The below being a brief overview of the history of the C'tan, necrontyr and others, a synopsis of many works too great to be contained herein, containing the true and verified account of the infamy and repentance of the Emperor, as well as an overview of the national history. Though I do not expect this document ever to be published, I write it nonetheless, in the hope that some day the Emperor will become, emotionally comfortable, enough to permit the truth to become widely known.
~ Elash Mîriel, Adjutant of the Emperor, Imperial Year B200
Life arises from chaos, form, fleeting in compared with the inevitable slow decline of all things back beneath the waves of the primordial seas of entropy, the grip of whom cannot be avoided by any mortal means. So were the Star-Gods born, fragments of order in the energies of the primal explosion that birthed the universe. Nothing like the beings of today, these child-gods slowly gained awareness of a kind.
Little could they do at this time, little less than parasites of stars, grazing upon the vast power flow of these balls of hydrogen. In this age, a society of a form was not yet theirs, and the star-gods wandered solitary, unbound by anything but their wills, but they were also unaware of the scope of their existence, and the fineness and joy that they would learn upon becoming enamored of their youngers.
Without science and technology, without objective reference, and without any diversion from the monotony of their existence, hidden from them by their ignorance, the star-gods chose to make their minds run slowly and to them, every day was as long as an age to others.
Of old there were a great many star-gods, a number, though not beyond count, great indeed. Of those who were summoned forth, a minor fraction of the true number. But four, a minor fraction of those who came forth, remain to this day.
Now it was, that the C'tan were not alone in this universe, and other entities existed, yet young in comparison, if as many believe, there is a creator of the universe, then they were later works, smaller perhaps, but not lesser. Prime among these, the race with the greatest wisdom and strength, were the Old Ones. The Old Ones seeded their progeny upon a million worlds, having long put disputes behind them, and finding that they were effectively alone in the universe, they sought to bring forth life wherever they could, that they need not be alone.
The power of the Old Ones came from the alternate dimension known variously at the Warp and the Immaterium, but in this day, because of the lack of sentient life with the characteristics to stir it, barring the Old Ones themselves, who had ascended to great wisdom, and were more than able to control their effects on the Warp, the Warp was not the horror and threat to all life that it would become in later ages.
In the wake of the Old Ones, yet not founded by them, or known to them, arose another race, the necrontyr arose. While they were not the second species to arise, they were the third of the great races. Like so many others, they lacked the genetics that permitted the easy travel through the Warp that were gifted to the Old Ones. Because of this, they were for the longest time limited to a small enclave around their homeworld of Naogeddon, near the galactic rim. They traveled in sub light vessels between worlds, preserved in stasis as they went about their journeys.
Given to the Old Ones was great wisdom, but given to the necrontyr was great intellect, and they drove their science, art and creativity on with relentless passion, clambering up to great technological heights for many millions of years. They learnt the art of shaping worlds to their desire, and their home system became a near paradise, gleaming cities and endless wilds, populated by many types of flora and fauna, even species that they themselves had made extinct they resurrected. Vast automated factories produced everything that could be desired, within reason, and goods became unimaginably cheap, resources superabundant as the necrontyr stripped the resources from the rock and ice remnants of the formation of their system, and reprocessed their waste near endlessly.
They made the rocky worlds into replicas of their own, bringing surface gravity up to their desire by inserting super massive degenerate matter into the cores, or down by raising that they did not desire into orbit, building from it great orbital habitats like vast hoops of metal in space, their inner surfaces much like the worlds.
The gas giants of the system became home to a hundred thousand floating cities, beautiful spires climbing in both directions from their surfaces, and millions upon millions of space-ships crossed the void between these islands of life, linking them as surely as the vast communications arrays upon each. Occasionally events marred this civilization, the rampancy of early artificial intelligences for example, but each time, the species came together once more, and rebuilt what had been lost greater, better than before. Slowly as light, they began to spread into neighboring systems, and do likewise.
However, it was early in their existence, that the Star God who would one day become known as the Bringer of Night, came to Naogeddon's star and feasted upon it. Great beyond comprehension was his hunger, and he broke the normal methods by which the Star-Gods fed, instead of passive grazing, he learnt the secret of increasing the radiation output of a star, a technique which would one day, in the first age of the Star-Gods, become used to fuel them to new powers. He began to consume the Naogeddon-star, and in doing so, let terrible radiation spew forth from it.
This cursed the necrontyr, of whom it was unaware, with the many fold plagues and cancers and all that they had built began to turn to ash. Even though normal medical problems could easily be cured at this point in their history, for they had spread throughout the star system, the curse of the Death God was near incurable, and the average necrontyr life span collapsed, from several centuries to a bare forty years, measured in human terms. Now the necrontyr groped out into space to avoid this, deserting their home system in droves, yet no matter how far they went, it could not be avoided with their travel technology.
And so, the greatest minds in their civilization came together, to learn the secrets of traveling faster than light, and to break the rules which governed speed momentum and acceleration. Eventually, means were devised to do so, though it was not yet useable. In simplest terms, the faster than light drive, as it was known, for there was no reason to give it a more specific name, worked by throwing the laws of relativity away with regards to maximal attainable velocity, and made the mechanics of travel for the ship, and anything near it, purely newtonian. Although it could travel faster than light in theory, no ship yet built could withstand the friction of space travel at these speeds, and thus the design team were cast back to their initial problem.
It was after many years work that a principle first employed in communications became used for overcoming this problem. After great endeavors, a 'phasing' (the necrontyr term is not truly translatable, as english lacks the scientific terms required, thus this misnomer has been used ~ Elash) system was devised, which allowed a phased object to pass through un phased objects, allowing not only friction, but also all navigational obstacles, such as stars, to be bypassed. Yet the problem of powering the drive remained. But at long last it worked, and the light barrier was breached by the necrontyr over one hundred million years ago.
So it was, the necrontyr spread out into space, first slowly, at speeds of one, two, three times the speed of light, and then progressively faster, as they learnt the art of harnessing kinetic energy from alternate dimensions, they became able to accelerate their vessels to one thousand times the speed of light, and even greater.
It was then, as their race was resurgent, recovering from the curse of the nightbringer at last, spreading into hundreds of systems, and living beyond the accursedly short life spans caused by perpetual radiation bombardment, that they met the Old Ones for the first time.
Keigh myth would have it that the following events were caused by the greed and jealousy of the necrontyr, and while this did come to play a role later, for the character of the necrontyr had been forever altered by the curse of the Nightbringer, but at first, the problems were caused by the Old Ones occupation of worlds near the necrontyr enclave. First contact did not go well, surprisingly, as for all their desire to have others in the galaxy, the Old Ones were as unprepared as the necrontyr for the realities of first contact.
The exact events of the first contact consisted of a necrontyr colonization vessel, with a population of three million aboard, being shot down when it approached a moon occupied by the Old Ones. It was not that such an act was deliberate on their part, for that moon had long been deserted by them, but they had left behind, to guard the life they had seeded there, a great system for defense against puny space borne rocks. Now to a warship of later ages, this would barely have been sufficient to scratch the hull, but at this time, it was enough to destroy the vessel, puncturing its engines.
Now to the necrontyr, these Old Ones seemed to be primitive, for their technology was greatly lacking, by necrontyr standards, and, angered by the loss of millions of their people, they set out to have satisfaction from these interlopers. Alas, pride, the error from which all others proceed, forced the Old Ones to, in their communications, blame the necrontyr for their careless navigation, and offer no apology or recompense for this. And so, the necrontyr set out to punish this, with fire.
They delivered weapons, of power they had never dared utilize before when they had been confined to one system, to the moon, scouring it of all life, and leaving it a cratered wasteland. Not a day later, the Old Ones struck back, laying waste to the necrontyr fleet, leaving not one necrontyr ship in the system. War was joined. Now, until this time, the necrontyr had only heard of psycic powers and magic in their arts, and their earliest religions and philosophies, things that had been dropped long ago as primative superstision, and their defeat at the hands of the Old Ones forced them to take stock of this once more. They began to resent the Old Ones more with every passing day, and turned their whole civilisation to making war upon their enemies, due to fear and resentment.
They built up great armardas, each one expanding their sphere of influence a little, only to be pushed back in by a counteroffensive, for, though the Old Ones had inferior technology, their mastery of the Warp allowed them to travel at great speed, and gain the resources to drown any offensive of the necrontyr in their own forces. The necrontyr spend many ages improving their technology, dedicating all research to the terrible art of war making. They devised arcane techno-sorceries that could seem like magic to the uninitiated, even to the point of improving their drive systems to a level capable of crossing the entire galaxy in a single eyeblink.
And yet, it was not enough, and so, confined to their small enclave of worlds, where they could not bother the Old Ones, the necrontyr hegemony devoted its prodigious skills to learning of a way to harness the powers of the star entities that had plagued their race for so long, and it was in their own star, and the great red giant star Isizha, near unto the necrontyr homeworld that they found their entities.
Using great communications systems, they set about summoning forth the occupant of their own star first of all, of whom there were three, two great, and one lesser. The first they summoned was the nightbringer itself, though they did not know it, this was the same entitiy responsible, un-knowingly, for much, if not all of their problems. They summoned it forth, and it came. Its first act was, in enjoying the fear and awe of those who had brought it forth. It began to consume those who had brought it, and slew them, consuming their minds. This technique it would refine, and pass on to other Star Gods as a means of pleasure, and due to their solitary nature, lacking any degree of empathy for others, they embraced it.
On Isizha, they summoned forth the C'tan would would become known to the Eldar as the Void-Dragon, but in necrontyr he was named Asirnoth, and the third of the C'tan, the brother of Asirnoth, there has even been speculation that at some point in the past the two were one, but it has never been confirmed. The third was Mephet'ran, 'The Messenger' known to the Eldar as the Jackal God. The Dragon was without question the most powerful of the Star Gods, and the Jackal God the weakest. They arrived in the Naogeddon system several weeks later, to a scene of utter devasation. Fear of Asirnoth finally checked the Nightbringer's ambitions upon the necrontyr, and they swept outward, as they did, conquering and laying low all the forces of the Old Ones that stood before them, and summoning yet more Star Gods to join them in their conquest of the 'material plane.'
Now the galaxy turned blue with the blood of the Old Ones (NB Old One blood was actually red, Necrontyr blood is blue ~ Elash) and hundreds more Stargods joined them, many of thier names were lost in time, the true name of the Outsider for example, is much like that of the Nightbringer, known to no organic today, and many are still known, from the archives of their deeds, such as Saraken, Asirnal and Sutra. The shoe was on the other foot, and the necrontyr paused in their conquest to fortify themselves, and this period lasted for almost a millenium, a final rennasance, cultural and technological, of the original necrontyr.
Many of the necrontyr were satisfied with their conquests now, and content to defend their territory, they would not go further, but the Star Gods, especially the more bloodthirsty of their number such as Asirnal and the Nightbringer had no desire to stop. Mephet'ran led the betrayal of the necrontyr, motivated in part by greed of his own, and mostly by the fear of the other, more powerful C'tan turning upon him before he was ready to manipulate them into falling upon one another, and the race was purged, becoming instead necrons, machines of death, shock troops for all eternity, serving the C'tan and their desire to consume and conquer.
Now, with this done, and armed with hundreds of thousands of warships capable of cracking worlds and crossing the galaxy in the blink of an eye, the C'tan and their necrons stood ready to begin their war anew. The vast empire of the Old Ones was desecrated utterly, and they were, as the necrontyr had been before them, driven back beyond the fringes of the galaxy. Asirnoth destroyed their home system by creating a 'black hole' of vast stellar mass, consuming their homeworld and earliest colonies.
More pointless atrocities followed as the C'tan metodically purged the galaxy of all that had been influenced by the Old Ones in orgies of destruction. The Old Ones meanwhile, were busy preparing a counter to this, and even as the C'tan destroyed, and usurped, their role, creating life and civilisations on a million worlds only as 'cattle' for their sport and to feed them.
In this time the C'tan fell upon one another, and over time, the hundreds of star-gods initially summoned were whittled down to a mere handfull.
The Old Ones however, were not vanquished, though now they began to become desperate, despairing at what had happened to their galaxy, they unleashed the powers of the Immaterium in ever greater power, breeding new warrior races with psycic powers, chronically unstable, to fight the necrons and bending their will to finding ways of destroying the C'tan, with limited success.
Unfortunately, everyone lost as the wars continued, and new threats bred in the warp, enslavers, among other such horrors, beings of terror that could dominate the minds of organic beings. The hordes of creatures created by the shadows of the Old One's new weapons breached their intergalactic network, and cast th Old Ones down into a state of deepest regression, barring some few who survived.
The C'tan were now dismayed as these horrors overran the universe and set about the Great Warding, a scheme which would destroy the immaterium forever. If failed, for they could not finish it before the horrors of the warp would ovverun the universe, leaving almost all sentient organic life under their heel.
The C'tan went into a form of stasis, their servants with them, to be reawakened once the threat was lessened, and they could resume their dominance of the universe.
Millions of years passed, until the date 35,021 by the Christian calender, when the 'tomb' of Mephet'ran was opened by Explorator Magos Dural Lavank. The human expedition was rapidly killed by the C'tan, who immediately left to take stock of the status of his capital galaxy. He eventually, after several millenia, concluded that the universe was not worth remaining in, and took up residence in the Void Dragon's 'Dyson Sphere,' a vast shell that encloses a star, and began a far more expedient project than would have been required to alter the universe and remove the immaterium entirely.
Instead the Jackal God arranged for an uncontrolled reality distortion, this would take all C'tan assets from their original home galaxy to a strange melting pot of realities (Hey, we might live here, but it's hardly ordered ~ Elash) in which the possibilities for growth and his own power were far greater. When it was activated, the great shattering device took every necron artifact. every dead world with such devices on it, and innumerate ships to this reality, and even now continues to do such things with the occasional unwise wanderer, the largest example of such moving is of course, the Yvressi craftworld.
Upon arrival, the Emperor proceeded, unaccompanied by necrons and other devices, barring the smallest common FTL capable vessel, a grave class shuttle. Landing in an equatorial region of the planet, which had been curiously distorted, possibly as a result of the shattering, or some other event, it's impossible to tell which, the Emperor located a number of small, warring nations gathered in one region. Not least among these was the expansionist socialist state of Tsaragrad. The region was fast descending into war, with Tsaragrad and their allies looking likely to win the war.
The Emperor's arrival in the then republic of Seroi was quiet, but soon he had begun to recruit a small group, co-led by three of the most talented people in the entire region, the future spymaster Klaus 'Paul' de Vere, and Lady-Senator Laudrina Frost and Lord Cane Kolath. With his own politicial abilities, as well as their own not small talents, the Emperor arranged for Tsaragrad's rapid defeat at the battle of Tanagra. Acting rapidly, the Seroi Republic, marginally more powerful than the other nations in the region, which were mostly small city-states, came to an agreement, arguably influenced by the Emperor, by which both sides would agree to work together as a single state in the future.
The first head of the Senate, which was then a wholly elected body with ruling power, was a man from the Socialist Party of Tsaragrad, but after several seditious efforts on his behalf, the newly formed ISA under de Vere arrested him and he was publically convicted of treason. The ISA's power grew and rapidly efforts by dissident elements began to subside, and many other nearby city-states began to join the Confederacy. The second head of the senate was Lord Kolath, and he served in that capacity for many years before retiring, and taking over the far less stressful job of Minister for International Aid.
During his leadership, the Emperor became aware of the species of elves, specifically in an overseas incident involving genocide against them. At first it was his opinion that this race was the same as the Keigh he knew, and he arranged for the dispatch of the carrier vessel Killing Time to the area, on which he offered to chair talks on the matter, secretly hoping at first to stall these talks and facilitate the extermination of this group. However, after observing other elves present at the time, specifically a Menelmacari representative, he eventually decided that they were not the same species, and ordered an assault aimed at freeing the elves, in no small part for public relations.
A brief naval and arial battle followed, in which agents of Morgoth attacked the Killing Time and the ship retaliated against their vessels. Many years of peace and isolation followed, though it is of course interesting to note that the elven population drastically increased during this period. At some point, unnoticed, the Yvressi craftworld appeared, and it became obvious to the Emperor that his forces would once more be required, and surrupisiously and in secret he began to rebuild the necron fleets, and armies, which on Earth were largely based in Mount Arandar, where he had taken up residence.
Other incidents too minor to mention followed, such as the Aligreth War, a brief conflict to force regime change in that (now unfortunately dissapeared) nation, as well as numerous skirmishes against the Eldar, and a disastrous incident involving the forces of Morgoth, which had become far more technologically advanced than had been imagined. This incident forced the Emperor to begin artificially accelerating the technological level of the Confederacy.
Once more it was conflict with Morgoth that caused change, this time on Mars, where action against him had been taken by the Necrons, among many others, resulting in the rapid destruction of the Melkorian forced on that planet. However, this much high profile action made keeping the Necrons a secret impossible, and the Emperor was forced to disclose his real identity to the public.