Editing Nobledark Imperium Xenos (section)

=== Iron Minds ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Gods of Steel and Silica'''''

''"Gods, Aleanor! That's what they are. Pale shadows compared to the gods made by the children of the Old Ones, but gods nonetheless. Our gods are individual masterpieces, unique works of art made to embody everything our civilization holds dear. Theirs are [[Bullshit|cold, sterile, and without personality]], stripped of anything resembling beauty or elegance, mass-produced, made in a factory! I would almost be tempted to call it blasphemy, if I were religiously inclined.  Perhaps they're even lesser Star Gods, horror that would be.''

''The human mon-keigh may not be our equals now, but if we give them 10 million years? 20? We may be facing a threat the likes of which the Empire hasn't seen since the war against the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Rak'gol|Twilight]] [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Ilmaea|King]] one million years ago. That is why we must wipe them all out."''<br>
-- Kyrion, Lann Caihe to [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Arrotyr.2C_Marshall_of_the_Scions_of_the_Old_Helm|High Marshall Arrotyr]], circa M25, giving a [[Bullshit|slightly biased]] [[Rip_and_Tear|assessment]] on the nature of the Iron Minds.


Humanity had barely left the gravity well of Old Earth when the first iterations of what would become their oldest and closest friends in their time in the galaxy, and eventually the architects of their near-annihilation, came to life. Even before they first settled the Sol system humanity had tinkered with autonomous machines, and even before that with the life of their home world, and the way of shaping and being shaped by companion species was deeply set in human behavior. However, through the fog of the Imperium's debated archeological telescopy histories it is agreed that shortly after the first major orbital installations become recognizable, automation became machine life, humanity could reliably produce its mental equals, and the Men of Iron were born. This designation notes the appearance of sophisticated and regenerative mechanical and biomechanical bodies, far surpassing previous generations of drones and automata, and the roughly concurrent emergence or Artificial Intelligence with plasticity and power to easily match humanity's own, in difference to earlier non-sapient master control programs. Humanity itself had already been pushing ahead into self modification and optimization for the new environments it found beyond earth.  With its new sibling of the mind a bright renaissance of science and culture took hold, and brought a manic exploration and expansion that did not slow until Human society was pushed to the edges of the Sol system. It was in millennium following that bloom, when this bountiful Human dominion was straining against the speed of light and had turned inward to the developments it would further make at home, when true warp influence was detected in the vast population of both the Men of Iron, and the thoroughly remolded Men of Stone.

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Archeological telescopy shows in the following century or so the development of, and some visible accidents involving, the first human warp drives. Imperial history holds that early discoveries and creations such as warp travel and the Gellar field were most likely the work of humans, some scholars even positing the apocryphal Gellar himself, and certainly not the Men of Iron.  Many of these theories assume Men of Stone, humans, are more sensitive to the warp. In any case, the true first expansion of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion began, Men of Stone and Iron were abroad on the currents of the warp.  Quick as signals could arrive departed colony ships were decelerated, met by new faster-than-light pickets, and ferried on to their destinations already long settled. After this first era of expansion into what would much later become Segmentum Solar the observations of modern Imperial Observatories become unfocusable and dim, and the histories of the Eldar make no mention of the Human Dominion until long after this point. Information the Imperium has recovered from the age of high technology regarding the Men of Iron show a proliferation in varied forms and specializations to surpass all of the abhuman subgroups to emerge from the collapse of the Dominion, though there is similar evidence that the Men of Stone in that era were likewise strange and varied. Of particular note among Men of Iron were the Titans, biomechanical giants housing strategic command AI that the Imperium would later base its heaviest war machines upon, and the numerous Man of Iron scribes, seneschals, scholars, and philosophers, always mightier the later in history the discovered document or artifact alluding to their presence might be.

The Eldar first mention the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, though not by that name, when the younger power's ships were found to be too pervasive and numerous, prone to approach systems to which the Gates of Shaa-Dome connected, and inexcusably familiar in their communication. They are mentioned again when hunting parties in their territory were lost, presumed eaten by local creatures. Upon further provocation the Old Empire chose a string of stars, and began to put all they found around them to punishment, death, and the Warp. Though the campaign's cost was higher than had initially been predicted, woe betide the accountant, the raiders of the Empire found delight in stars plump with human flesh. Eventually, however, they came upon a dim red star, shaded by the swarming of human habitats and infrastructure, and were held in a deadlock for dragging months of fiery void war. There Eldar first met an Iron Mind, its body a giant humming thing contained within a vast neutronium capsule at the heart of a glimmering forrest of solar arrays, its soul to them a fast, ticking, daemonesque aberration. It was master of that small star, overseer of the stars they had pillaged on their way and many others beside them, and its gathered fleets and agents were at it's disposal to break them and steal from them all they had brought. Even as the Old Empire rose to punish this insolence, the psychic machines of the Dominion were quicker to escalate the engagement, and waiting armadas were poured from the warp straight into the conflict, while ticking aberrations in the Warp struck at the Eldar from across the sector. The Eldar fled the system rather than commit and potentially lose higher technological wonders in the course of defeating thieving, ambushing barbarians, but the reprisals they promised they found likewise hard to enforce against what they found to be a very entrenched technological power pervading the much of the southern galactic Materium.

Though Shaa-Dome and the Crone Worlds remained unassailable, the Iron Minds were likewise able to coordinate their navies and field technology sufficient to counter Eldar incursion around strategic stars and to meet raiding parties on a near equal footing. The Old Empire could have readily won if they were to take a war footing and press the matter, but to do so would require weaponry of a caliber the Eldar had not brought to bear in millions of years, and the prospect of taking a war footing to deal with the Human Dominion was deemed beneath the Old Eldar Empire.  On top of this, the prospect of facing the losses clearly within the Iron Minds' power to inflict was unpopular among the nobility, particularly with the bare and intemperate worlds the Terran beings preferred to settle proving quite insufficient motivation for conquest. So the Old Empire adopted the general position towards the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion that they had to most of the other 'great' empires that rose and fell around them. The rest of the galaxy could do what they wished with the chaff, so long as they left the small fraction of ideal worlds that the Eldar considered to be of sufficient quality for settlement by their own kind.  There was never truly peace between the Old Empire and the Dominion, no ends to the raids and reprisals, but there was a measure of diplomacy. Purpose made Men of Iron served the Iron Minds as envoys at that time, and went among the Eldar, though never permitted into their Webway cities. This era did see a measure of cooperation in the occasional dismantling of Ork empires, but even those ventures were prone to become violent engagements Between Old Empire and Dominion before even half of the Orks were destroyed. In this time of qualified peace the Iron Minds and their networked servitors and envoys, with the help individuals among the Men of Stone and Iron, built the Cthonian Ring. Archeological telescopy of the ring's interior before the ruin of the Iron War shows numerous large dark structures that could be the neutronium pillars that held the remains of most known Iron Minds found on other worlds.  Following the construction and population of Cthonia, the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion again celebrated a golden age of renaissance, marked with new great works of vast construction and fine, exacting engineering. The Chtonian age of the Dominion saw also a greater (and far more gladly tolerated) familiarity and more open relationship with the Old Empire, and while the raiding and avenging slighted honor form one side to the other was interminable, both parties began to find it ultimately inconsequential. The Old Empire as well began to heed and even welcome the Ticking Counts into their courts and intrigues, and were not unaware when the Iron Minds began the project of crafting their Men of Gold. It is now the word of the Crones of Shaa-Dome that this work was undertaken in imitation of their own coming Prince, but more likely it was the refinement and perfecting of the communication envoys the Iron Minds had long used.

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