Event · M0
Biotransference
Biotransference was the process by which the Necrontyr transferred their minds into metal bodies, becoming the Necrons, at the instigation of the C’tan. It is recorded as taking place on the Necrontyr homeworld roughly sixty million years before the Imperium, in the ancient galaxy of the War in Heaven, and it marks the point at which a short-lived species became the Necron race that later dynasties descend from. The cause was the Necrontyr’s own condition. Their star bathed the homeworld in radiation that kept their lives brief, and they were in conflict with the Old Ones and the servitor races that fought for them, a war in which they were outmatched. The C’tan, star-eating entities of great power, offered an escape from mortality. Szarekh, later remembered as the Silent King, is recorded as having opposed the bargain, but the Necrontyr leadership accepted it, and the C’tan carried out the transference on a vast scale, moving consciousness into durable bodies of living metal. The outcome was ambiguous. The Necrons gained near-immortality and the strength to fight the Old Ones, but accounts hold that the process cost many of them their emotion, individuality or sanity, and that the C’tan bound the new race to their service. The Necrons later turned on their masters, shattering them into shards, and withdrew into the Great Sleep within their tomb worlds. Their reawakening in the later millennia of the Imperium, on worlds such as Terra’s neighbours in the Segmentum Solar and far beyond, traces directly to this event, and it remains the origin point for every Necron dynasty on the timeline.
See where Biotransference occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.