Obyron

Vargard Obyron is a Necron Lychguard of the Sautekh Dynasty who serves as bodyguard and closest companion to Nemesor Zahndrekh, ruler of Gidrim. His rank, Vargard, denotes a personal protector bound to a single noble rather than a household captain in the ordinary sense, and Obyron holds it as a matter of identity rather than mere office. He does not covet Zahndrekh’s throne or crownworld; his stated purpose is Zahndrekh’s continued existence, which in the treacherous politics of a Necron court is the harder and more consequential ambition.

The bond between the two predates the Necrontyr’s transition into deathless metal. Obyron and Zahndrekh were living beings together on Yama, a swamp world, in the age before the biotransference that emptied the Necrontyr race into living metal chassis. That shared mortal history survived the change more completely in Obyron than in almost any other Necron of the dynasty, and it is the root of a loyalty later Necron courts found difficult to explain by rank alone. Zahndrekh’s mind bears the marks of that long transition: he behaves as a courtly general still fighting the wars of a vanished age, addressing enemies as noble adversaries and observing forms of chivalry that belong to a galaxy his empire no longer rules. Obyron neither corrects this nor exploits it. He instead maintains the fiction, managing Gidrim’s real defences and the dynasty’s actual interests behind the ceremony Zahndrekh believes he is conducting.

In battle Obyron fights in the front rank with a warscythe, and when Zahndrekh comes under direct threat he closes the distance by means of the Ghostwalk Mantle, an artefact that folds space to bring him to his lord’s side without warning. Against Kor’sarro Khan of the White Scars, Obyron fought a duel he was close to winning outright; Zahndrekh, holding to the terms of engagement his own delusion imposes on him, ordered the contest ended before the killing stroke, and Obyron obeyed at once. The episode is often cited as the clearest illustration of the relationship’s terms: Obyron’s obedience is total, but it is obedience offered to a man he has chosen to protect from the truth of his own condition, not merely a superior he cannot refuse.

Gidrim’s court is riven with the intrigue typical of Sautekh Dynasty holdings, where nobles calculate advantage in a hierarchy that death no longer settles. Obyron takes no part in these manoeuvrings directly; he instead identifies those who conspire against Zahndrekh’s rule and removes them before their schemes mature. It is this practice, more than Zahndrekh’s own diminished grasp of court politics, that keeps Gidrim under its Nemesor’s authority. Obyron remains at his post in the current era, his status unchanged: a Lychguard who has outlasted an age of empire in service to one man, anchoring Gidrim’s fortunes to a loyalty formed before the dynasty itself took its present form.