The Twice-dead King: Reign, page 1
More Necrons from Black Library
THE INFINITE AND THE DIVINE
Robert Rath
INDOMITUS
Gav Thorpe
SEVERED
Nate Crowley
THE WORLD ENGINE
Ben Counter
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• DAWN OF FIRE •
Book 1: AVENGING SON
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Book 2: THE GATE OF BONES
Andy Clark
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Darius Hinks
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BELISARIUS CAWL: THE GREAT WORK
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Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Dramatis Necronae
Sunset
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Midnight
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Dawn
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Epilogue
About the Author
An Extract from ‘The Infinite and The Divine’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.
Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.
This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.
There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.
DRAMATIS NECRONAE
The Royal House of Ithakas
Unnas, The former dynast and king of Ithakas, equivalent in rank to a phaeron. Honoured by Szarekh himself for his actions at the Sokar Gate, in the war against the C’tan. Now fallen to the flayer curse. Slain in the ruins of Antikef, his capital, where he had anointed himself the Eater-of-Gods.
Djoseras, Kynazh of Ithakas, and elder scion of Unnas. Heir to the dynastic throne. Slain by a captain of the Angels Encarmine, during the fall of Antikef.
Oltyx, The younger scion of the Ithakas Dynasty, and second in line to the throne. Formerly exiled as nomarch of the fringeworld Sedh, but now ascendant to the throne after the fall of Antikef. Sole survivor of the royal line.
Duamehht, Head of the House of Erebur, a cadet branch of the Ithakas Dynasty.
Pakhet, Royal warden, and captain of the king’s lychguard. Previously sworn to Unnas, and now to Oltyx. A commoner of rare skill and honour.
The scarab, A canoptek creature of uncertain rank, the scarab is host to a gestalt personality comprising five partial copies of Oltyx’s own consciousness, created to augment his mind but now emancipated.
The Ithakas Dynasty
Yenekh, High admiral of the Sedh defence fleet and captain of the ancient juggernaut Akrops. A figure of great renown, called the Razor for his prowess in Szarekh’s war, but now suffering from the onset of the flayer curse.
Neth, Praetor of Sedh, and warden of its garrison. Formerly assigned to the service of the nomarch, but now dismissed upon Oltyx’s ascendance. Wishes he was a vargard.
Lysikor, A low-ranking noble from an Ithakan coreworld. Became a nemesor in the most technical sense, after killing everyone on his world who outranked him during the Great Sleep. A self-styled deathmark and master of canoptek constructs.
Borakka, Formerly a common soldier, was appointed Red Marshal of Antikef, charged with ensuring all subjects of the king com plied with the decree of biotransference. Now a war machine afflicted with the Destroyer curse.
Brukt, A skorpekh Destroyer lord, and the most abominably powerful of Borakka’s Destroyer cult.
Denet, Sedh’s Master of Monoliths – a once great general, afflicted by severe pattern ataxia. No longer possesses monoliths; forgets this.
Parreg, Sedh’s Agoranomos (a now obsolete title bearing responsi bility for food imports), and one of the few of the world’s nobles to have earned Oltyx’s respect.
Taikash, Sedh’s polemarch – a necron of extraordinary wealth, and very poor strategic ability.
Erraph, Sedh’s Dikast – once a judge in a military court, but never much of a leader.
Korrocep, Once the master of all of Ithakas’ navies. Slain at the Battle of the Sokar Gate, but still rumoured to persist in some form within the autonomous spirit of the Akrops.
Other Dynasties
Zultanekh, Crown prince of the Ogdobekh Dynasty, and heir to Anathrosis the Phaeron. Once commander of Ogdobekh forces against the Ithakan rebellion during the Wars of Seces sion, where he became the nemesis of Djoseras. Regarded as strange, even by the Ogdobekh.
Nebbeshken, A forthright cryptek of the Ogdobekh conclaves, known for mastery of drive technology.
Mentep, A cryptek from an unknown dynasty, formerly residing on Sedh in order to research the flayer curse. Gifted Oltyx with the boons of his five subordinate minds, and the strange ability known as the evocatory medium. Claims to be an engrammancer.
Xott, A canoptek reanimation construct of unusually advanced sentience, which Mentep insists does not possess an auton omous spirit of forbidden magnitude.
SUNSET
CHAPTER ONE
REFLECTIONS
How has it come to this?
Oltyx intended to speak the words aloud, but he could not find the will. He did not often speak, these days, as when the silence flowed back into place, it only reminded him how alone he was. And so he let the words settle in the hollow of his mind instead, so as to at least make a companion of their echo.
How has it come to this?
Ismaronsz was burning. Oltyx watched the dawn spread in an arc across the arid tomb world, consuming a night pocked with glowing impact craters, and leaving smoke-streaked desert behind. Ahead of the sun’s light moved a line of ugly warships, cruising at the very limits of the world’s exosphere, and shedding yet more bombs from their city-broad bellies. Gauss fire streaked up from the shrouded surface, consuming two, three, six of the barbarian vessels. But it was not enough. The wrecks of the stricken craft tumbled silently down into the ocean of smoke, along with the bombs of the survivors, to pulverise whatever still stood beneath.
Oltyx listened to the last carrier wave signals echoing across the interstitial bands, as the remnants of Ismaronsz’s orbital defence cohort faced their end.
The Unclean overwhelm us… our core is stricken…
Recall failure approaching totality… The Sixth Legion is gone…
But, my lord, there are no scythecraft left to launch…
A curse on Unnas for this abandonment…
Oltyx had seen and heard enough. Waving a dark, ragged hand through the carnage before him, he swept the vision of the world away, and paced on to the next scene of devastation.
Here was Tarramun, where the mausoleums of his people were suspended in the seething heart of a gas giant. Those diamond-braced tombs had withstood sixty million years of crushing, elemental force down there, thought Oltyx, only for it all to end like this. Amid the tangled bones of necron cruisers, the last of the world’s particle whip batteries were in the process of being overwhelmed, picked apart by fighter swarms so dense they seemed like mist. In a silent flash of green, one of the ancient weapons platforms detonated, taking hundreds of attackers with it. But it made little difference. Thousands more craft were streaming through the firestorm of its death already, towards the gravitic aperture that led to the tomb complexes.
Just visible through the faint translucence of the scene, Oltyx could see another planet falling to the enemy, and another beyond that. The images, woven in light down the central aisle
But they never failed to re-form in his wake, and on each new passage through them, they showed a worse situation. Oltyx had come to accept, some time ago, that he was not observing the progress of a war – he was watching the fall of his empire, in real time. And for all the certain confidence he knew a king should feel, it was beginning to get to him.
With a brief crash of interstitial static, a Scythe-class cruiser foundered off his left shoulder, its drive sepulchre rupturing under bombardment from six opposing capital ships. Trudging through the spectral, gauss-green vapour of its death bloom, Oltyx tilted his faceplate upwards, and watched the crude, blade-prowed victors slink onwards towards the now defenceless world it had guarded. The sight of those ships, barely void-worthy, and yet free to ransack the legacy of Ithakas, made his core boil with loathing.
Humans, he thought, stung by hatred at the thought of the word. This variety of Unclean had only staggered into consciousness at the very end of his own people’s Great Sleep. The creatures had blundered through chaotic cycles of expansion and collapse as the necrons had slept on, losing great swathes of what meagre advancements they had once achieved. But they had persisted, and were now in what would be the last throes of a period of empire, begun ten thousand years ago by a thuggish mystic on their homeworld.
They should have been a triviality: a degenerate martial cult, haunting the shell of former conquests. And yet here they were, thought Oltyx bitterly. And even armed with such pitiful technology as they were – they used solid munitions, by the Triarchs – they were sweeping away the entire empire of Ithakas, once the bastion of necrontyr power in the galactic west.
A crusade, the humans called this warfleet. A tidal wave of superstition and hatred, manifesting as an armada thousands of ships strong. It had been sighted months ago, approaching Sedh, the fringeworld where Oltyx had waited out the centuries in exile. He had known then that the Unclean fleet would be the doom of Ithakas.
Once, such a foe would have been laughable. But the dynasty had become weak, rotting from the inside as Unnas, its dynast, had languished in madness. Now, like some ancient, dull-witted beast, the kingdom had been all but devoured alive before it even knew it was under attack. For all his bitterness towards the king who had cast him out, Oltyx had not been able to stand aside and watch it all be swept away. After the armada had been sighted, he had travelled to the crownworld Antikef, risking death in breaching the terms of his exile, to plead for the defence of the realm.
First, he had gone to Kynazh Djoseras, his elder, and the heir to the throne. But crippled by his loyalty to Unnas, Djoseras had offered nothing. Then, with no other roads left to him, Oltyx had gone to Unnas himself. It had… not gone well.
The king’s court, it had transpired, had fallen to the flayer curse in the years of Oltyx’s absence. And so had the king. Unnas had collapsed entirely into degeneracy, becoming little more than a puppet to his honourless adviser, Hemiun. The treacherous courtier had stripped Oltyx of all his royal enhancements, imprisoning him in the desecrated vault of Ithakka the Founder, along with a menagerie of horrors. In the depths of that decaying ziggurat, Oltyx had come to the brink of losing his own mind.
But in the end, Djoseras had seen sense. While Oltyx had been imprisoned, his elder had rallied those few worlds still willing and able to fight, and had scraped together a fleet for the final, desperate defence of Antikef. With the battle raging, and hundreds of capital ships clashing across the breadth of the home system, Djoseras had stormed Unnas’ palace himself, delivering Oltyx from destruction so that they might fight together.
And how they had fought, Oltyx lamented. Within the walls of the crumbling necropolis, the two scions had commanded the defence of the capital against staggering odds. For a full solar cycle, starships had fallen like rain across the crownworld’s deserts, until Oltyx had almost begun to wonder if the dynasty would weather the storm. But then the landing craft had come.
Oltyx’s ocular array flagged motion to his right; as if summoned from his engrammatic strata, a cluster of crude, bulky shapes lumbered in from the edge of the nearest projection, on a slow approach to the world of Gehsekt. They were giant craft of appalling simplicity: little more than airtight steel boxes, crammed with their reeking organic cargo. But that was all they needed to be, against an empire that had spent the best of its strength so many millennia ago.
Because the humans were numberless, it seemed. On the second solar cycle of the Battle of Antikef, they had invaded in million-strong waves, overcoming the ancient bastion of the necropolis with sheer, wasteful mass of soldiery. Every monstrous, ancient contingency of defence had been brought to bear by Djoseras. Every last scrap of the dynasty’s faded might had been scoured from the storage sepulchres and dimensional appendices. But Ithakas had mouldered too long in decadence. What remained, for all its grandeur, had not been enough to hold back the tide.
The crownworld had been lost. And though its surface had been turned to a sea of boiling rock by the Akrops, the ship which carried him now, it had been small vengeance. Antikef was now a staging post for the humans’ crusade. Even now their ships were emerging from the warp by the hundred, and every few hours, a new attack fleet would split off to target one of the coreworlds. There could be no fighting back against such an onslaught, Oltyx knew. All he could do was watch.
He glared at the spindly shapes now, as they shoaled over the molten surface of the crownworld in the next projection. Although more than half the Unclean armada was barely armed – civilian vessels belonging to their strange cult, plus cargo vessels, hospital ships and troop carriers – at its core were hundreds of naval vessels, some of which rivalled necron voidcraft in scale. And leading this great host of warships, like the heads of some beast from the ancient texts, were three leviathans.
The human flagship was a vessel called the Polyphemus, which the Akrops had wounded on the way out of Antikef. The strike had torn the ship’s prow away, and should have foundered it. But Oltyx knew better than to presume a corpse when there was none to be seen.
The second head of the monster was the Lystraegonian, a blood-red hammer of a ship that was both fortress and temple to an order of the transhuman warriors called the Astartes – the Space Marines. It had been the ship which had finally breached the necropolis walls, in a reckless atmospheric bombing run, before disgorging waves of Astartes to lead the sacking. That ship was a devil.
The third great ship had arrived just after the Battle of Antikef, and it was the strangest of them. Oltyx looked at it now, as the huge sigil on its flank – a skull and a primitive toothed gear – glowed with the reflected devastation of the planet below. This craft was called the Tyresias, and belonged to the machine-cultists of the world known as Mars. They would be here to plunder noctilith from the tombs of Ithakas. But scavengers though they were, they had not come armed lightly – the ship bore relict weapons more formidable than anything he had seen on a human vessel before.
At the sight of the thing, Oltyx could not bear to look at the barbarian ships any longer. Emitting the low buzz which had passed for a sigh ever since his people had given up their bodies, Oltyx dismissed the sight of Antikef, and then cast for all the projections down the length of the sanctum to be dispelled. They faded, their chorus of interstitial distress calls dwindling along with them, until the sanctum was shrouded in darkness once more. The only light now was from the glow of the stars beyond the viewport. And between those stars and him, no longer possible to ignore, sat a blunt black shadow.
The throne.
As far as Oltyx knew, that great slab was the last piece of crownworld stone still under Ithakan sovereignty. It was a replica of the throne which had sat in Unnas’ palatial ziggurat, installed here so as to provide proper lodgings to the dynast, should he have found cause to travel the stars. But Unnas had not left the walls of his court for centuries, and so it had been empty a long time. Now, the emptiness of the seat beckoned to Oltyx. It had gone from being a throne to the throne.
