Editing Nobledark Imperium Xenos (section)

== Necron Star Empire ==

=== Dynasties of the Star Empire ===

==== Ahmontekh and the Suhbekhar Dynasty ====

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The leadership of the Necron Star Empire is a pale shadow of its former self. While Szarekh, first and mightiest of their number, still reigns, the other two members of the Triarch, his left and right hands, were lost in the millions of years during the Great Sleep. Szarekh's right hand was Ahmontekh of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, a skilled warrior with an eye for long-term strategy, valued not only for his ability in battle but for his wise council. Ahmontekh's skill in battle was such that he was one of the warriors that fought alongside the C'tan and even struck the killing blow that slew the Great Weaver of the K’nib. When the War in Heaven ended, Ahmontekh entered the Great Sleep without issue like so many other Necrons.

Then, approximately twenty-three million years ago, the Old Eldar Empire made the mistake of waking Ahmontekh up early. Although separated from his dynasty, having been put into stasis alongside some of the finest soldiers and war machines of the Necron Star Empire due to his status as Triarch, Ahmontekh had enough resources entombed with him in his royal crypt to pose a serious problem. Ahmontekh’s response to being awoken by the children of the Old Ones was swift, immediate, and fiery. Worlds that had known peace for millions of years burned under Ahmontekh's assault, their state of the art defense systems no match for ancient Necrontyr technology. In particular, the eldar swore eternal vengeance on Ahmontekh for destroying the Crone World of Maldek, killing trillions in a single stroke, and declared they would hunt him to the ends of the galaxy. Worse yet was that Ahmontekh’s destruction wasn’t simply mindless. He was looking for the other tomb worlds and his buried lord. If the eldar didn’t stop him soon, the Old Empire would have a full-scale revival of the Necron Star Empire on their hands.

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Then the Old Empire were approached by a strange figure, a robotic avatar of an unknown species with a single cycloptic eye. Exactly who this being was remains unknown, but told the eldar it knew of a way to destroy Ahmontekh. Long ago before the Necrons had traded flesh and blood for metal, Ahmontekh had warred with the Charnovokh Dynasty, which at the time had been ruled by his cousin. Although outright warfare between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties had been stopped by the control protocols, the memory of the rivalry still existed in Ahmontekh’s mind. The stranger could take that seed of resentment, distort it and expand it, until nothing else occupied the Phaeron’s thoughts. While Ahmontekh was a skilled fighter and cunning strategist, his weakness was his lack of scientific knowledge. Like most Phaerons, Ahmontekh knew nothing of how technology actually worked, and therefore no way to stop anyone from subverting the functions of his mind. Ahmontekh would be made predictable and easy to destroy by his madness. The eldar considered any plan to destroy Ahmontekh to be a good idea, but they didn’t notice the stranger spoke such words with a heavy heart. Although they knew the stranger wanted Ahmontekh gone as much as they did, what they didn’t know is that Gahet of the Cabal had approached the Eldar Empire as a last resort, having previously tried to sway Ahmontekh to his cause with words instead of violence.

The foul deed was done and Ahmontekh’s mental state began to deteriorate. Rather than seek out and awaken his liege Szarekh, he became increasingly focused on finding the resting place of his hated rivals the Charnovokh Dynasty and destroy them once and for all. Knowing his hated rivals were located somewhere on the Eastern fringe, Ahmontekh’s army marched increasingly eastward, making their movements extremely telegraphed and easy to intercept. The eldar assumed he was killed in a bombardment, especially given his forces fell apart soon after his assumed death, but such was not the case. In one last display of sentimentality out of regret for his own actions, Gahet crippled Ahmontekh’s cybernetic body and spirited him away before his death. He placed the mad Phaeron in a stasis capsule and laid him to rest in the old tomb complexes of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, hoping that Ahmontekh could one day be awakened and healed of his madness at a time when the galaxy no longer had to conceive of war.


With the incapacitation of the triarch, rule of the Suhbekhar Dynasty fell to Ahmontekh’s son, Ahhotekh. In many ways, Ahhotekh is everything that his father was not. Instead of being a proud regent and warrior, he is a schemer, who prefers to dispose of his foes through intrigue and manipulation rather than brute force. Ahhotekh has even gone so far as to disdain those who gain power through brute force; while he has killed in his share of duels, he considers those who make a habit of it to be insufficiently imaginative to actively hold power and capable of little more than savagery. Ahhotekh spent much of the War of Heaven disposing of his rivals in convenient accidents and other such methods, including stoking the rivalry between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties. Indeed, before the biotransference, Ahhotekh was actively plotting to dispose of Ahmontekh, the only member of the Suhbekhar Dynasty who would dare consider raising their hand against the Phaeron, something that the control protocols put a stop to.

Fortunately, despite Ahmontekh’s incapacitation the control protocols were still in place, his insanity was not enough to cause the Suhbekhar Dynasty to break the will of the Silent King. However, this is cold comfort for Ahhotekh, who isn’t sure if the control protocols also protect him since his father is incapacitated, not dead. As a result, Ahhotekh is intensely paranoid and relentlessly persecutes his underlings for any perceived sign of betrayal. After all, he would do the same to them if their positions were reversed. It is unclear, but ironically possible, that the control protocols forbidding harm to their liege are the only thing preventing the Necrons of the Suhbekhar Dynasty from rising up and uniting as one to overthrow Ahhotekh.

However, no matter how much he wants to, there is something preventing Ahhotekh from disposing of his dear father. Ahmontekh saw something when he was awakened, something that few others alive in the galaxy today still remember. The Silent King wants that information out of Ahmontekh’s head, as any intelligence on the state of the galaxy since the Great Sleep could prove highly useful in realizing the Star Empire’s plans. At the same time, Ahhotekh wants the control protocols to secure control of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, and as long as the Silent King’s orders leave room for creative interpretation of his orders he is willing to pursue it. Nevertheless, examining Ahmontekh’s mind is a slow process, one that must be carried out piecemeal by thousands of Crypteks. Seeing too much of Ahmontekh’s mind at once tends to drive any Necron who sees it insane.

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=== Necron Titans (Stalkers) ===

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For many years, after the reemergence of the Necron Star Empire, there was considerable debate among Imperial scholars as to what a Necron Titan would look like. Many theorized that a Necron Titan would simply look like a giant Necron. Others hypothesized that the C’tan were the Necron’s equivalents of Titans, and after the War in Heaven the Necrons may have had no need for Titan-scale weaponry. This was all before the Necron-Imperium Conflict, that brief period in M40 when tensions between the Imperium and the Necrontyr Star Empire ran hot after the Silent King demanded a trillion subjects for biotransference experiments before settling into the quasi-cold war state that it has today. It was during this period that the Necrons brought out some of the heavy weapons they had to bear, and Imperial scholars learned they had been wrong. Completely, horribly, wrong.

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In contrast to nearly all other races, Necron Titans, or Stalkers, are distinctly non-humanoid, almost arachnid or insect-like in appearance. This is perhaps best exemplified by the most commonly seen Necron Stalker, the Tomb Stalker. Rather than standing upright on two large limbs, Tomb Stalkers support their weight via dozens of insectoid limbs, resembling Earth centipedes. These limbs are not only effective in carrying the construct’s weight, but also in burrowing through the ground and tearing through the armor plating of opposing vehicles and titans. This is true not only of the generic Warhound-sized Tomb Stalkers most commonly seen, but also of the larger Scolopendra class Tomb Stalkers, which can be the size of an Imperator Titan.

Compared to other Stalkers, Tomb Stalkers use little in the way of quantum shielding, which is thought to be the Necron’s answer to Void Shields. Instead, they use the very earth as their shield, burrowing beneath the ground in order to ambush their prey. In doing so, Tomb Stalkers are able to achieve something very few Titans are capable of performing: stealth. The effectiveness of the Tomb Stalker’s burrowing strategy became clear during the Necron-Imperium Conflict, when a Tomb Stalker burrowed a circle around an Imperator Titan before erupting from the ground, using the unstable substrate to drag the Imperial Titan and its Princeps to their grave.

Surprisingly enough, Tomb Stalkers are thought to be weaponized construction vehicles. Records obtained from the Imperium’s Necron contacts report that Tomb Stalkers were originally used in constructing the vast tomb complexes that the Necrons inhabited in their heyday. The Necrontyr apparently evolved on a world with blistering levels of stellar radiation, which would kill most lifeforms over an extended period of time. As a result, the only logical place to build cities on the Necrontyr homeworld was underground, resulting in an architectural style that resembled increasingly ornate bunker complexes. The Necrontyr found this architectural style to be highly effective in protecting against meteoroid strikes and orbital bombardments, even after they spread off their homeworld to planets less affected by radiation.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Crypt Stalkers, which resemble gigantic versions of the Terran daddy longlegs. The control center and weaponry are all mounted on the central body of the Crypt Stalker, allowing them to instantly change direction in response to new threats, even capable of rotating their heat rays 180 degrees and suddenly reversing direction without even having to turn. Crypt Stalkers have a sensory array which gives them a nearly 360 degree field of vision, and their long legs allow them to simply step over most obstacles in their path. Crypt Stalkers make much heavier use of void shielding, mainly because their small body and comparatively narrow legs would make them otherwise easy targets for anti-titan weaponry. Triarch Stalkers are similar to Crypt Stalkers, except are smaller with a distinct pilot (closer to tank-sized) and are not capable of omnidirectional movement. They compensate for this with huge melee appendages they can use as melee weapons.

It is still not entirely clear how Stalkers work. It is clear that Stalkers have some kind of intelligence, given their ability to react to changing conditions on the battlefield, but whether that consciousness is a pilot or intrinsic to the machine itself is unknown. The kneejerk assumption would be that Stalkers are operated by an uploaded Necron consciousness, or otherwise powered by a C’tan shard. However, evidence indicates that Tomb Stalkers were around in nearly their current form (minus the heavy weaponry) before the First Wars of Secession, given their use in carving out the underground complexes the Necrontyr called home, long before the Necrontyr had developed biotransferrence or discovered the C’tan. The current running hypothesis is that the Stalkers are controlled by some manner of artificial intelligence, similar to the Scarabs, Canoptek Wraiths, and Crypt Spyders, except on a much larger scale.

Nemesor Zandrekh is known to treat his personal Tomb Stalker like a beloved pet, but it is unknown if this is typical or just another one of the Nemesor’s…eccentricities.

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=== Independent and Imperial-aligned Dynasties ===

==== Nemesor Zahndrekh and the Gidrim Dynasty ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notes#Nemesor Zahndrekh|Nemesor Zahndrekh]] (TEMPORARY LINK)

==== Trazyn the Infinite and Solemnace ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets#Solemnace|Solemnace]]

==== Xun'Bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty ====

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Of all the independent Necron dynasties, the Maynarkh Dynasty is perhaps the biggest threat to the Imperium. Even as far back as the War in Heaven, the Maynarkh Dynasty were known for their brutality and cruelty, acting as the Silent King’s pet monsters and wetwork agents. This behavior was no different under the Maynarkh Dynasty’s last and latest Phaerakh: Xun’bakyr, the Mother of Oblivion. Eldar Harlequins speak of countless atrocities and genocides, all perpetrated by Necrons in glowing colors of brass and orange. Indeed, the brutality of Xun’bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty was so great that just before the Great Sleep several Phaerons, normally so subservient as to the point of indolence, approached the Silent King to suggest that the Silent King take steps to make sure Xun’bakyr…didn’t wake up from the Great Sleep. It is rather telling that the Silent King actually agreed with this proposal.

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The Silent King may have had more than one reason to try and kill off the Maynarkh Dynasty. Phaerarch Xun’bakyr was, to put it bluntly, infatuated with the Nightbringer. When the Silent King gave the order for the Drazak Dynasty to kill Llandu’gor the Flayer, he had to noticeably take precautions to avoid letting the information reach Xun’bakyr, given that any weapon that could conceivably be used against the object of her obsession would likely cause her to react poorly. Even when the C’tan were shattered and the Silent King ordered the Necrons to go into their long hibernation, the news was kept hidden from the Maynarkh Dynasty, who went to sleep still believing they were following orders from their C’tan overlords. The Silent King may have been able to directly override the free will of Xun’bakyr, but given her instability, he didn’t want to risk the chance of her slipping her leash.

The Maynarkh Dynasty was put in hibernation in their traditional lands, far on the other side of the galaxy from the core of the Star Empire in what would one day become the Orpheus Sector of the Segmentum Pacificus. This was a high-density stellar cluster filled with numerous stars, some of which were…encouraged to go supernova early with a little bit of help from the Oruscar Dynasty’s Celestial Orrery. The Silent King hoped that the constant bombardment of electromagnetic pulses from exploding stars would damage the Maynarkh Dynasty to the point that they would never wake up from the Great Sleep, or at the very least be so damaged that they could only awake into an addled half-life.

It didn’t work. Although the Maynarkh Dynasty was damaged, they still awoke from the Great Sleep along with everyone else. Xun’bakyr’s madness and obsession was, if anything, worsened by the damage from the Great Sleep, to the point that the Silent King could no longer assert any control over her. Xun’bakyr seemed to rapidly realize she had been deceived, having awoken in a time when the great immortal C’tan had either been killed or reduced to hiding and the Silent King was the one trying to give her orders.

Rapidly dismissing the ravings of the would-be king, Xun’bakyr realized that her dynasty now needed a new purpose. It didn’t take her long to come up with one. Xun’bakyr decided that the Maynarkh Dynasty would rededicate themselves to killing all life in the galaxy itself, a creative masterpiece of death and destruction that might even go so far as killing time itself, all to attract the attention of the Nightbringer and to demonstrate her affection for the object of her infatuation. She is rather oblivious to the fact that despite all his paraphernalia and death-associated trappings, the Nightbringer is mostly concerned with sating his own gluttony and power-lust and would rather like causality to keep existing (though in his own image of course).

Xun'bakyr is obsessive and meticulous, in the long term focused absolutely on her deadly Idol, in the short term honing and perfecting some novel variety of star eater, 4D ionized shrapnel projector, or reality-pin to nail down certain doom. Xun'bakyr isn't a large scale threat only because she is so narrow in the scope of her ambitions. Her armies march along in the wake of the Nightbringer dealing death, and her scouts proceed him demonstrating their queen's new horrors. A blow from one will often be followed by a blow from the other, and together they make a horrible local threat and disaster within a sector, but beyond an additional horror following the Nightbringer's aimless killing spree they are not strategically significant. Xun'bakyr's universe destroying plans coming to fruition is an existential threat, but one that is sadly insignificant compared to many others. Although the rest of the Maynarkh Dynasty generally does not share her obsessions, the dynasty had always been composed of the worst sort of sadists, psychopaths, and war criminals and so jump at the chance to kill people in new and creative ways.

The first overt sign of action by the Maynarkh Dynasty was when the stars of the Caracol binary system went supernova during between Blood Pact and Imperial Forces. Both groups considered it the first shots of a surprise attack by some unknown third party. What they didn’t know was that rather than a military action, it was the result of a weapons test from one of Xun’bakyr’s harebrained schemes. The slaughter that followed was mostly unrelated. Mostly, in that the Maynarkh Dynasty was involved, and there was slaughter, but it had nothing to do with the two stars they had made go nova. Today, the Orpheus sector is nearly lifeless, haunted only by ghosts and madmen and ruled by an even madder queen.

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=== Blanks and the Pariah Gene ===

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66,000,000 years ago, the aristocracy of the Necrontyr Star Empire had a problem. They were in danger of losing the War in Heaven. Although they had the might of the C’tan and the Dolmen Gates at their back, the war was growing increasingly bloody as the Old Ones threw uplifted species after uplifted species into the meat grinder. And despite the Necrontyr’s understanding of the material realm, the Old Ones had the raw power of the illogical, irrational realm of the Immaterium at their disposal, which the ancient amphibians were the virtual unchallenged masters of. The Necrontyr needed some way to neutralize that advantage.

Several Crypteks came up with one possible solution: genetically engineering Necrontyr soldiers and eventually the entire Necrontyr to have an inverted Warp signature, canceling out the immense psychic power of the Old Ones and their servant races. However, although such this plan was possible for the Necrontyr Star Empire, the empire’s aristocracy was uncomfortable with the idea for several reasons. First, it would require mass-cloning Necrontyr soldiers in the billions, and would effectively make their entire standing army (not to mention all living Necrontyr) obsolete. Additionally, and more importantly, although the Necrontyr’s rank and file would be safe from psychic attack, it did nothing to stop the Old Ones from decapitating the Star Empire’s leadership by simply assassinating the Triarchy. The Necrontyr aristocracy, in their vaunted superiority, didn’t think very highly of a plan that benefited future generations but didn’t benefit them. Ultimately, the plan was shut down and cast aside in favor of the idea of biotransference, the brain child of Mag’ladroth but presented to the Necrontyr aristocracy by Mephet’ran. However, not everyone forgot about the project. At least not Mephet’ran, the Deceiver, nor his shards that escaped containment in the millions of years after the end of the War in Heaven while the Necrons slumbered.

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Millions of years later, as humanity’s Great Crusade rediscovered numerous human worlds thought lost during the Age of Strife, they came across an interesting phenomenon. On many worlds, there were occasionally individuals that were not only immune to the touch the warp, but in many cases were capable of actively suppressing these effects. These individuals, who came to be known as blanks or pariahs, were always very rare in a population, often in ratios of billions to one, and almost always seemed to exist as outcasts or hermits, or at best lived in small isolated communes far away from any major population center. Further investigation found that these blanks, who ranging from Jenetia Krole of Sibar to the nightmarish blacksoul assassin Spear, gained their strange warp-suppressing powers from an even more unusual source, a complete lack of what would conventionally be called a soul.
 
Blanks work by emitting an inverted warp signature, rather than the positively charged soul of most species. Their inverted warp signature interacts with background positive warp signature of the universe like the union of matter and anti-matter, creating a null aura that cancels both signatures out and creates a zone of no warp signature, either negative or positive, at all. Normally blanks are capable of funneling the energy from this reaction to their own ends. However, unlike normal humans, blanks are capable of surviving being completely disconnected from the Warp as their bodies are adapted to exist in the null zone their inverted Warp signature normally produces. Although they have an inverted warp signature, the null aura they create means they effectively have no soul.
 
Being in contact with a blank’s null aura is not a pleasant experience, and the experience typically gets worse the more psychically sensitive an individual is. To psykers, having their connection to the Warp muffled by a blank’s null aura produces actual pain and a sensation which some have described, usually after they finish screaming, as “sensory deprivation of a sixth sense” or “a feeling akin to losing a limb”. Only extremely strong psykers are capable of overwhelming a blanks null aura with minimal effect, but the only psykers capable of something like that are being like Magnus the Red or the Emperor of Mankind. However, such negative effects are not only limited to psykers. Any being with a soul is instinctively capable of sensing the void that blanks represent, and the muffling of their soul leads to an uncanny valley effect and feelings of dread and existential despair. This uncanny valley effect manifests itself in different ways. In some it causes migrane headaches, while in others it leads to anxiety attacks, while in others it manifests as a hard to define but odious stench. More subtle behavioral alterations have been suspected as well. Although some blanks have learned to weaponized this null aura, in the days before null-collars this often made the life of a blank short and miserable.
 
After much research, ranging from psychological to metabiological, the Imperium was able to connect this soullessness and anti-Warp aura to a genetic factor, known as the pariah gene. The pariah seemingly makes no sense given what is known about genetics and metaphysical biology. Humans with the pariah gene are rare, to the point that one is lucky to find one individual with the pariah gene on a planet with a population of billions. Additionally, because of their aura, blanks have a hard time finding mates and therefore producing offspring. This means that if the pariah gene originated during the Age of Strife, its carriers should simply disappear from the population due to random chance and genetic drift. But they don’t. If the pariah gene were recessive, it is easy to see how the gene could remain hidden in the populace for generations, only occasionally producing blanks. But it isn’t. The pariah gene is dominant, with individuals with two copies known as blacksouls. At least some parts of the pariah gene appear to be genetic: it is heritable and is disproportionately more common in women than men, suggesting a link to the X-chromosome. But the fact that it appears seemingly at random throughout the population has led many to wonder if the pariah “gene” is actually multiple genes (a recessive gene to turn the effect on and off, and a dominant one to control the intensity), or if the actual pariah allele is a symptom, rather than a cause.
 
From a metaphysical perspective blanks and the pariah gene are no less strange. In theory, it should be possible to evolve from having a soul with a strong positive Warp signature to one with a negative Warp signature like a blank. Indeed, the Tau have a particularly low Warp signature, and have displayed significant resistance to Warp corruption (though at a cost of being relatively helpless when a particularly powerful Warp entity like a daemon decides to focus its attention on them). The ancient Necrontyr are believed to have been the same way. The problem with this hypothesis is it requires a species to pass through a stage with a warp signature of zero, meaning a body that is alive only at the cellular level with no sentience. The only way to get around this hurdle would be artificial means, a species with positive Warp signature engineering individuals with an inverted one, though other explanations have been suggested. The fact that the pariah gene independently appeared in populations that should have had no contact with each other during the Age of Strife, and only in humans (though Kroot blanks have also been produced through the usual ways in which the Kroot assimilate traits) has also made many suspicious, though few would disagree that an adaptation to shut out the Warp would prove useful for an age when the galaxy was in chaos (and in Chaos), and desperate attempts at genetic engineering for survival were rampant in the early days of the Age of Strife.
 

Many people in the Imperium were disturbed by the idea of people without a soul. The Navigators in particular, being a race of all psykers, were especially disturbed by the existence of blanks, believing they were an attempt by the rest of the Imperium to create a contingency plan to wipe them all out. The Nobilis Navigo tried to whip people into a frenzy to kill the blanks by playing on the unnatural dread blanks produced until the Steward and the other High Lords told the Paternoval Envoy point blank they weren’t going to persecute an entire group of people who were not warp-tainted just because they looked different, no matter how much the Navis Nobilite screamed, rather unsubtly hinting between the lines that any excuse the Navigators made to persecute the pariahs could be easily turned around to apply to the Navigators. Though, the Imperium’s reasonings for defending the pariahs were not made out of simple compassion. The Navigators and pariahs were both useful resources, and the Imperium needed every advantage it could get in those days. If that meant wielding fire and anti-fire in accord, so be it.
 
As might be expected, the eldar were also horrified at the idea of blanks. Due to being a psychic species, the idea of life in eldar culture had become inimically tied to the idea of having a soul. To the eldar, the idea of being alive and thinking yet without a soul was uncomfortably close to the idea of being undead or a philosophical zombie. The only things the eldar had as a cultural comparison were the Harlequin Solitaires, and those were artificially created, rather than born. The implications of what Solitares represented and how they were created only made things worse. Today, blanks are by far the most discriminated against group of humans by the eldar. One just doesn’t see it firsthand very often given both parties are unable to interact except over a vid-screen. Opinions and prejudices towards humans vary from Dorhai to Ulthwé, but blanks are always treated worse than normal humans. Even the most tolerant eldar still see them as tragic monsters, people who didn’t want to be born as abominations against the natural order but ended up that way regardless. Kind of like they do Solitaires (only replacing “freaks of nature” with “necessary evil”).
 
When they awakened from their sixty-six million year sleep, the Necron Star Empire were also interested in the blanks. In particular, they were extremely suspicious as to how a species could develop a feature that almost exactly resembled the old mothballed Necrontyr research project, down to some of the smallest details. Szarekh’s chief cryptek, Illuminor Szeras, is particularly interested in the blanks and the applications of the pariah gene. The idea of making specialized soldiers to use as mobilized suppression devices and hunter-killers against psykers and daemons is an idea too good to pass up.
 

The largest living population of Blanks can be found on Pluto and Charon, close enough for the Imperium to have its anti-Warp weaponry close at hand, but far enough away for them to not block the light of the Astronomican. Indeed, watching Pluto cross the Astronomican, like an exoplanet slightly dimming the light of a far-off star, is a popular activity for young Navigators, though the Paternova has issued warnings telling people not to stare directly into the light of the Astronomican. Because the colony’s true reason for existing is to continue to exist and keep producing blanks, in order to keep the population of Pluto and Charon occupied they have been given exclusive mining rights over anything in the Kuiper Belt or stray rocks in the Oort zone that they lay eyes on. Both Pluto and Charon have been hollowed out and built on to the point where they are now not recognizable. To anyone else looking it now just looks like a private space port with manufactory rigs and a small docking yard. It does appear on the official maps, but only because not doing so would be more suspicious. It's a "private enterprise" on the charts and not open to the public, with the official story being they were claimed by an early Rogue Trader (whose “dynasty” is actually a shell corporation for the Administratum). Life on Pluto and Charon is a terminally boring experience, though on the positive side at least its inhabitants no longer have to fear the possibility of being lynched.

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=== Wyverns ===

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The Void Dragon is not whole. Although perhaps 95% of the great Dragon lies half-buried beneath the surface of Mars, the Dragon still bears a number of old wounds, chunks of him torn off in the war with his kin. But the Void Dragon is an embodied god, and gods do not bleed. Like the wounds of all the children of hungry stars, his lost essence turned into shards, scattered across the cosmos.

Throughout time, history has spoken of encounters with strange metallic dragon-like creatures. These encounters are consistent enough that they cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, but are so maddeningly rare that it has been impossible to create a clear picture of exactly what these sightings represent. These creatures are generally referred to as Wyverns. However, to those few privy to the horrible secret of what lies buried underneath the surface of Mars, the identity of these beings is clear. Wyverns are shards of the Void Dragon.

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These shards somewhat resemble the Void Dragon, except they are more bestial looking (having only legs and a pair of wings and no arms, for example) and have no semblance of intelligence whatsoever. They are animalistic, or perhaps better described as mechanistic, seeking to eat and survive and nothing else. It is not clear why these shards of the Void Dragon act so differently from their sire, as even similar-sized shards of the Deceiver or the Nightbringer show some level of intelligence. It is possible that the Dragon’s prison is somehow acting as a signal blocker, cutting the Wyverns off from the Void Dragon’s mind.  

It is likewise possible that the shards of more completely shattered C'tan are more intelligent precisely because they are so thoroughly broken up.  The slivers of the wholly obliterated Deceiver display the greatest individual intelligence and the highest proportion of infighting as expressed through the disparate intrigues of Strigoi Vampires; the greater shards and Nosferatu slivers of the Nightbringer are less cerebral or articulate, though they retain speech and planning.  The Nosferatu are known to vociferously compete in propagating death for their dread progenitor, but also all profess a shared vision of universal death they seek to realize.  With around two thirds of the Nightbringer's necrodermis forming the Noctifer Corpus Magnum, the big shard that was freed from Necron imprisonment, and from which the lesser shards and slivers are understood to have been fractured in combat with the Necrons, there is room for comparison with the Dragon's mostly complete body.  The Corpus Magnum has been observed throughout the eastern galaxy since its escape form confinement, and it displays a greater intellect than other Nightbringer shards it had encountered and integrated, though the disparity is far less than that between the ingenious Dragon and the non-sapient wyverns.  Data regarding the relationship between a C'tan shard's intellect and the ratios of its progeniter's shattered and assembled mass is being gathered and analyzed by the Inquisition and Mechanicus projects, but its implications for the Dragon and the Wyverns will never be brought to the light of Imperial war rooms, let alone open day.

Only a few encounters with Wyverns have been well-documented. One involves the primarch Ferrus Manus. During unification of the planet Medusa, he learned about a creature the locals called Asirnoth that descended to prey upon the people of Medusa from its lair in the planet-encircling Telstarax. When Ferrus reported to the Mechanicum what the people of Medusa had told him, they were in shock and immediately informed him that he must dispatch this creature with all haste, giving the primarch permission to use the otherwise forbidden holy archaeotech relics aboard his ship. Three maniples of Iron Hands Skitarii accompanied Ferrus Manus into the lair of the beast, but less than a dozen came out. The battle was hard-fought, but by the end of the battle the primarch managed to strike down the wyvern and bind it within the strange archaeotech device. Ferrus Manus never knew exactly what he fought, but the high Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus said he had performed a great service for the Mechanicum, and so Ferrus felt satisfied by his actions.

The Steward also fought one. Once.

It was an unexpected fight on what was supposed to be an otherwise peaceful world. Granted, the Steward had the upper hand for much of that fight, the issue was that no matter how many times the Steward would smite the wyvern it would simply rise again, ready to continue the fight. The creature was eventually defeated when the Steward staggered the beast with a particularly powerful blow and a Mechanicus adept sealed it in its inert state using a strange device that no one had ever seen before. When the Steward asked what the creature was, the adept evaded the question by claiming it was piece of archaeotech, which could only be deactivated by another piece of archaeotech the Mechanicus normally forbade the use of (which was technically true). Stranger things made by the hands of men had been found at that time in the Great Crusade, and at that time there was no reason to suspect there was anything unusual about the metal beast.

Another noteworthy feature about these creatures is that they seem to be impervious to normal means of harm, rising over and over again from seemingly lethal injuries. As a result, stories about these creatures tend to feature particularly innovative ways of incapacitating or imprisoning them. Burying them alive in lava is a popular option.

The Void Dragon somehow knows about the Wyverns despite his imprisonment, to no one’s surprise, and has repeatedly asked the Adeptus Mechanicus where those shards of him are. It is not clear if the Void Dragon truly does not know the exact location of his shards, or if he is merely reminding the Adeptus Mechanicus that they exist and the Mechanicus do not have complete control over him. Some among the Order of the Dragon have theorized that the Wyverns are somehow necessary to free the Void Dragon from its non-Euclidean chains, a prison that can only be unlocked by the prisoner. This is an idea that no one is particularly interested in testing.

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