Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

==  Gahet ==

The Cabal in this timeline aren’t interested in wiping out humanity. Indeed, by the Cabal’s standards, the Imperium is everything they could have ever dreamed of. Not only does the Imperium deny Chaos ready access to one of the most numerous, easily corruptible species in the galaxy, but they provide a strong front which has the military power to oppose Chaos directly, which the Cabal so desperately needs. All the Cabal has to do is provide information through third parties and let the Imperium go to work. With their limited future-seeing abilities the Cabal would likely see the Imperium's potential. They might even see far enough into the future where the Imperium is the citadel of civilization under which most Chaos-hating species are united. Hence, they wouldn't want to wipe out humanity in this timeline. They would want to boost it up and keep it from falling (hence one of the many possible origins of Alpharius and Omegon are as agents of the Cabal).

They were expecting something like a galaxy-wide Interex. They didn't count on Eldrad "go big or go home" Ulthran, but then few do.

One of the most prominent members of the Cabal’s Inner Circle, and to many the face of the organization, is a being known as Gahet. Gahet's species is a mystery to many, especially since he claims to have been old enough to see the War in Heaven, but in many ways the truth is even stranger than any theory the members of the Cabal could have come up with. Gahet is a Necron. Gahet was not a Phaeron but a lower-ranked Necron, either an Overlord or a Cryptek. Gahet became separated from his Phaeron during the War in Heaven and missed the Silent King’s call for the Great Sleep. When he woke up (either having reactivated on his own or having been buried and later accidentally unearthed and awakened by another alien race), the Necrons were gone and millennia had passed. With the Silent King and his lord in stasis the command protocols are no longer active and Gahet found himself free to do as he wishes.

Gahet spent a great deal of time after that wandering. Using the capabilities of his necrodermis body to take the form of other species and walk among them unnoticed. He saw a lot of history, but he never decided to take an active role. He even claims to have set foot on Shaa-Dome back when it was still a nice place and the inhabitants weren't so rapey, though a lot of people are pretty sure he's just bullshitting them, because he'd be picked out the moment none of the Eldar's psychic technology worked for him. Some members of the Cabal still have some theories as to how he could have done it, mostly in the form of trying to pass himself off as a Man of Iron. When his body did get damaged, he repaired it with what technology he could scavenge to a degree that would make Zu’se proud. 

Gahet was one of the original founders of the Cabal. Having wandered around for potentially millions of years, patching himself up as needed and taking notes on all he sees, he came to the conclusion that Chaos was indeed the ruination of all things. He starts approaching the lesser peoples and recruiting their best and brightest (and most stable and willing) to the cause.

Over the eons Chaos waxes and wanes and by his efforts and the efforts of like minded individuals sanity is preserved down the long march of years. Kingdoms rise and fall, faces and names are worn and discarded, stars dance, continents shift, suns flare and worlds are born and die and his war against Chaos continues because it's what he believes in, it is a good fight. A clean and pure and noble goal the likes of which he did not have in the War in Heaven where both sides committed atrocities as routine.

Then the eldar murderfuck a torture-rape god into existence. He honestly didn't see that coming. He didn't think they were that stupid.

That's when the Cabal's war against Chaos gets really serious. Before it was just a war fought in the shadows, but now there's another Chaos God on the block and the other three have decided to rise up from the depths of the Great Ocean in which they had been mostly passive. 

This is also about the time that the Cabal and Gahet meet Eldrad, fresh from having his brain scrambled from the birth of Slaanesh. Due to his age Gahet, and by extension the Cabal, is one of the biggest sources of knowledge in the galaxy short of a surviving Old One (laughingbelakor.stonecarving). So Eldrad decides to seek the Cabal out when he’s on his quest for forbidden knowledge to try and save the eldar in the early Great Crusade era. Eldrad was in contact with the Cabal but never a part of it. He saw his job as making sure the craftworlds were set up safe and to ensure a future for the eldar people, Gahet's was fighting Chaos in all it's forms. Their jobs often found them fighting together and they did sort of become friends.

At some point not long before the rise of The Beast Eldrad receives a vision of the Silent King reappearing. A great silver specter emerging from the darkness and covering the galaxy in silence. Normally there’s wiggle room in prophecies. They work by seeing potential alternate futures and then working out the most likely outcome. Even the very act of seeing a prophecy can change the most likely future. But the return of the Silent King is an external event. It appears in every single future he’s seen. Eldrad has no way of affecting the outcome. Eldrad has no clue what he's seeing, so he goes to Gahet and tells him of the future he's seen in the hopes that the old bastard might be able to provide some context.

Gahet understands exactly what the vision means. He had hoped the old bastard was millions of years dead. Gahet, last of his name, is fucking tired by this point. So fucking tired. He confesses to Eldrad what he is and what that vision means to him. The Silent King could awaken sometime between tomorrow and a hundred thousand years but inevitably he will awaken and he will subsume his will and pervert all his efforts. So he asks that Eldrad kill him. Eldrad specifically, because he wants the peace of mind that there will be someone to look after the galaxy after he's gone. Better to die on his feet than live on his knees.

Eldrad is shocked. He hadn't known Gahet was a Necron. Between millions of years of repair work and what he assumed to be an un-necron like attitude towards things (the eldar only remembering Necrons as unfeeling murderbots rather than people who once had virtues of their own) threw him off. Eldrad finds he is actually hesitant to strike the killing blow. Eldrad doesn’t want to do it. Not like this. He and Gahet were never friends but he was a fellow soldier in this mad galaxy, a reliable ally and he was always there.  He had always dreamed of fighting the Yngir since he was a child, what Eldar youth wouldn’t fantasize about fighting for glory back in the age of gods and heroes, but he always imagined it as spitting defiance in the face of the Eldar’s ancestral enemy in the heat of battle. Not striking down a helpless old ghost asking for death.

Eldrad does kill him, or at least renders him non-functional. He found no joy in what he did.

Gahet's body, rumour has it, is in the Black Library; enshrined as befits a soldier who fought the Long War on a scale measured in epochs.

It is unknown what happened to the Cabal after that and the War of the Beast started a few years later to further confound efforts to track. None of the agents spoke to Eldrad again, they didn't try to kill him for what he had done because they understood but they couldn't forgive him.

''"Do you remember it, Eldrad? Shaa-Dome in it's prime? Back before it was tainted by decadence and the touch of the Primordial Annihilator. I do. I remember the sight of the Grand Acropolis, the site of the Old Empire's government and all it's greatest temples. The Temple of Isha, the Shrine of Asuryan, the Conclave where the nobles and the Sidhe Lords held their court. It was a beautiful planet. I truly hope that you can reclaim it some day, Eldrad. It may be little more than a hopeless dream, but it is more than can be said for my home. My home is naught but dust."''<br>
-- The last words of Gahet

The ''really'' sad thing is that Gahet didn't have to die. Trazyn was just wiping the sleep out of his eyes at the same time as Gahet's death, and Trazyn found a way around the Silent King's control protocols. It's just that nobody knew Solemnace was active at the time because the only contact with them had been the first contact by the Imperium, whose initial report had written then off as native, mindless Xenos Independens and nobody had taken a second look. [[Grimdark|If Gahet had held out a little longer, Trazyn could have fixed him and all this suffering and tragedy could have been averted]].