Editing Nobledark Imperium Xenos (section)

=== 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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