The Story Behind the Legions of Nekheny

While I was off serving my country, my employer did some layoffs due to the economy and poor financial management.  So when I came home, I still had a job, but at a lot less pay.  However, some is still better than nothing at this moment.  The job I have now I did about two and a half years ago, so they are making me go through all of the training again, a months long refresher course.  Needless to say I was bore immediately, and started scribbling stuff for my Necron army.  While messing around with different Necron hieroglyphs, I stumbled onto a way to make a bird from similar symbols in the codex.

Immediately I was thinking of the phoenix as I love that myth and was going to call my Tomb World Lord the "Phoenix Lord."  Then by Googling that title, I realized that there was already the "Phoenix Lords" of the Eldar and that killed my plans for that.  So I started researching ancient Egypt more, especially the gods and military organization.  I settled on Horus as the example for my Tomb World Lord, but chose a variant name of "Nekheny" that apparently means "falcon," and sounds more 'Cronish.  And so the Legions of Nekheny were born.  And thanks to boredom in class, Nekheny's recent story so far goes like this:

Driven mad by dreams in his long slumber, nay, by the nightmare of his people's double curse of immortally and eternal servitude to cruel and unloving gods.  Now this Great Lord of a Tomb World has awoke, to find his world much changed with no communication with any other Tomb World.  A new race infested the surface of his world, the humans.  Enraged by the squatting vermin on his world, he beings his cleansing of the Warp plagued humans, while ordering their primitive technologies secured to learn more of this new universe he has emerged into.  From the human records the Great Lord learns that the C'tan have made the humans chosen above all other races, not just as cattle to feed their endless appetite, but as the perfect beings through their creation of the Pariah.

But in the humans, the Great Lord saw a different future for his people.  If his people could be enslaved into their immortal machine bodies, maybe they could be freed into the human bodies, freed to a mortal existence, and freed to finally find the embrace of death.  Maybe the humans infected with this Pariah Gene could be their new hosts.  And so the Great Lord became obsessed with the humans and their history, seeking out all knowledge on them, raiding the human worlds and research stations.  In the human history of their ancient Egypt, the Great Lord saw the influence of the C'tan he served, Mephet'ran, the Great Deceiver.  The Great Lord obsessed with this time and civilization as when the humans may have become the chosen.  The Great Lord took the name "Nekheny," that of the ancient Egyptian's greatest god, symbolized as a falcon to its human worshipers, and in truth a form of the Great Deceiver.  And the Great Lord now Nekheny ordered his legions be recolored from their gleaming silver to a dark and deathly version of the ancient Egyptians.  Nekheny adopted the falcon as his symbol to be brandished by his legions to honor Nekheny and his quest to elevate and free his people, and rebuild their once great civilization.  Nekheny envisions a universe free of all but the human race, the C'tan destroyed, and the Warp forever separated from the material world.  Luckily the C'tan have a similar vision of the future save their own destruction and their Necron slaves returning to freedom and mortal lives through the humans.  But until the Great Works are done, the Legions of Nekhany continue to serve the Great Deceiver, waiting for their time to seize their freedom.

Beginnings of the Legions of Nekheny

I dreamed of a Necron army painted to meet the fluff in the Necron Codex, a beautiful mirror finished chrome.  This dream apparently is going to be expensive and time consuming, and money and a lot of free time is not something I have at the moment, so I went with my second favorite paint scheme idea based on a sort of ancient Egyptian scheme with black and gold as the colors.  Here is my first Necron attempt.

And here is my second attempt.

Pre-Necron Painting Test

Before I started painting my Necrons, I decided to test my skills on a few Space Marines from my Assault on Black Reach set.  I am looking to have a Space Marine army someday, so I tested some different color schemes.  Left to right is the order in which I painted them.  Not so good, but learning quickly.

My Space Marine army will be similar to the third model, the white and darker gold, their story to come in the future.

Warhammer 40000 and I

This is the story of how I came to Warhammer 40000.  About twenty years ago, I was playing Classic BattleTech and MTG at a local hobby shop.  I watched others play Warhammer Fantasy, 40000, and Blood Bowl there, and while I was interested, never played.  For basically the year of 2009, I was deployed to Kuwait, serving my country as they saw fit.  While there, my friend Z asked to play D&D, but I had tried it and was never able to get into it, too much imagination and making up stuff as you go along for me.  I prefer much more structured games, though I love fluff and creating background for my units, armies, whatever.  However, Z did get me into the Dawn of War computer game, and I loved playing the Necrons in it.  Then he asked to play table top 40k and we did.  We ordered a rule book and a few codex and got into it.  Playing on a table or a rug on the floor with bottle caps and cardboard cut outs as units and what ever we could find as terrain.  And so we played, with another roommate Bailey, and worked on learning the rules and the armies.  And I loved playing.  I tried a few armies and settled on the Necrons, loving their fluff and the We'll Be Back, as it can be so disheartening to your opponent.  We started ordering our armies online, having them delivered to our homes back in the states awaiting for us to come home.  I picked up Space Hulk to start getting my kids in to 40k as well.  They liked Space Hulk, and how I have Assault on Black Reach to see if they will be into the actual 40k.  We have yet to play, but I look forward to it.