Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

==== About the Old Ones ====

The Old Ones were a species of sapient, three-eyed amphibians, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Etymological_Legacy_of_the_Old_Ones|who called themselves Slann in their own tongue]]. However, like toads or some Paleozoic amphibians despite being amphibious they had no problems staying out of the water for extended periods of time and had a dry leathery or warty skin rather than a slimy one. In spite of this, they returned to the water to breed and had a tadpole-like larval stage, though by the time they ascended they had ceased all need for such functions and references to this mostly existed as cultural idioms. When they were still material the Old Ones did have small, blunt hornlets, though after ascending they could basically look however they want and each individual tailored their appearance to their own subjective idea of what they wanted to look like. Be'lakor's wings and huge horns are because, like everything else in his life, he is overcompensating for something. [[Archaon|It's been suggested Be'lakor's horns in this universe are more forward curving like in depictions of Archaon to make him look less like a Bloodthirster painted black.]]

The Old Ones as a species basically won the evolutionary lottery due to two key features. The first was their third eye, which like the "third eye" (pineal gland) of Terran reptiles helped track the passage of time and gave them a natural edge in comprehending a realm where the laws of causality are loose. Whereas to humans and other races the changing rates of the passage of time is disorienting and confusion, to the Old Ones it was no different from moving in any other three dimensions. Which isn’t to say they could time travel, just that they could perceive when time was speeding up, slowing down, or reversing. Which explains how the Navigators do it. Because the Old Ones had an advantage in a realm which they could literally shape to their whims even more than realspace, they paid less attention to the material sciences, which is how the relatively primitive Necrontyr Star Empire was able to fight them. The Old Ones were so dependent on the Warp yanking their mastery of the Warp out from under them made the fight substantially easier. It would be like if a third-world country invented a device which stopped computers and internal combustion engines from working.

Secondly, the Old Ones as a species were also characterized by “cold blooded logic”. This meant that while they had emotions they were tremendously mentally stable and able to manipulate the emotionally volatile Realm of Souls much more easily and skillfully than almost any species before or after, it gave them the emotional intelligence of a wet paper bag. The effects of this can be seen when the Necrontyr demanded immortality as recompense for the Old Ones knowing they had been suffering on an irradiated hellhole for millions of years and did nothing. The Old Ones told them the Necrontyr were not ready for immortality, and they had a point. Immortality requires a lot of forethought and maturity. You have to figure out how you are going to distribute resources, deal with population growth, etc. The Necrontyr didn't even have their own house in order. The Old Ones assumed the Necrons would hear their words, logically come to the same conclusion as they had, and calmly accept it. They didn't expect the Necrontyr to take it personally, [[Mortarion|see it as dismissing their suffering]], in the Old Ones' eyes emotionally overreact, and declare war on them.

This only got worse after the Necrontyr managed to make some of the Old Ones, who as individuals had been fixtures of society for millions of years, actually die. This caused the Old Ones, who weren't used to being so emotional, to freak out and contributed to a lot of knee-jerk, short-sighted decisions. Like uplifting a bunch of races to do the fighting so they didn't have to. Or making Khorne.

The Old Ones are also, as their name might suggest incredibly, mind-bendingly, old. There’s a reason that even the eldar, whose Old Empire lasted 65 million years before it imploded, consider the Old Ones to be much more ancient and advanced than they ever were. The Old Ones were, as far as anyone knows, the oldest sentient forms of life in the galaxy. The C’tan don’t count, although they existed since the dawn of the universe and had the potential for sentience they did not truly become sentient until they gained physical form by the Necrontyr and were able to perceive the world in terms of more than simple stimuli. To the Old Ones, the C’tan were nothing more than interesting wildlife and environmental hazards until the Necrontyr weaponized them.

As a point of reference, consider that Khorne was born 65 million years ago, and his birth hole, the Maelstrom, is still open today. Tzeentch, Malal, and Nurgle are all older than that, and there don’t appear to be any birth wounds that can readily be attributed to them. It could be argued that they may not have produced one as their birth was not as violent as Slaanesh or Khorne’s was, and Nurgle in particular would be more likely to drag his birth cradle into a zone of stagnancy in the Warp than create a new hole in reality, but if not these three would have to be at least as old as the dawn of the Cretaceous Era. And Be’lakor, as the first Old One to truly step between the bounds of mortality and immortality, even if he was massively passed up and outdated by everyone and everything that came after, would predate even that.

Indeed, this is what led the Old Ones to develop their particular philosophy. The Old Ones are distinct anti-nihlists. When they first set out into the stars, they found that there was nothing there, no higher purpose, no meaning, and a lot more lifeless worlds than one would expect from 40k (the implication being that the surprisingly high number of habitable worlds are due to the Old Ones). So they decided to make their own purpose, by devoting themselves to spreading life (especially sentient life) everywhere they could and making the galaxy flourish. Of course, they were still amoral lizard wizards with no sense of right and wrong, so how they went about doing this could be somewhat dubious at times. For example, leaving the Necrontyr on their homeworld in the hopes it would make them evolve quicker because the Old Ones were lonely and wanted another species they could talk to and pass their wisdom on to, which led the Necrontyr to see the Old Ones as playing god with everyone else.