Not since her reawakening had Ah-hotep been so sharply conscious of the emptiness of her tomb ship. Vassal to the command protocols of Simut, its stasis chambers remained dormant, only her presence reflecting back to her from the control matrix.

Alone.

Simut’s words bit deep, but not because of their truth. She cared nothing for the transient mortals of the world below. The energy they possessed was of passing interest but their existence was of no concern.

But to speak of the flesh…

The curse they all shared and yet most pretended was a gift. The biotransference to their artificial forms was hailed as an epoch of greatness, and not the vilest trick of the star gods. Yet they all yearned for their mortality once more, in many different ways. Eternity was too high a price to pay for dominion, and many of her fellow nobles had not been able to pay it. Ah-hotep’s own lusting after energy was perhaps a surrogate desire. Fulfilment was always beyond her but she craved the acquisition of the energy all the same. Like a flighty, mortal thing after all.

She floated along the empty corridors, lit only by the ghost ambience of her cortical field. She could translocate to anywhere on the ship but that cursed physicality hung upon her as heavy as chains. If one no longer cared for form, what was left but predetermined engrams moving along a nebulous cortical spiral matrix? Mortality had a long legacy and the necrons had not escaped its hold though their bodies had survived for an incomprehensible span of the universe.

Ah-hotep drifted, passing the great soldier dorms where five thousand of her warriors awaited the command to activate. A command she could not issue. Everywhere she sensed the hierolock of Szarekh’s dynasty, slaved to the will of Simut.

Her anger – a physical, hot-blooded thing that her wraith-body could no longer fully encapsulate – soared at the thought of the incompetent overlord. The humiliation of pandering to a noble who had in life been vain and stupid, and in afterlife was losing such scant faculties. The Silent King wielded his dynasty with unflinching despotism over those bound to his will in afterlife, their fates sworn to his protocols by inescapable cortical bonds. Hierarchy was absolute, the upper echelon a new elite equal to the nobility that had occupied it at the height of the necrontyr empire.

Her movement brought her into the inner chambers, surrounded by her elite guardians, as useless as inert hunks of rock or bags of flesh that had lost the spark of animus. A legion to command, wasting on the altar of paranoia and jealousy.

But there was one vault open, the door wards deactivated, the portal stone disembodied. Ah-hotep passed within, the seals flaring with power in recognition of her presence, burning briefly in hierograms unknown to any within the Szarekh dynasty.