The Yncarne

The Yncarne is the Ynnari’s avatar of Ynnead, the death god, given form from the ruined infinity circuit of the craftworld Biel-Tan. It is not a spirit given council, as a farseer’s Warlock or Autarch might be, nor a construct of wraithbone animated by a single soul; it is closer to an argument made flesh, a proof that Ynnead is stirring rather than a fully realised god. Aeldari tradition holds Ynnead as the death god yet to awaken fully, prophesied to consume Slaanesh and end the long agony that followed the Fall. The Yncarne is the clearest evidence, thus far, that the prophecy is beginning to come true.

It entered the galaxy’s story when Biel-Tan, one of the great warrior craftworlds, was broken in battle and its infinity circuit torn open, spilling the stored dead into a crisis that Yvraine, the reborn Emissary of Ynnead, and her sworn blade the Visarch moved to exploit. From that wound Ynnead drew enough substance to manifest a body, and the Yncarne rose from Biel-Tan’s dying wraithbone as the first true avatar its worshippers had seen. Its appearance at Biel-Tan is the clearest character-to-craftworld binding attested in its short history, and it remains the event by which its origin is dated.

Since then the Yncarne has fought as the Ynnari’s foremost instrument, drawn to battlefields where death gathers thickest and the newly slain are most numerous, for it moves by stepping through the fallen rather than by conventional means. Alongside Yvraine and the Visarch it has contended against the forces of Chaos and against the Drukhari of Commorragh, whose torment-cults Ynnead’s rise threatens to starve, and it has drawn scattered aelfarers of many craftworlds into the Ynnari’s ranks even as farseers such as Eldrad Ulthran have questioned whether following it serves the Asuryani or merely hastens their consumption by another hungry power. Each soul the Yncarne claims is read by the Ynnari as a small defeat for Slaanesh; sceptics on the older craftworlds read the same act as evidence of an appetite no less troubling than the one it opposes.

Ynnead remains, by the Ynnari’s own account, only partly awake, and the Yncarne’s dependence on the dead as both fuel and means of travel reflects that incompleteness rather than any final form. Its status among the Aeldari is consequently unsettled: the Ynnari treat it as living proof that salvation is possible, while many Craftworld and Drukhari factions still withhold judgement on whether Ynnead’s full waking would deliver their kind from the Fall or simply replace one devourer of souls with another.