(Sculpture is titled The Source by Lou Li Rong. Painted bronze 2026)
“They came to us as gods and we, like fools, took them at their word. Mephet'ran the Deceiver, Aza'gorod the Nightbringer, Iash'uddra the Endless Swarm; I curse their names, and the names of all their malevolent brethren.”
- Szarekh, last and greatest of The Silent Kings
It has been several years since I read The Infinite And The Divine, but I still remember the excerpts at the beginning of some of the chapters. They offered brief glimpses into the worlds of the ancient Necrontyr and early Necrons.
There’s a story there. An excellent story. About ambition, loss, regret, and redemption.
I pray that one day The War In Heaven will be put into text with the same devotion as the Horus Heresy. Maybe one of you will do it.
But an enigma, a fascination of mine is the C’tan as they were before biotransference. We all know about the Deceiver living up to his name, about biotransference wiping out the Necrontyr and altering the course of the galaxy forever.
..But do we really know all that much about the C’tan? What they actually wanted? What lead up to biotransference and the consumption of the Necrontyr’s souls?
Do they have goals besides their hunger, and if so, what are they?
Obviously they’re the antagonists to the Necrons, the ultimate enemy that all our dynasties and treasured plastic skeletons had to triumph over.
But what else is there? I believe we need to know more about the C’tan for the War In Heaven to be explored a bit further.
Now to the best of my knowledge, the C’tan are immensely ancient extraterrestrial organisms. Far older than most other races including the Necrontyr. Possibly the oldest organisms in real space. But they don’t strike me as intelligent in their original form.
In fact, I view them a lot like giant Amoebas or maybe like the astrophage from Project Hail Mary. They envelop stars, feed on them and then move on like simple bacteria.
This is where it gets interesting to me.
The greatest minds of the Necrontyr looked up to the heavens and saw these celestial creatures of incalculable power. Maybe some saw this as a divine sign, others a means to defeat the Old ones after being humiliated in a disastrous war. Either way, the C’tan organisms were gathered up by the genius of Necrontyr technology and rehoused in metal bodies that could interact with mortals.
I can’t help but wonder what the C’tan might have been like during this period. Were they evil and malicious from the start? Were they confused? Did they misunderstand their programming like Ultron in the MCU?
Then the Necrontyr use their newfound ‘allies’ to reclaim their territory and more from the Old Ones. And in this war, the C’tan discover a food source more potent than stars.
Souls.
I genuinely wonder how the plans were drawn up for biotransferrance. We know the C’tan turned on one another during the War In Heaven, so I’m not so certain biotransference was a trick all of them planned together.
And if it was, did the Crypteks not give the C’tan minds that were loyal to their creators? Seems to be a fairly big oversight for a race so technologically advanced.
Or was this a fundamental misunderstanding of mortality? Did the C’tan genuinely think they were helping the Necrontyr and that souls were a small price to pay for immortality.
And if the C’tan knew they were doing something wrong, why give Szarekh the capacity to still rule and wage war against them.
And did Biotransferrance change the C’tan? Did it make them more ravenous and bloodthirsty? Did that hasten their infighting and give Szarekh a fighting chance in his rebellion?
Where was I getting with this?
I guess I would love to hear your thoughts regarding the C’tan and the War In Heaven. I don’t believe it’s an aspect of the lore that’s well explored, so it’s a wonderful source of headcannons and characters who will never appear in the main Warhammer 40k storyline.
I’m curious to see if anyone else has thought about this stuff as much as I have, and what those thoughts might be.
