Editing Setting:Brighthammer 40,000/1st edition (section)

=== Necrontyr ===

The story of the Necrontyr is also that of the terrible Great Old Ones from a time before the rise of Humanity. Once, before the birth of the Gods of Order, the Warp was not the peaceful, structured paradise it is today. Instead, it was the plaything of the Great Old Ones, abominable, xenophobic creatures hell-bent on the destruction of all life apart from themselves. The peaceful Necrontyr, which had been blessed with immortality by the life-giving rays of their sun, were one of the first races to fall afoul of their attention. The first skirmishes between the Necrontyr and the Great Old Ones went poorly for the Necrontyr, unused to war as they were, were quickly pushed back to their home world.

While desperate to find some means of defending themselves against the Great Old Ones, the Necrontyr scientists realized on comparing data with the returning refugees that the calm, unchanging surface of their own star was unusual within the galaxy. On investigating, they discovered that the reason for this was that their system had been chosen as the stewardship of one of the great shepherds of life, the C'tan that would later become known as the Daybringer. Upon explaining to the Daybringer the horrors that were being visited upon the galaxy by the Great Old Ones, the Daybringer quickly rallied its fellows to the aid of the Necrontyr.

Driven into disarray by the counterattack of the C'tan and the resurgent Necrontyr, the desperate Great Old Ones turned from genocide to genetic slavery, engineering warrior slaves from the biospheres of countless worlds, including the ancestors of the Eldar and the Orks, and granted these thralls the ability to use the Warp as weapons against their foes, resulting in the deaths of nearly all of the C'tan over the course of the war. However, despite the attempts of the wicked Great Old Ones tried to twist these races into their image they proved more open to the ideals of peace and brotherhood championed by the Necrontyr, and one by one they turned on their oppressors, and with them, the Warp also began to change, robbing the Great Old Ones of much of their power as the warp entities that would later grow become the Gods of Order and their servants began to refuse to be responsible for the destruction that the Great Old Ones called on them to wreak.

In the end, however, the threat of the Great Old Ones had to be ended permanently, and to spare the other races from having to bear the guilt of this deed, the Necrontyr and C'tan took the burden upon themselves of removing the Great Old Ones from the galaxy. Wracked with remorse at having destroyed another sapient species, regardless of the necessity of the deed to the peace of the galaxy, the Necrontyr and C'tan sealed themselves in meditation within monasteries beneath the surfaces of worlds spread across the galaxy, awaiting a time when they might be able to redeem themselves of the crime they were forced to commit.