Overlord Photrek dug up a general to save her civil war and lost her throne to him for the trouble. That’s the actual sequence of events in White Dwarf #496, and GW doesn’t get enough credit for how casually brutal it is. Mandragora, crownworld of the Sautekh Dynasty, came out of the Great Sleep to find its phaeron dead in stasis and half the royal court trying to murder each other over the vacancy. Photrek, one of the rival nobles, remembered the dynasty had once had a legendary Nemesor called Imotekh. She found his stasis crypt, woke him up, and set him loose as her personal champion. Her plan lasted about as long as it takes to read that sentence. Imotekh looked at the state of his own dynasty, decided the entire court was an embarrassment to it, and crushed all of them himself. Photrek included, presumably. The text moves on from her fairly fast.
That’s Imotekh’s whole personality in one anecdote, and he hadn’t even fought anyone who wasn’t Necron yet.
He’s Sautekh’s phaeron now, ruler of a dynasty White Dwarf #496 places among the largest currently awake, and “the Stormlord” isn’t just a cool nickname GW slapped on a model box. Crypteks in his court can conjure real weather ahead of his legions, dark skies and no rain, the kind of storm that puts weaker enemies to flight before a shot’s fired. It’s psychological warfare with a weather system attached, and it’s only the overture. The actual attack starts once Scarab Swarms start pouring down out of the black clouds like a plague, glowing eye-lenses by the thousand, and only then does the infantry move. The storm and the scarabs do the work first. A Necron warrior doesn’t take a step until the sky’s already finished its part of the job.
The one flaw the codex admits to
Here’s the bit that got me, and the reason he’s the Necron I actually wanted to write about instead of another named C’tan or another dynasty ledger entry. White Dwarf #496 states outright, no hedging, that if Imotekh has a weakness it’s his taste for cultivating rivalries. He genuinely believes a galaxy with no worthy enemies in it would be dull. He never turns down a personal challenge. He fights duels he doesn’t need to fight, under a code inherited from the old Triarchal law, and when he beats somebody impressive he sometimes takes one hand off them and sends them home as a warning rather than finishing the job. It’s theatre, and it’s expensive theatre, because the text also admits some of those spared enemies have come back and beaten him later out of pure hate. White Dwarf #496 shrugs this off in the same paragraph: his body can be remade, and time is on his side regardless of who wins any one fight.
I keep turning this over because it complicates the standard Necron pitch, all cold calculation and dynastic bookkeeping. Imotekh runs the calculations fine, and he’s also a hyperlogical strategist who genuinely likes a good scrap and likes being watched having one. Which honestly, fine, I get it. My Thousand Sons are meant to be the faction of cold sorcerous calculation too and half of them still can’t resist a grudge match against whichever Space Wolf insulted them nine thousand years ago.
The one enemy this doesn’t work on is Orks, and the text is explicit that he despises them specifically because they break his calculations. His strategic plans are described as fractal, layered with redundancy against every rational contingency, and none of it accounts for something that fights for reasons a computer can’t model. So he doesn’t duel Orks. He doesn’t spare Orks. He just tries to erase them wherever he finds them before they can wreck the maths. Which is a genuinely funny position for the Necron most likely to be sharing a table with Ghazghkull Thraka at some point given how much of current 40k has been staged on and around Armageddon lately.
The king he won’t kneel to
The part that isn’t in the box text, and that most players I’ve talked to at tournaments genuinely don’t know, is that Imotekh is currently at open war with Szarekh, the Silent King. Not metaphorically. White Dwarf #496 has him launching real offensives against Szarekhan legions inside the Pariah Nexus while Szarekh’s forces are simultaneously fighting off Humanity’s Indomitus Crusade on the same front. Two wars, same map, and White Dwarf #496 is clear that Imotekh chose the timing deliberately rather than stumbling into it.
His stated reason is that Szarekh betrayed his own people twice. Once, ancient history, when he cut the command protocols and left the dynasties to fend for themselves for sixty million years. And now, current-tense, because Szarekh’s return project inside the Pariah Nexus is aimed at eventually reversing biotransference and giving Necrons flesh again. Imotekh’s read on that is almost admiring in how coldly he frames it: cladding the species in living metal was the one thing Szarekh got right, the only decision that actually equipped the Necrons for the reconquest they’re owed, and now the man wants to undo it. So Imotekh went to war over the principle of the thing, formally, publicly, and according to the codes.
That’s the detail I can’t get past. He announces himself before he attacks, gives targets a chance to withdraw, and will substitute single combat for a full battle when the other side agrees to it, because to Imotekh that’s what defending the Triarchal Codes actually requires. He casts himself as the last dynast still keeping the old law, and the Silent King as the one who broke from it: sneaking planet to planet through unwitting proxies, a pretender rather than a king. There’s a quote from him, recorded in the same issue, calling Szarekh’s whole return “risible,” accusing him of “creeping through the darkness, playing shadow games through puppets,” and saying flatly that “no true king acts this way.” That’s a Necron phaeron with eighty tomb worlds under him going on record against the one figure in the entire Necron hierarchy who’s supposed to outrank everybody.
None of this makes him the good guy in the fight. He’s still running a genocidal reconquest campaign against every organic species in his path, and I’m aware four hundred words about his PR instincts could start reading like I’m rooting for him.
Orikan’s name shows up on both sides
Here’s where the sourcing actually contradicts itself, which I always enjoy more than I probably should. White Dwarf #480, from 2022, has Orikan the Diviner leading a mixed dynastic army under Szarekh’s direct authority, full Triarch backing, on a mission to burn down a fortified Imperial world called Vantis III. Szarekh’s adviser, in other words, doing Szarekh’s bidding.
White Dwarf #496, two years later, lists Orikan among the wavering nobles who defected to Imotekh’s side once the civil war heated up. Not a passing mention either, the text calls him “no less a luminary” and treats his defection as a real propaganda win for the Sautekh cause.
Neither article walks the other one back. I went looking for a follow-up that reconciles them and didn’t find one, so either GW quietly moved him between the two publication dates and never made a fuss about it, or the timeline of “current” Necron lore has gotten loose enough that both are simultaneously true depending which front you’re reading about. Given what Orikan’s actually like once you dig into how he operates, I’d bet on the second option before I’d bet on GW’s continuity team.
Kiran, my Death Guard-playing other half of most Kill Team nights, thinks I’m overreading two throwaway sentences from magazines three years apart and that nobody at Games Workshop is tracking Orikan’s loyalty status with the rigor I’m assuming. He’s probably right. I still went and checked both issues twice before writing this paragraph, because if I’m wrong about a detail like that somebody in the comments will absolutely tell me, and they’d be right to.
What you’re actually fielding
Imotekh got a full plastic multipart kit in 2023, cloak crawling with little scarab constructs, Gauntlet of Fire in one hand and the Staff of the Destroyer in the other, and it’s a genuinely lovely model even next to how strong Necron sculpts have been this decade. I don’t play Necrons and I still nearly bought one off a mate clearing out his display cabinet last year, purely for the cloak sculpting.
What the box doesn’t tell you, and what most of the marketing copy skips past in favour of “most influential Necron Overlord after the Silent King himself,” is that the two of them are currently shooting at each other’s legions in a warzone most players have never heard of.
I don’t know how GW resolves this, or whether they’re planning to at all. Plenty of 40k plot threads get left open on purpose, a permanent background hum rather than a story arc anyone’s obligated to finish. But it does mean that every time someone plays green Sautekh Necrons off the shelf, the army they’re fielding has an actual live grievance against the faction’s own returned king, recorded in the fluff, sitting there for anyone who bothers to read past the datasheet.
