Blackstone - The Competition for Blackstone: The Adeptus Mechanicus has always sought to jealously protect those worlds that make up their empire within an empire. During the founding era of the Imperium, when the conquerors and lords of the Imperium sought to claim the largest and most strategically vital planets from those that could support life, the Tech-priests of the Machine God sought worlds with the most bounteous resources, such as mineral wealth, ore-rich substrates, geothermic power, or even rarer and more exotic assets.Unfortunately, they were not the first to recognise the potential of those worlds, and there were in many instances evidence of prior mining of blackstone there tens of millions of Terran years before.Cadia was perhaps the most famous of the worlds where blackstone was found in great measure. Before its fall, that Fortress World's wastelands were dotted with hundreds of "pylons" that had their lower portions buried below ground and their upper reaches jutting skywards.The Cadian Pylons had strange circular holes and other smooth apertures that led to a complex maze of tunnels within them. The wind of the Cadian moorlands whistled eerily through them, producing strange harmonics that could set one on edge. Whenever the Adeptus Mechanicus sent tiny probe-servitors to investigate and chart these tunnels, they would emerge disoriented and suffering from myriad glitches -- if they returned at all.Just as the forces of Chaos were preparing to invade the Cadian Gate in greater numbers than ever before in 999.M41, Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl of Mars theorised that there was a connection between the presence of these structures and the targets of Abaddon the Despoiler's strikes against the Imperium, the so-called Black Crusades that had scarred Human history across ten Terran millennia.It was his belief that some inherent property of blackstone, when treated and shaped correctly, reinforced the structure of the material universe, metaphysically "bracing" it against the psychic energies of Chaos and the Warp.Blackstone structures could hold back the aetheric energy that spilled through whenever an untrained psyker was possessed by a Daemon, or that poured out in great system-wrecking cataclysms from the Warp Storms that plagued the stars.Cawl's leap of logic was a turning point for the agenda of the Martian Tech-priests. His discovery was profound -- blackstone structures could prevent empyric manifestations before they even occurred, or in other words, hold back the tides of daemons that sought to tear through the fabric of reality.Since that day, the Archmagos has obsessively sent his agents across the galaxy to retrieve as many noctilith structures as possible. First amongst them was Magos Dominus Dentrex Ologostion. His orders were to secure the material using any means necessary -- or at the very least protect it until word could reach the Martian Priesthood and it could be harvested by the proper processes.But there is another force in the galaxy that seeks to make use of this strange natural resource, working the stone and amplifying its inherent aura to the point it becomes a powerful shield against the intrusions of Chaos. The once-slumbering Necron Tomb Worlds, gradually awakening in the latter part of the 41st Millennium, are now populated with serried ranks of undying cybernetic warriors awakened by the Canoptek constructs that have long kept vigil over them.The conquests that the Necron dynasties are embarking upon are merciless and terrifyingly efficient. In every Segmentum they are scouring the life from their sovereign domain with the dispassion of an Extermination Servitor burning vermin from an orbital dockyard. These are not random attacks, but carefully-planned strikes against the foundations of the Adeptus Mechanicus' galactic realm.The Technomandrites of the ancient Necrontyr once understood how to manipulate the noctilith stone, fashioning obelisks and pylons that suppress Warp tempests and hold then back much as the Cadian Pylons once held back the Eye of Terror. Yet the Technomandrite Crypteks who pioneered this process as mortals of flesh are only now fully awakening, and many have badly damaged memory engrams -- even those relatively intact have neither the numbers nor the influence to effect works of galactic engineering.For their part, the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus do not yet fully understand how to utilise blackstone, but they do have an unparalleled mastery over the macro-industry of the Imperium of Man. With the teeming flock of the Machine God harnessed by the same masters, the mining and distribution of noctilith pylons and obelisks could be achieved on a galaxy-wide scale.Together, the two forces could perhaps restore order and logic to realspace. Yet though the Forge Worlds and the Necron dynasties have found common cause before, they are so consumed by their own sense of superiority that they would never truly work in concert. Instead the one concentrates on bringing about the demise of the other by the most violent and final methods that they can conceive.The arcane geniuses of the Necrons now lead phalanxes of metal warriors and insectoid Canoptek constructs against the scions of the Machine God on a hundred mineral-rich worlds. Soon after Magos Ologostion made his first play to gain blackstone upon the world of Amontep II, the Technomandrite Cryptek Agdahax of the Sautekh Dynasty rose to stop him.In the Necron Cryptek's eyes, Humanity unwittingly seeks the most valuable of resources in the galaxy, and it is high time such mortals learned their place in the true order of things.