The War in Heaven

The War in Heaven is the most ancient conflict in all the galaxy's long memory, a cataclysm fought some sixty million years before the rise of humanity whose distant echoes still shape the grim wars of the 41st Millennium. It was a titanic struggle between the enigmatic Old Ones, ancient masters of life and the hidden webway, and the Necrons together with their terrible masters, the star-devouring C'tan.

The Necrontyr, a short-lived, embittered and envious race, had bargained away their very flesh to the C'tan star-gods in exchange for tireless bodies of living metal, becoming in the process the soulless and immortal Necrons. Enslaved utterly to the ravenous star-gods they had raised up, they turned in fury upon the Old Ones, who had refused to share with them the gift of eternal life, and the whole galaxy became a battleground of powers far beyond any mortal comprehension.

To resist the rising metal tide, the Old Ones seeded countless servant species across the stars to serve as living soldiers, among them the ancestors of the Aeldari, the brutish Krork forebears of the modern orks, and others whose scattered descendants endure even to this day. The war raged across millions of years and unnumbered worlds, reshaping the very structure of the galaxy and, in its final convulsions, helping to tear open the great wound in reality that mortals would one day come to know and fear as the warp.

In the bitter end both ancient sides were utterly undone. The Old Ones were destroyed or driven forever into oblivion, the C'tan were shattered into fragments by their own treacherous metal servants, and the victorious Necrons withdrew into their vast tomb-worlds to sleep away the long aeons. The full account is told in the chronicle of the War in Heaven.