The priest of the Triumvirate spoke with the voice of the Silent King, his mechanical voxbox projecting fury that echoed across the grand banquet hall.
Yet the Storm King—Dukel—remained unmoved. He neither flinched nor offered apology.
The Eternal King mocked the dignity of the last and greatest of the Silent Kings with nothing but silence.
The assembled Overlords and Magos in attendance understood well the tension in the air. A civil war among the Necron dynasties could erupt at any moment.
And none of them cared.
The undead watched in silence—amused. For them, this was nothing new. The Necrontyr, ageless rulers of the stars, had always been creatures of internecine destruction. Their glory was matched only by their capacity for self-destruction.
Among the millions of species scattered across the galaxy, few matched the Necrontyr in the sheer art of tearing themselves apart.
Once, when they ruled the stars, they had nearly been brought to extinction by the Old Ones.
One by one, their armies were broken. Their worlds were reduced to stardust. Their empire, once spanning sectors, crumbled into a shrinking pocket of dying stars.
Their civilization teetered on the brink. And when faced with annihilation, the Necrontyr were given choices:
Form alliances, flee and preserve a spark for rebirth, or pour their genius into one final technological miracle to fight back.
They chose none of these.
Instead, as the enemy closed in, they turned inward. They devoured themselves in blood-soaked civil war. Entire dynasties vanished. Suns went dark. Worlds turned to ash.
Now, millennia later, they face another choice.
The threat of the Imperium of Man cannot be ignored. The fate of the galaxy may rest in their ancient, metallic hands. So, what path do they take?
Naturally—they begin to tear themselves apart again.
After the clash between Dukel and the Silent King, the once-grand banquet was effectively over.
Sensing the end, opportunistic Overlords and dynastic rulers crammed their necrodermis throats with precious matter—food they did not need but desired nonetheless.
Trazyn the Infinite, always one to collect the moment, activated his dimensional folds and began casually packing artifacts from the table.
For the Necrons, food held no sustenance. And that is what made this feast valuable—utterly useless, and therefore, the perfect luxury.
Despite the declaration of war, the Silent King had not forgotten his primary objective.
He continued his tireless efforts to unite the Necron dynasties in a renewed campaign against the rising might of the Imperium.
Dukel, Storm King of Vigilus, watched from afar, restrained by oath. Until the Silent King departed his realm, he could not strike.
And yet, the Silent King's rhetoric was persuasive. One by one, dynastic rulers pledged themselves to his cause. Forgotten engines of war stirred once more. Technologies once deemed forbidden reawakened.
The very same weapons used in their war against the C'tan—the Star Gods—returned to service. It had been with these doomsday devices that they shattered their former gods, scattering the divine into shards across reality.
Now, with the same determination, they looked to restore the dominance of the Necrontyr.
Their gaze, sharpened by ancient pride and bitter memory, fell upon the current masters of the galaxy: humanity.
But mankind was not the only threat.
The Orks—creations left behind by the Old Ones—were surging again. A green tide spread across multiple sectors, multiplying at an exponential rate. According to Overlord Orida the Scryer, the threat was snowballing. The more Orks there were, the faster they grew—and the harder they were to stop.
Beyond the rim of the galaxy, the Tyranid hive fleets crept closer. Silent. Patient. Hungry.
The Silent King feared them above all. The galaxy, he warned, must be cleansed and united. Or nothing would survive.
He addressed the dynastic courts, warning that if the Necrons remained inert—trapped in their tombs, dreaming of glories past—they would be swept aside.
By humanity. By the Orks. By the Tyranids.
The galaxy would not wait for them to wake.
His voice, though cold and synthetic, carried a weight that shook many slumbering lords from their pride.
He spoke the truth: The galaxy was aflame, and every fire sought to consume the stars.
At his words, several memory-cores overloaded. Even the oldest data-crystals could not compute the madness of the modern galaxy.
Where once the Necrontyr had ruled, now madness reigned.
Still, the Necrons would not surrender their birthright.
Reports had surfaced from the Synnlaith Enclaves—evidence that even the immaterium itself had become more volatile.
Eldar craftworlds, once proud and distant, had begun to humble themselves before the Imperium. Followers of the Laughing God emerged more frequently, seemingly attempting to unite what remained of their fractured race.
In the face of this, even the most arrogant dynastic lords—those who had only recently reawakened—began to understand:
The galaxy they had returned to was no longer theirs. And if they did not act quickly, it never would be again.
Despite their deep divisions, the Necron dynasties had, for the first time in sixty million years, reached a tentative accord.
A fragile unity, perhaps—but a unity nonetheless.
In accordance with this newfound alliance, a small Necron scout fleet was dispatched to the borders of the Imperium to make first contact.
Meanwhile, fate took its own course.
The Imperial fleet en route to the Vikia system encountered a Necron flotilla mid-transit.
Onboard that fleet served a rising star among the younger generation of Imperial heroes: a young engineer named Lance.
Unlike the majority of his peers in the officer corps, Lance bore no noble crest nor any title of lineage. He was the son of a humble farmer—nothing more.
During the earliest campaigns of Dukel's Black Crusade, that backwater agri-world had faced annihilation at the hands of the Daemons of Khorne. Lance's father died during the invasion, trampled beneath the hooves of a Bloodletter. There was no glory in his death—no skull claimed, not even contempt. Just an anonymous death among billions.
His mother survived, and in the aftermath of the daemonic incursion, Dukel's Crusade arrived to cleanse the system.
Lance was half-dead by the time the crusaders landed. Yet, with her last reserves of strength and desperation, his frail mother stepped before a Primarch of the Imperium—a being of godlike power and myth—and begged him to save her child.
Such a plea, made so directly to the Son of the Emperor, was considered near-suicidal. Dukel had only recently awakened from stasis. No one yet knew his temperament.
But something in her courage—or perhaps in her trembling, mortal sincerity—moved him.
Rather than strike her down or turn away, Dukel knelt, lifted the dying child into his armored hands, and raised him high above his head.
And in full view of the people, the Primarch bestowed his blessing.
A miracle followed.
Lance's fevered body stabilized. His wounds healed. His life was saved.
The boy once held aloft by the Warmaster had now become a man—a decorated officer of the Imperial Navy and an accomplished engineer. His homeworld had been brought under Ophelia Detachment No. 7, and order restored.
Having graduated from the Imperial Temple Academy—founded by Dukel himself—Lance now wore the uniform of a fleet lieutenant, his military record already marked with valor.
His hair was cut short and sharp; his bearing upright and commanding. The lean strength of his frame and the resilience etched into his marble-hard features made clear the steel that adversity had forged.
He was, in every way, a product of Imperial will.
And he held himself to impossibly high standards. Though born a commoner, Lance never saw that as shameful. He had a mother who loved him, a father who died protecting their home, and the memory of the day the Primarch himself had raised him above the heads of the crowd.
He would not allow himself to be lesser than any noble.
Lance's engineering corps was currently embedded with an Imperial fleet dispatched from the Far Eastern fringe toward the Vikia system.
No sooner had they completed their warp translation than disaster struck.
They were under attack.
The enemy descended without warning—an ambush in the void.
Within seconds, the ship's interior exploded into a frenzy of coordinated movement. Sweaty gunners worked the massive loading arms of the macro-cannons, shoving shells the size of drop-pods into the waiting breeches.
Towering blast doors opened. Giant steel grappling hooks latched onto ordnance and dragged them into position.
Though automation could have managed the load cycles, the macro-cannons' immense output made full automation dangerously unstable. The firepower was too great—chain reactions were a constant threat. Hence the need for servitors and crew to assist directly.
Outside, the void war raged.
From a reinforced viewing panel, Lance caught glimpses of the battle: a Sword-class frigate, old but heavily modified, erupted into flames. Its quantum deflector had been overwhelmed by a hail of Gauss fire. The final hits tore straight through its midsection, shattering it in a halo of flame and debris.
The explosion released its internal moisture and oxygen into space, forming a ghostly mist of ice crystals before vanishing.
The Imperium returned fire in full. Lance could see fan-shaped blasts of laser light sweeping toward the enemy's pyramidal vessels. Although outnumbered, the Necrons' uncanny tactical precision and advanced weaponry gave them a sharp edge.
Even with the advantage of numbers, the Imperial fleet was hard-pressed.
When they realized that long-range fire had little effect on the enemy hulls, the captains gave the command.
Burn retros. Charge.
The void engines of Imperial battleships thundered to life. Colossal ramming horns, kilometers in length, surged forward under the shielding barrage of the Light Spear Array.
Then, collision.
With a bloom of plasma fire and kinetic devastation, the prow of an Imperial cruiser struck the Necron flagship.
Red flame burst from within the Necron vessel. A moment later, the ship fractured, cracking like an egg, reduced to molten slag drifting in zero-gravity.
And yet—something was wrong.
The battle was not over.
The ruined Necron vessels ignited with eerie green flames—ethereal balefire that refused to obey physics.
And then, one by one, ships—Imperial and Necron alike—began to vanish.
The ghost-flames did not consume. They erased.
Entire vessels vanished beneath waves of spectral green light, dissolving into unreality. No wreckage. No explosion. Just... gone.
It was as if the void itself had come alive to devour the living.
Lance stared in grim silence.
The warp? Phase-space flicker? Some Necron stasis weaponry long lost to sane knowledge?
Whatever the cause, the battle had become something else entirely.
He stepped into an anti-gravity lift capsule, descending swiftly to the command bridge.
Upon arrival, he stood at attention before the fleet's acting commander.
"Report," the officer snapped.
"The link dock area of A22 has been repaired," Lance replied crisply.
Vice Admiral Poole gave a firm nod.
"General," a communications officer announced, "the Department of Military Affairs has issued new orders. If survivors can be rescued from Vikia, we are to continue the operation. However, if our losses are too severe, we are to withdraw to the Geno system. Reinforcements will be dispatched to Vikia from there."
The lieutenant general turned to the herald.
"If we redeploy from the Geno system, how long until arrival at Vikia?"
"Twenty-one standard days, sir."
Poole's expression hardened. He lowered his gaze to the holo-star map projected before him, the flickering constellations reflecting off his command gauntlet. After a moment of silent calculation, he straightened with resolve.
"All hands to stations. Bring the fleet to full speed. Set course—Vikia."
A murmur rippled through the bridge crew. At Poole's side, a member of the fleet's strategic advisory cohort—a think tank assigned by the Department—rose from his seat.
"General," he began cautiously, "our fleet has already sustained losses qualifying us for strategic withdrawal. The logical course of action is to fall back to the Geno system. Continuing forward will place the fleet in significant jeopardy. You risk the lives of thousands... and a Tribunal might hold you personally accountable for such a decision."
Poole turned to face the Magos Strategos.
"The survivors on Vikia are still holding out. That alone is reason enough."
His voice was calm, but resolute.
"Every day we delay means more Imperial citizens perish in despair. The order from Warmaster Dukel was clear: save as many as possible. Those survivors still believe in the Emperor's light—and in Dukel's salvation. As long as they hold the line, we will answer."
The Magos narrowed his mechanical eyes. Logic dictated withdrawal. But logic could not overwrite the image of burning cities or the echo of unanswered distress signals. He did not respond.
Near the back of the bridge, Lance listened in silence. A flicker of memory surfaced: giants descending from the heavens—Astartes in full plate—and at their head, him.
The Warmaster.
That moment had been over a decade ago.
And yet, the Warmaster's will had seeded itself in the hearts of all who followed him. The Imperium fought not merely for war's sake—but for salvation. War was the furnace. The goal was survival. Hope.
This time, Lance would carry the banner. He would be the one to bring salvation.
Just as Dukel once had.