Event · M41
Carnac Campaign
The Carnac Campaign was a clash between the Necrons and the Eldar late in the War in Heaven, marking the Eldar’s first encounter with the Nightbringer. It is recorded not as a single, discrete battle but as a sustained series of engagements fought at the height of Eldar civilisation, when the Eldar empire still stood among the galaxy’s great powers and the Necrons, newly risen from biotransference and bound to their C’tan patrons, were carrying war across the stars in the star gods’ service. The campaign’s importance to later ages rests less on its tactical course, which is poorly attested, than on what the Eldar are said to have taken from it. Among the C’tan that led the Necron assault was the Nightbringer, a being that later Necron and Eldar tradition alike describe as taking particular relish in the terror its coming caused. Accounts differ on the detail of what befell the Eldar hosts at Carnac, but a consistent thread in Eldar myth holds that this was the encounter in which the Nightbringer’s touch first exposed the Eldar to death in earnest, a species that until then had known no natural end to its long lives. Eldar tradition afterwards wove the Nightbringer into its own cosmology as the origin of their dread of death, a fear later generations carried into the moral reckoning of their society long after the Necrons themselves had withdrawn from the field. Within the wider War in Heaven, the Carnac Campaign stands as one of the encounters through which the Necrons and their C’tan patrons broke the confidence of the era’s elder and younger civilisations alike, part of the same age of conflict that ruined the Old Ones. It left no lasting Necron dominion at Carnac and no continuous narrative into later ages, but its mark on Eldar belief endured long after the Eldar’s own empire collapsed in the Fall. Within Orrery’s timeline it stands as the earliest attested meeting between the Necrons and the Eldar, binding both peoples’ oldest history to a single named world and to the deeper backdrop of the War in Heaven.
See where Carnac Campaign occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.