both, always.”
Obyron found himself wishing, briefly, that he still possessed teeth to grind.
“Is that an order, my lord?”
“Of course it is, dear Vargard,” Zahndrekh replied cheerfully. “Look at him. My new ward is as defenseless as a newborn skolopendra.”
The alien lifted its head again and looked toward Obyron. A smile spread across its small face, one that seemed strangely triumphant for so young a creature.
Weariness and apprehension settled deep within Obyron’s cognition matrices. The situation had now crystallized into a formal command. He had no option but to obey unless he chose to betray his lord—and that was unthinkable.
The arrival at the entrance of the main tomb complex did little to ease his thoughts.
Before them rose the structure that crowned Gidrim’s necropolis: three immense pyramids of black stone standing in silent alignment. They were vast even from the outside, their sheer faces rising starkly against the pale sky. Yet Obyron knew that what lay beneath the surface dwarfed what could be seen above. The true complex extended deep into the planet’s crust, an entire subterranean empire of halls, vaults, and slumbering legions.
“Look upon it,” Zahndrekh whispered to the infant with theatrical reverence. “A mere fraction of the might of the Necrontyr dynasties.”
The creature’s purple eyes darted eagerly across the monumental structures, absorbing every detail with clear fascination. It smiled again.
“It is grander still beneath the earth,” Zahndrekh continued warmly. “Welcome to your new home, little one.”
The great slabs of black stone at the pyramid’s entrance parted soundlessly as they approached. Ancient mechanisms recognized the presence of their lord and opened the way without hesitation. Emerald light spilled outward from the depths of the complex, bathing the returning procession in its cold glow.
Only then did Obyron allow himself the indulgence of a silent sigh.