Orikan the Diviner

Orikan the Diviner is a Necron Cryptek of the Sautekh Dynasty who divines the future from the stars and manipulates time to correct failed prophecies. Where other Crypteks refine weapons or the substance of the Necron body, Orikan’s discipline is temporal and astromantic: he reads the movement of stars as a script of coming events, and where the script proves wrong he treats the error as a fault to be edited rather than a fate to be endured, rewinding the moment that produced it.

His court stands on Mandragora, and the Sautekh Dynasty, ruled in the present era by Imotekh the Stormlord, continues to number him among its own, even though his loyalty runs first to his own calculations of what is to come. He is recorded as answering the dynasty’s calls when his readings align with its interests, and withholding himself when they do not, a pattern that has made him a valued but never wholly biddable servant of Sautekh ambition.

Orikan’s oldest and most persistent rivalry is with Trazyn the Infinite, archivist of the Solitude, a contest of tombs, stolen relics and time loops said to predate most of the empires now active in the galaxy. In one notable episode Trazyn is held to have buried Orikan beneath an Exterminatus, the Imperial sentence of a world’s total destruction, from which the Diviner eventually excavated himself, resuming their quarrel largely where it had left off. Among his other faculties, Orikan can briefly assume a form of pure light, a capability he treats as an instrument of his craft rather than as a wonder in its own right.

During the Pariah Nexus, Szarekh, the Silent King, sought Orikan’s service directly; the Diviner declined until the arrival of Vashtorr the Herald of Chaos changed his reading of events, at which point he acted. The episode is characteristic of his standing among the Necrons: he is courted rather than commanded, and his cooperation, when it comes, follows his own foresight rather than the summons of even the highest authority. Between his command of prophecy and time, his uneasy alliance with Sautekh, and his enduring opposition to Trazyn, Orikan remains one of the more independently minded figures in the Necron dynasties, his exact current design known chiefly through the outcomes he has already engineered.