Trazyn the Infinite: The Necron Who Collects History

Beneath the surface of a tomb world called Solemnace, an inquisitor of the Holy Ordos once lay frozen in the hundredth of a second between life and death, a bolt shell blooming like a rose on her chest. The woman who fired that shell stood a few steps away on a plinth of her own, her bodyguard ranked behind her in parade dress. Neither of them aged. Neither of them could move. And the being who arranged them both would be offended — genuinely, courteously offended — to hear himself called a monster. He prefers another word: curator. This is the chronicle of Trazyn the Infinite, and of the question every record of him eventually asks: is he a scholar, a thief, or something the Imperium has no word for?

Who Is Trazyn the Infinite?

First, reader, understand what a Necron is. Some sixty-five million years ago the Necrontyr surrendered their flesh in the process called biotransference, pouring their minds into bodies of living metal built for them by the star-gods they named the C’tan. Their empire then slumbered in stasis tombs scattered across the galaxy, and now, world by world, it is waking. Trazyn is one of its nobles: an overlord of the Nihilakh Dynasty — a dynasty that, in Trazyn’s own estimation, hoards treasure where others amass warships. He rules Solemnace, and in the formal cadence of his court he is Trazyn who-is-called Infinite, Overlord of Solemnace, Archaeovist of the Prismatic Galleries.

What sets him apart is not his rank but his temperament. The Necrons, the novels tell us, lost nearly all their artistry in biotransference; they forge now rather than create. Necrons were never meant to smile, Orikan grumbles — yet Trazyn smiles constantly. He has been awake far longer than even the handful of his early-risen kin, and he learned quickly that an immortal’s greatest enemy is not the ork or the aeldari but boredom, which must be fought without end lest madness or despair set in. His weapon against it is his collection.

The Prismatic Galleries of Solemnace

Imagine a museum with no closing hour and no exit. The Prismatic Galleries are winding sepulchral corridors in which objects from every major species are crammed side by side, billion-year-old relics beside recent acquisitions, eras deliberately intermixed. Some galleries hold life-size dioramas of entire battlefields, thousands of warriors frozen mid-struggle in stasis fields, their skies and deserts supplied by hard-light projection. One account speaks of hundreds of displays on a single deck, with thousands more decks above and below, and of creatures preserved there that died out half a million years ago.

The details are what linger. Trazyn keeps a rack of Space Marine helmets so large that he needs mnemonic charts to tell the Fire Hawks from the Flame Eagles. He keeps a hangar of captured starships, a library tended by copying crypteks, even a wine cellar. An Imperial bell, the Bell of Saint Gerstahl, sat silent on its pedestal among his artefacts for thousands upon thousands of years. And an Inquisitor who spent time among the exhibits noticed that nothing in the hard-light tableaux showed daily life: every display was drama — last stands, disasters, doomed charges. Trazyn does not collect the ordinary. He collects the moment history turned.

Archaeology, Not Theft

Trazyn has a philosophy, and he states it with perfect sincerity. When Orikan the Diviner accused him of stealing a device from the Ammunos Dynasty, Trazyn answered that the Ammunos were naught but inert metal now; one cannot steal from the dead, he said — that is called archaeology. The purpose, he insists, is to memorialise, to learn, to study what came before, to look to the past to navigate the future. Orikan’s reply was less generous: a bird building a nest from shiny things, a child with a rock collection.

Both descriptions fit. When the Tyranid swarm Hive Fleet Behemoth bore down on Solemnace, Orikan prophesied that it would devour Trazyn and his galleries alike. Trazyn triggered deep-space lures and the swarm parted around his world like a river around a stone. Later he acquired a hive tyrant for restoration, had six mindshackle scarabs — Necron control devices — drilled into its brain, and set it up as the centrepiece of a Tyrannic Wars exhibit, surrounded by the Imperial heroes who had fought such creatures. He even recorded his own voice as a gallery guide.

The Infinite: How Trazyn Cheats Death

His epithet is not idle boasting. The novels show Trazyn surviving deaths that would end any other overlord by abandoning the body that is dying. His engram — his recorded self — leaps across the battlefield into one of his lychguard, the elite bodyguards of a Necron noble, usurping motor control and overwriting the guard’s own mind in an instant. On the eve of dangerous work he keeps a fresh surrogate body waiting so that he can evacuate his consciousness at need; when a Tyranid lictor caught him in his own gallery, he was, in the story’s dry phrase, smart enough to transfer before he died.

The method has costs he rarely admits. Pressed by Orikan, he conceded that he has had a bad transfer or two, and that sending out duplicates of his consciousness is not without risk. In one expedition a copy of Trazyn, a formatted lychguard carrying his memories, fell so deeply into the Destroyer madness — the affliction that drives some Necrons to remake themselves into weapons against all living things — that it believed itself the Silent King. Trazyn dismissed it as a mere copy. Orikan was not reassured, and nor, perhaps, should we be.

Orikan the Diviner: An Aeon-Long Rivalry

If Trazyn has a nemesis, it is Orikan, an astromancer of the Sautekh Dynasty who can send his consciousness backwards along his own timeline, rehearsing a fight until he finds the blow that lands. In one duel he told Trazyn there were twenty-seven openings that would not have got past his guard — but the twenty-eighth was a slaying blow. Their quarrel centres on the Astrarium Mysterios, an icosahedral device of shifting geometry that holds the lingering mind of a long-dead genius, Datamancer Vishani, and can direct a portal to places distant and destroyed.

Robert Rath’s novel The Infinite and the Divine follows the feud across millennia. After four and a half thousand years of rivalry, Trazyn took to hiding the Mysterios at random within his galleries, knowing that their jumble of eras fouled Orikan’s divinations; Orikan broke in regardless. Yet their council forced the two to work together, and the book ends with an unlikely oath sworn by forearm grip: that the contents of a certain vault are too dangerous for anyone to possess. Especially, Orikan added, themselves.

The Inquisitor in the Glass

Trazyn’s dealings with the Imperium are where his charm curdles. Inquisitor Helynna Valeria of the Ordo Xenos crossed his path through her work on noctilith, the warp-reactive blackstone, and the two traded research. She did so with his mindshackle scarabs in her head. His price for removing them was that she entice an inquisitor of similar rank into his collection. The bait she brought was Katarinya Greyfax of the Ordo Hereticus — and Greyfax shot her.

Trazyn’s stasis field caught Valeria at the exact instant the mass-reactive shell detonated. His cryptek told him plainly that nothing could be done: drop the field, and she would die within a hundredth of a second. So Greyfax went onto a plinth with her Kappic Eagles bodyguard, Valeria went into a hovering stasis-casket that followed her collector about, and Trazyn sealed the Inquisitorial gallery behind him, saying that perhaps after a few centuries the wounds would not be so fresh. I have read many accounts of xenos cruelty. Few are as unsettling as this one, because it reads so much like grief.

Thief or Saviour at Cadia

When the Thirteenth Black Crusade of Abaddon the Despoiler broke upon Cadia, the fortress world guarding the Eye of Terror, Trazyn went there — his stasis vaults damaged, his legions frozen by Solemnace’s faltering master program, and not one peer left who would lend him warriors rather than assassinate him. He went instead to a particular vault. On Cadia he opened a tesseract labyrinth and loosed what it held: Vostroyan soldiers, snipers from long-dead Tanith, Salamanders thought lost in the Klovian disaster, a lone warrior in golden armour with a scarlet plume — and Greyfax, reawakened, her Kappic Eagles with her.

Greyfax tried to shoot him. The mindshackle he had left in her would not let her pull the trigger. He told her he had brought her out of common cause, and that their reckoning would wait. Then he watched Archmagos Belisarius Cawl attempt to master the ancient pylons that held the warp at bay, and asked himself whether he had come as thief or saviour. The account leaves him on a rocky perch turning a tesseract in his fingers, pondering which trophy to take from history’s momentous hour. When Cawl’s grid failed and Cadia was lost, there was no sign of the Necron.

A Collector in the Age of the Rift

Trazyn did not stop at Cadia. Rath’s The Infinite and the Divine shows him holding a bound shard of the Deceiver — one of those same C’tan, now a fallen god in chains — and demanding to know the properties of the Great Rift, not in order to close it but to enter it. In the sequel, The Wicked and the Warped, a Nihilakh executioner accuses him of keeping an undeclared, unlicensed Deceiver shard beyond treaty limits; he retorts that he never signed the treaty.

That sequel also returns to Valeria. Trazyn coaxes Orikan, with flattery disguised as insult, into attempting the chronomantic working his crypteks had called near impossible, and Valeria walks once more among the living — still bound by his scarabs, and his reluctant guide to the horrors of the warp. Somewhere in the Imperium’s files lies a letter from him to her, protesting that he is not, in fact, a monster; the copy, the records note, is kept in Greyfax’s own archive of future prosecutions.

So is he scholar, thief or saviour? The records answer: all three, and in whichever order amuses him that century. Trazyn turned the Great Devourer from Solemnace, then slipped away from Cadia as it fell; he froze a dying woman out of something like love and kept her murderer as an exhibit. He is the one being in the galaxy who truly believes history should be preserved — and the reason so much of it now stands silent on his plinths, waiting for a visitor who will never come.

Questions from the Archive

Who is Trazyn the Infinite in Warhammer 40k?

Trazyn the Infinite is a Necron overlord of the Nihilakh Dynasty who rules the tomb world of Solemnace and styles himself Archaeovist of the Prismatic Galleries. He woke long before most of his kind and fills the endless years collecting: relics, ships, living specimens and whole battles frozen in stasis. He calls it archaeology. His victims, and a good many inquisitors, call it theft.

How does Trazyn cheat death?

The novels show Trazyn sending his consciousness out of a failing body and into another — often one of his own lychguard, whose mind he simply overwrites — or into surrogate bodies he keeps ready for emergencies. He can also dispatch partial copies of himself. The trick is not flawless: he admits to the occasional bad transfer, and one copy of him fell to the Destroyer madness.

Are Trazyn and Orikan enemies?

Rivals is closer to the truth. Orikan the Diviner, an astromancer of the Sautekh Dynasty, has feuded with Trazyn for thousands of years over the Astrarium Mysterios and much else, breaking into Solemnace and trading blows whenever they meet. Yet when their council or the galaxy demands it, the two work together — bickering, scheming and, occasionally, saving each other.

What happened between Trazyn and Inquisitor Valeria?

Helynna Valeria of the Ordo Xenos traded research with Trazyn while carrying his mindshackle scarabs. He promised to remove them if she lured an inquisitor of her rank into his collection. The bait was Katarinya Greyfax, who shot Valeria; Trazyn froze her in stasis at the instant the bolt shell burst, and placed Greyfax on a plinth beside her. Rath’s later novel returns to her fate.

Where should I start reading about Trazyn?

Start with Robert Rath’s The Infinite and the Divine, a novel spanning millennia of Trazyn’s rivalry with Orikan and the best single portrait of the pair. Rath’s sequel, The Wicked and the Warped, continues their story alongside Inquisitor Valeria. For Trazyn’s part in the Fall of Cadia, the Gathering Storm campaign book Fall of Cadia tells how he came to the doomed world.