I Enslave Gods and Turn Them Into Pokémon. What's Your Hobby? (Patreon)

Hello!

The Big Cheese of the Necrons is here!  I'll try to summarise why this guy is such a big deal.  60 million years before the current 40K timeline, the Necrons were actually known as the Necrontyr.  The overall ruler of the race was Szarekh, the Silent King.  His title is derived from the fact that individual Necrontyr dynasties were themselves governed by the overarching Triarch, a ruling council of three senior phaerons. The head of the Triarch was known as the "Silent King," for he addressed his subjects only through the other two phaerons who ruled alongside him.

So the Necrontyr were a hyper advanced race but suffered from extremely short lifespans due to radiation from their homeworld's sun.  At some point they made contact with the Old Ones (giant fat frog people) who were equally advanced and also had mastery of genetics.  The Necrons wanted their help in curing the Necrontyr's ailment but the Old Ones said no.  This triggered a war which the started with the Necrons getting wrecked and the dynasties becoming more fragmented.

During this time, the Necrons also came into contact with entities that were feeding off energy from stars (C'tan).  One of these entities called Mephet'ran made a deal with the Silent King.  'Give all of us bodies and help us defeat the Old Ones.  In return we'll give you immortality'.  There were a lot of warning signs that this was a bad idea but Szarekh basically said 'it's better than losing the war and having more dynasty divisions.'  So the entire Necrontyr race were hauled into bio furnaces which consumed their weak-bodied flesh and replacing it with enduring forms of living metal thus becoming Terminators, I mean Necrons. 😉

The Silent King then realised he had made a huge mistake when he discovered the C'tan used this process to suck out their life essence.  While they had achieved immortality, they had lost their souls in the process and the majority of the Necrons had become mindless automatons.  Only the higher ups retained some semblance of their original personalities.  Regardless, the newly forged Necrons and C'tan then waged war against the Old Ones and this cataclysmic event became known as the War of Heaven.  It's really hard to overstate how destructive this time period was.  Planets were razed, suns extinguished and whole systems devoured by black holes called into being by the reality warping powers of the star gods.  The Old Ones also created the Eldar and Orks during this war to combat the Necrons.  This is when the warp became turbulent due to the violence in physical space, sowing the seeds which would eventually make Chaos ascendant.  Eventually the Old Ones lost and either went extinct or fled to another galaxy.

After this, the Silent King backstabbed the C'tan, turning his super weapons on the beings that tricked the Necrons into becoming their meal bags.  C'tan are part of the fundamental fabric of reality and therefore nigh impossible to destroy. But the Silent King did manage to sunder them into thousands of fragments and that was enough.  Each C'tan Shard was stuffed within a Tesseract labyrinth, which is the equivalent of putting a Pokémon into a Pokéball except that Pokémon can destroy a planet when unleashed.

After this super fun time, the Silent King felt really bad.  He told the Necrons to go into hibernation while the Eldar/Ork mess sorted itself out.  Then he released his command protocols over the Necrons and left to go travel across galaxies.  Cue current timeline and the Silent King came rushing back because he saw the Tyranids menace arriving.  If the Tyranids win, it means no more biomass and that means there will be no chance for the Necrons to go back into their mortal forms.

I skipped over a lot of stuff, but hopefully that gives you some idea why the Silent King is so important because he basically set the stage for how the 40K galaxy turned out.  All of Abbadon's conquests look like a fart in the wind compared to the Silent King and the unimaginable power he wielded during the War in Heaven.  Although to be fair, even the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy didn't come close the cataclysmic events 60 million years ago.

I designed the Silent King's appearance as a hybrid of his old concept art and his new model.  In general, the more important a Necron is, the more elaborate their Necrodermis bodies becomes, so I included tons of ornamentation for the Necron's Big Cheese.  I wasn't too sure what they were going for with the Silent King's cape (what are those square thingies?) so I went with the more traditional scale capes that Necron royalty have.  Those capes are awesome. 👍

One more thing.  For Necrons, there are basically two styles to their designs - Terminator style or the newer Cyclops style.  So it wasn't too hard to tweak Szarekh's appearance to become everyone's favourite kleptomaniac.  With Trazyn, every other Necron could be one of his body doubles so who knows. 😄

Okay, I'm moving on to the Thunderhawk now.  Hopefully I can design it in a way that doesn't attract the ire of the Angry Company.  Stay tuned!