The Necron Triarch

The Necron Triarch is the ancient governing authority of the Necron race, a triumvirate of paramount phaerons that once stood above all the sundered dynasties and spoke with the voice of the Silent King himself. In the epochs before the great sleep, it was the Triarch that bound a fractious empire of immortal nobles into a single order, arbitrating between rival dynasts and enforcing the codes by which their deathless civilisation was ruled. Its word was law across a domain that spanned the galaxy.

Beneath the three great thrones served the Triarch Praetorians, honour-guards and enforcers who answered to no dynasty but to the institution itself. These grim figures were charged with upholding the codes of war and rulership, and where a phaeron overstepped or a protocol was broken, it was the Praetorians who descended to see the balance restored. Even now, roused from their long dormancy, they wander the awakening tomb worlds of the Necrons as living reminders of a vanished sovereignty.

The Triarch's authority was forged in the terrible bargain that made the Necrons what they are. It was the Silent King, as its supreme voice, who led his people into the embrace of the C'tan, trading their flesh and their souls for undying bodies of living metal, and who later turned upon those star-gods once he understood the enormity of what he had done. That guilt and that rebellion define the institution's legacy to this day.

In the present age the Triarch is more memory than power, for the Silent King departed the galaxy in self-imposed exile and the dynasties slumbered for sixty million years. Yet as the tomb worlds stir, so too does the old authority, and the Praetorians labour to reunite a shattered empire beneath codes older than mankind. Whether the deathless nobles will kneel again to that ancient law is a question the galaxy has only begun to answer.