Imotekh

Imotekh the Stormlord is the Phaeron of the Sautekh Dynasty, a Necron dynasty seated on the crownworld of Mandragora. He woke from the biotransference stasis of the Necrontyr’s Great Sleep not to a united realm but to a succession war among rival nobles, each claiming the dynasty’s throne in the long absence of central rule. Imotekh ended the conflict directly, in single combat and by the reconquest of fractured holdings, and took the title Phaeron as the dynasty’s sole and undisputed ruler. The epithet Stormlord followed from his chosen instrument of war: he commands technology capable of disrupting a world’s atmosphere and orbital space alike, summoning lightning, ionised storms, and gravitic disturbance to blind, strand, and annihilate an enemy before a single warrior advances.

Having secured Mandragora, Imotekh treated the dynasty’s pre-Sleep borders as a baseline to be restored rather than a memory to be honoured, and Sautekh forces have since expanded well past them. His campaign against the Thanet system, fought in the 41st millennium, is recorded as characteristic of this approach: an Imperial defence and relief fleet gathered in orbit was broken and destroyed when Imotekh turned the space above the world into a storm of directed lightning and debris, opening the way for a ground invasion conducted with comparatively little further resistance. He has met and defeated other Imperial crusades in similar fashion, favouring engagements in which the storm itself does the work of an army. Where Necron rivals rather than human armies contest him, Imotekh observes a stricter code, treating ritual duels between phaeron as binding regardless of how each side regards the enemy’s claim to honour.

Command within the dynasty is not uniformly his to exercise alone. Nemesor Zahndrekh, a Sautekh noble who is recorded as having outranked Imotekh before the Great Sleep, now serves under him: a degradation of memory common among the long-slept has left Zahndrekh convinced that the wars he fights are still those of the ancient War in Heaven, and he addresses present-day foes with an archaic chivalry that belongs to an age the galaxy has long since lost. Imotekh retains him in command regardless, valuing a tactical instinct the affliction has not dulled, while Vargard Obyron, Zahndrekh’s bodyguard and closest companion, quietly manages the gap between his lord’s perception and the battle actually under way. Orikan the Diviner, the dynasty’s astromancer, occupies different ground again: Imotekh tolerates his independent divinations and shifting loyalties for the value of his foresight rather than for any warmth between them.

Beyond his own dynasty, Imotekh’s dealings with other Necron powers are functional rather than cordial. He regards Trazyn the Infinite, curator of the Solar Wardens and a phaeron for whom relics matter more than dynastic pride, as a colleague whose company he does not seek out, and he treats Szarekh, the returned Silent King, as a sovereign he must accommodate rather than one he has chosen to follow. These relationships place Imotekh among the more assertive of the awakened phaeron, unwilling to subordinate Sautekh interests to any inherited hierarchy he did not build himself.

In the present era, Imotekh continues to direct the Sautekh Dynasty’s expansion from Mandragora, extending its reach across neighbouring systems on the same terms that ended its civil war: absolute command, storms as a weapon of first resort, and no tolerance for an empire smaller than the one he inherited.

Accounts of his later campaigns are more closely dated. One pretender to the Sautekh throne awoke Imotekh from stasis as Nemesor during the civil war on Mandragora; he destroyed the rival claimants and took the crownworld for himself, and from 781.M41 he has ruled the dynasty as Phaeron. He forbade dynastic infighting thereafter, treating it as a waste of force. Even before the Great Sleep he is recorded as having annihilated the Khuvu Dynasty, an act remembered among the Necrons in the saying “gone like the Khuvu.”

In 798.M41 he fought in person at the Siege of Somonor, where Farseer Starbane of Craftworld Alaitoc attacked the tomb world of Overlord Szaron. Szaron pledged allegiance to the Sautekh, and Imotekh directed the defence: he teleported a Monolith into the battle, denied the Eldar their mobility, drew Starbane into the tombs under a summoned storm, and left the Farseer as the sole survivor after taking his right hand. In 897.M41 Sautekh forces under his command destroyed the Adepta Sororitas fortress-convent of Sanctuary 101 in the Vidar Sector, the Imperium’s first open contact with the Necrons, flaying the Sisters within. In 910–911.M41 he took the forge world Hypnoth in the Siege of Hypnoth, using a technophagic virus that broke the Adeptus Mechanicus defences.

On the ice world Schrödinger VII he defeated High Marshal Helbrecht of the Black Templars, severing Helbrecht’s right hand and sparing him; one account dates that defeat to 930.M41 and another to 999.M41. Later Helbrecht boarded Imotekh’s tomb ship Inevitable Conqueror while it travelled toward Davatas, forced the Stormlord to withdraw to an escort, and destroyed the ship; one account dates the boarding to 985.M41 and another to 999.M41. In 988.M41 Logan Grimnar of the Space Wolves broke Imotekh’s phalanxes on Vhaloth IV while hunting Trazyn the Infinite, a victory Grimnar is said to have thought hollow. Lexicanum also records that Necrons led by Imotekh scoured the population of Graiad from the skies.

In M42, during the War in the Pariah Nexus in the Nephilim Sector, Imotekh revolted against the returned Silent King Szarekh. He regards Necron machine-forms as an improvement over the old flesh and opposes Szarekh’s aim to reverse biotransference; he sought to destabilise the Pariah Nexus and to prevent any other from eclipsing him as unifier of the dynasties. Sautekh forces struck Imperial and Szarekhan holdings alike in that theatre, including an advance on Vergoyz Alphic in the Myrtika System before withdrawing when Imperial agents struck the pylon complex.

He fights with the Staff of the Destroyer, a unique Staff of Light, and a Gauntlet of Fire, and can unleash Bloodswarm Nanoscarabs. On the map his career is bound to Mandragora and the Sautekh tomb worlds of the Eastern Fringe; on the timeline, to the reawakening of the dynasty from 781.M41 and to the Pariah schism of M42.