Event · M0
War in Heaven
The War in Heaven was an ancient galaxy-spanning conflict between the Old Ones and the Necrontyr, whose transformation into the Necrons decided its outcome. Later Imperial and Eldar tradition places the war tens of millions of years before the rise of humankind, in an era otherwise lost to record, and treats it as the calamity that ended the galaxy’s oldest age of elder civilizations. Its significance for the present lies less in any surviving eyewitness account than in its legacy: a galaxy emptied of much of its ancient life, its webway broken, and its most enduring victors sealed away in tombs to sleep across the deep time that followed. The Old Ones are recorded as an elder race that had shaped or uplifted several younger peoples as soldiers and wards in their wars, among them the forebears of the Eldar and the Krork, the ancestral stock later associated with the Orks. Against them stood the Necrontyr, a proud but short-lived species whose homeworld’s dying sun had left them prone to a wasting sickness, and whose war with the seemingly ageless Old Ones is described as long, costly, and increasingly hopeless for a mortal people fighting an enemy that scarcely aged. Necrontyr resentment of their own mortality, tradition holds, became as much a cause of the conflict’s escalation as any territorial dispute. The war’s course changed when the Necrontyr entered into a pact with the C’tan, star-devouring entities of immense power who offered escape from death itself. Through the process later remembered as biotransference, the Necrontyr shed their failing flesh for immortal metal bodies, becoming the Necrons, and turned the war decisively against the Old Ones in the C’tan’s service. Accounts differ on how the Old Ones’ civilization finally broke, but its end is consistently linked to this alliance, and to the ruin it brought upon the webway the Old Ones were said to have built. By the war’s close, the Old Ones were reduced to remnants or extinguished outright, and the Necrons, victorious but bound to the C’tan and facing a galaxy diminished by the fighting, withdrew into stasis to await a distant future. The War in Heaven is thus remembered less as a single campaign than as the hinge between the galaxy’s oldest age and the long silence that preceded the rise of the Eldar and, far later, humanity. Within Orrery’s timeline it stands as the deepest anchor point for the Necrons and the C’tan, and as the ancestral backdrop against which the younger civilizations of the present era eventually emerged.
See where War in Heaven occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.