Szarekh

Szarekh, the Silent King, is the last Triarch of the Necrons and the ruler who led them into biotransference. He commands the loyalty, however fractured, of the scattered Necron dynasties, and where his will is voiced it carries the authority of a Triarch rather than a single overlord — a distinction the Necrons themselves still observe. Among the galaxy’s rulers he is unusual in being neither dead nor continuously present: for most of the last sixty million years he was absent from the galaxy altogether, and his current rule is as much an act of return as of succession.

Szarekh’s authority dates to the War in Heaven, when the Necrontyr, dying prematurely from exposure to their sun and unable to match the Old Ones’ biological mastery, accepted an alliance with the star-gods known as the C’tan. In exchange for aid against the Old Ones and their bio-engineered servants, the Necrontyr underwent biotransference, casting off their failing organic bodies for immortal constructs of living metal. Szarekh sanctioned the exchange as Silent King, and the Necrontyr — now Necrons — helped break the Old Ones and, eventually, the C’tan themselves, shattering the star-gods into shards later bound as weapons and slaves. The cost of biotransference fell hardest on the Necrons’ minds: nearly all trace of former character and feeling was lost, leaving Szarekh to rule a species he had remade into something closer to machine than to the people it had been.

Unable to reconcile what he had sanctioned, Szarekh withdrew from galactic affairs, leaving the Necron dynasties to enter the Great Sleep while he travelled beyond the galaxy’s edge for millions of years — a self-imposed exile that left the empire without its Silent King through the whole of the Imperium’s rise. He returned in the era of the Indomitus Crusade and the opening of the Pariah Nexus, finding Tyranid hive fleets feeding on Necron holdings that the dynasties had been too fractured, too dormant, or too indifferent to defend. Concluding that the awakening of the empire could no longer wait on the consent of individual dynasties, Szarekh moved to compel a reunification he judged necessary rather than desired.

In the Pariah Nexus, Szarekh offered Roboute Guilliman terms of surrender, presenting the offer as a formality preceding war rather than a genuine hope of peace; the Imperium declined, and the two powers have contested the Nexus since. Among his own kind he shares the era with figures such as Trazyn the Infinite, Imotekh the Stormlord, and Orikan the Diviner, dynastic rulers who owe him nominal deference but pursue their own ambitions with little regard for a Silent King who spent most of Necron history elsewhere. Szarekh regards the sixty million years since biotransference, and everything the dynasties have done in his absence, as an unfinished correction: the galaxy is to become a Necron domain, and no setback, including the Imperium’s refusal at the Pariah Nexus, alters that intention.