Call of C’tan

In discussion with LordLucan there, I noticed a good ‘description’ of my feeling on matters new-Necronomical.

I suggested that Andy Chamber’s Deus Ex Mechanicus fits neatly with the new ‘shards’ C’tan concept. Or rather, DEM informs the new shard concept in a pretty interesting way, almost as much as it would if it were republished verbatim as if it were written wholly for the new lore.

We, nowadays, have a ‘Shard’ of the Deceiver, rather than the Deceiver itself. LL notes he still thinks he runs the place. I suggest: The Deceiver’s ‘prolific’ magnificence that it claims could be backwards-interpreted as some sense of dispersed self-awareness; knowledge of what other, perhaps non-battlefield, shards are up to. And even if not, why make such claims? Because even as a minuscule shard having escaped some shackles, he’s still the Deceiver, that’s why. And strictly its true. Even if he’s a shard-slave, he can still think he *should* be the master, and thus lie about it.

More than that, the C’tan are still ‘laughing the laughter of thirsting gods’. They probably don’t care about anything else, so are happy enough to just lie and treat their present circumstances as an inconvenience. That could be explicitly contradicted in-Codex, but I’ll wait and see.

LL asked: “also, where does that leave the dark prophecies?”. He hoped the Ousider and Dragon get a mention.

I agree, certainly. LL chooses to think of it as the C’tan are choosing to let the Necron think they conquered them… but I disagree, think about it this way:

1. The Dyson Sphere – it’s a C’tan Quarry. They chip off bits for private use. They’ve managed to contain/pacify the Outsider. Not hard for an insane god. Well, monumentally difficult, but still; if anyone’s doing it, it’s Necrons!
2. The Shrouds assaulting Mars? Again, snapping up a ‘fragment’ of the Void Dragon. That’s the whole point of them going there. They can’t move the whole thing, but they can get ‘bits’. Once in, they have a fraction of the power of the Dragon, they don’t need their ships because they can now teleport back to another site of Dragon fragment.

LL goes on to bring up Mechanicum: The book of the dragon that is implied to be ‘made off with’ by Zouche – a C’tan shard. In human (err, “squat machinist”) cultist hands.

LL suggests, perhaps, the Mechanicus as a replacement ‘slave race’ for the Void Dragon? It’s intriguing. Or a ‘gaoler’ race.

Most Importantly

It also, thank Jebus, reinforces my overwhelming objection to “Mechanicum” that Graham McNeill himself poo-pooed : For Graham, the Emperor fought the actual dragon on actual earth. I always thought of it as a distant ‘sleeping tendril’ eking out in a Cthulhu-esque manner. Nowadays, it was a teeny fragment which had techno-magicked its way to Earth. The bulk of the thing was still on Mars, but this bit made it to Earth and fought the Emperor. The Emperor then is free to build the prison around the Dragon any damn well way he likes over the intervening millennia, perhaps with the ball-rolling beginning right there and then.

LL suggests Graham is wrong. He wrote the book, but it is out of his hands now. He has no say in our interpretation. So there. But LL would say that, nerr nerr.

And yet, hell, it can even preserve things like “C’tan domination” era 40k (how soon after beating the Old Ones do the Necrons wait before turning on the C’tan? When, perhaps before beating the Old Ones, did the C’tan turn on one another?) in the time not detailed in the new ‘dex. That mightn’t stand up to scrutiny of the book, of course, but still.

I don’t want to say “The new Necron lore is genius”, because it’s not, but it does seem to be good at patching over (solidly, in my esteem) most of the previous troubles I’ve had with the Necron lore.

I then berated LL for being (literally) prejudiced about the thing before he’d read it. They all had lemonade. The end.

 

Edit: Also, as Ashendant on Warseer notes – it also accommodates C’tan Phase Weapons: they’re actually tiny shards of C’tan.