Trazyn the Infinite: Warhammer 40k’s Obsessive Collector
In a dark galaxy filled with warring factions and destructive forces, one unusual figure stands out for his unique motivations – Trazyn the Infinite, a Necron overlord consumed by his all-encompassing passion for collecting artifacts, lifeforms, and even moments in time.
Who is Trazyn the Infinite?
Trazyn is an ancient Necron lord who woke from his great sleep before most of his brethren, giving him time to develop an intense fascination with observing and recording the history of the galaxy around him. While other Necrons seek conquest or extermination of the lesser races, Trazyn cares little for such goals, focused instead on gathering the rarest and most significant treasures to add to his extensive collections.
According to the lore, Trazyn watched with great interest during monumental events like the Unification Wars, Great Crusade and Horus Heresy. He developed a particular fascination with humans and the pivotal role they played in shaping galactic events over the last 10,000 years of turbulence. While he looks down on their brief mortal lifespans, he recognizes humanity’s importance in the wider scheme of things.
The Obsessive Collector
Trazyn approaches war and conquest solely as a means to an end – acquiring more valuable artifacts and lifeforms for preservation within his infinite vaults and stasis galleries. Victories and losses on the battlefield matter little to him compared to securing objects of fascination like Inquisitor Coteaz’s severed hand or a Tyranid Hive Ship frozen in time.
His tomb complex on the Necron crownworld of Solemnance contains a spectacular array of technologies and treasures from across the galaxy. The centerpiece is his Gallery of Infinity – 42 square miles of climate-controlled exhibit halls featuring endless stasis tubes and temporal cages to showcase his most valuable acquisitions. Just the psychic relics wing alone would cover all of Holy Terra!
Trazyn’s Favorite Possessions
Trazyn surrounds himself with his most favored prizes within his personal chambers. Some of the most famous contents of his vast collections include:
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Sebastian Thor‘s Dissected Head: The assassinated leader of the Adeptus Ministorum Ecclesiarchy, preserved in a medical bay display case hovering over Trazyn’s command dais so he can gloat over the humans’ misery.
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Spectral Bone: A psychically resonant fossil from before the Aeldari Empire that phase shifts anyone holding it onto a separate ghostly plane. Trazyn sometimes uses it for tactical repositioning mid-battle.
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The Celestial Orrery: A miniature diorama of the full galaxy accurate down to the last moon, allowing Trazyn to track stars and systems from his command throne via necrodermic infolinks.
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The Fulgurite: A shard of crystal containing the trapped life essence of the Necron Overlord Imotekh the Stormlord, who constantly rails against his imprisonment. Imotekh’s rants serve as little more than background noise during Trazyn’s studying sessions.
According to the 8th edition Necron codex, Trazyn also possesses an ancient Tesseract Labyrinth staff capable of discharging an electromagnetic shockwave that reduces victims to ash. He typically deploys such reality-warping weapons to instantly add new battlefield ruins to his famous Crumbling Civilizations exhibit gallery.
Master of Deception
Trazyn augments his vast technological arsenal with cunning and subterfuge to achieve his aims. He constantly transfers his consciousness between different custom-built surrogate bodies to avoid detection. According to lore sources, he will even covertly infect and override the minds of other Necron nobles when an opportunity presents itself, wearing their identities as just another suit to wear.
The most infamous case came during the Fall of Malvolion campaign, when Trazyn spent years manipulating the Blood Ravens Space Marines chapter into attacking the Chaos held Imperial world of Calderis by spreading rumors about a cache of “secret knowledge” artifacts hidden there. Though his forces joined sides with the loyalists, this alliance was merely a ploy to allow Trazyn to breach the planet’s stasis vaults amidst the fighting to escape with many exotic acquisitions.
On another occasion, Trazyn tricked the noble Salamanders chapter into a decade-long conflict with the Orks on the planet Heletine, purely to distract them from his excavation activities collecting precious relics left behind by the long-dead Eldar. Such ruthless deceptions and betrayals underscore Trazyn’s ultimate motivation – expanding his collection by any means necessary, giving little thought to the mortal lives disrupted or ended along the way. As long as he retrieves a few more curiosities for display back home, the rest are just details.
Consequences Across the Stars
While Trazyn generally cares little for power struggles or conquest, his seemingly random actions still send ripples across the wider 40k galaxy. After encountering a crippled Blackstone Fortress filled with entropic energies, he set it on a collision course with the Cadian Pylons as an experiment to see what would happen. The resulting cosmic explosion not only shut down the Necron-built pylons containing the Eye of Terror’s Immaterium warp storms but tore reality itself open, spewing daemonic hordes forth into surrounding systems.
This Cicatrix Maledictum event, known to humans as the Great Rift, restructured galactic geography itself overnight. But to Trazyn, it was merely a moment’s diversion, despite the untold devastation left in his wake. He even claimed a few daemonic weapons from the ensuing battles to add to his Warp Curiosities exhibit. Such callous disregard for the consequences underscores how his obsessive desire to acquire novel wonders often drives him into alliance or conflict with various factions across the stars. Exactly what will catch his eccentric attention next is anyone’s guess.
Rivalry with Orikan the Diviner
Fellow Necron overlord Orikan the Diviner provides an interesting foil to Trazyn’s obsession with collecting mementos of the past. As a master astromancer, Orikan’s interests instead lie in predicting and manipulating potential future timelines to achieve optimal outcomes for the recovering Necron race based on his meditations within the infinity circuit and divinations of fortune.
Long-standing tensions between the hoarding antiquarian Trazyn and forward-thinking oracle Orikan have erupted into open warfare many times over the passing epochs. Most recently, during the Psychic Awakening conflict in the Pariah Nexus region of space, both Necron lords traveled there hoping to exploit its reality-warping Nightmare Shard energies for their own ends.
However, Orikan had already forged a secret alliance with Szarekh, last of the infamous Triarch and the ambitious Silent King of the Necrons. Szarekh also sought to control the Nexus’s psychic powers for his grand plans to reunite the still-slumbering Necron dynasties across the galaxy after his return from self-imposed exile.
This fateful campaign perfectly illustrates the differing philosophies between those like Trazyn who obsessively preserve mementos of reality versus forward-thinkers like Orikan who focus on actively steering the timestream’s possibilities to come. For now, Orikan and his chronomancer allies have succeeded in creating both a new breed of Pariah warriors and keeping Trazyn from tapping into the dangerous warp-based powers of the Nexus. But the constantly shifting fate of the galaxy ensures this is unlikely their final clash over destiny’s direction…
What Drives the Collector?
For all his dismissive sentiments about “lesser races” or spearhead factions like the T’au, Trazyn nonetheless demonstrates some oddly sentimental attachments to particular human heroes and warriors he keeps locked in temporal stasis cryo-crypts within his vaults’ Living Exhibits gallery. The notorious Ecclesiarch Sebastian Thor may just be a trophy to him, but the young Sergeant Xarl of the Blood Ravens was rescued from death itself on the field of battle to be revived in prime youthful vigor so he can fight for all eternity as one of Trazyn’s new Lychguard.
This hints that what Trazyn may value most is loyalty, dedication and self-sacrifice for abstract ideals – noble qualities his soulless Canoptek constructs and formerly living Necron warriors now lack. While he surrounds himself with the petrified shadows of bygone Necron rulers and glory days 60 million years past, perhaps Trazyn on some level secretly envies living beings like humans for their passions and willingness to perish in pursuit of intangibles like honor or love an undying machine intellect like himself struggles to truly understand.
By putting such allegorical virtues and vices on literal display in his living statue galleries, Trazyn freezes in time ephemeral moments of courage, rage, despair and more that provide windows into the mortal condition his own endless, deathless existence otherwise lacks as anchor points. Perhaps these eclectic exhibits full of sins and souls from all species are closer to true immortality to him than even the Necrons’ long lifespans. We all wish to leave our mark upon the universe and be remembered before passing into nothingness. For unchanging Everliving machines like Trazyn, capturing the penultimate moments is possibly the closest they come to reclaiming the vividness of life once denied them.
What Lies Ahead?
Trazyn’s past exploits offer intriguing hints about humanity‘s possible fate if the Necrons continue awakening en masse to rebuild their ancient stellar empires. For now, the erratic collector contents himself with operating on the fringes of the galaxy’s grand events, more eccentric archivist than conqueror. But should he or other like-minded Cryptek lords begin taking a more coordinated active role in the 40k universe’s bloody struggles in the name of reclaiming Necron supremacy, they could irrevocably tilt the unfolding timestream’s balance forevermore. Imagine if Trayzn tapped the full resource repositories and military assets of Crownworld Solemnance and the surrounding Sautekh Dynasty, or struck alliances with those sharing his unsavory fascinations like the flayer virus tainted Maynarkh Dynasty!
Already his manipulations have set off some of the largest threats to stability the Imperium faces, like the Great Rift. In fact, had Trazyn not stirred up trouble releasing the C’tan shard known as the Deceiver on Makenna VII, Commander Dante would never have allocated crucial Blood Angel reinforcements to aid beleaguered Imperial forces there against the Tyranid menace. Thus leaving Terra itself vulnerable to massive losses when the subsequent Battle of Lionsgate reach there, forever altering the Imperium’s leadership.
What new unforeseen storms could be unleashed if Trazyn chooses to weaponize the unique powers, ancient relics technologies and vassal agents contained within his infinite archives? We can only shudder at the implications…
The Scale of Obsession
While it is impossible to tally the true scope of Trazyn’s hoarded treasures, some estimates of the contents of his stasis vaults galleries include:
- 16,402 Battle Tanks
- 983 Titan-class war machines
- 2.5+ million weapons artifacts
- 5,881 full mummified xeno-species specimens
- 18,594 individual skitarii cybernetica arcana automata
In raw storage volume alone, the arcane hyperspace pocket dimension chambers underlying the Gallery of Infinity exceed storied fictional treasure troves found in human myth and fiction such as:
| Site | Estimated Volume |
|---|---|
| Trazyn‘s Vaults | 5 cubic miles |
| Warehouse 13 | 0.5 cubic miles |
| Indiana Jones‘ Warehouse | 0.8 cubic miles |
| SCP Foundation Sites | 2 cubic miles |
A True Successor to the Cegorach?
The Aeldari god Cegorach is a symbol of collecting and preserving all that remains of Aeldari knowledge and culture following the Fall. As Trazyn continues amassing the lost histories, secrets and marvels of dozens now-extinct civilizations from eons past, perhaps the capricious collector sees himself as inheriting Cegorach‘s role as curator of eternity.
By surrounding himself with artifacts that emphasize mortality‘s impermanence whether bio-transference into undying android forms or the endless iterations of civilizations‘ rise and fall, Trazyn’s archives become a monument to the ultimate vanity of empire builders, who despite their boasts all eventually die off and get supplanted by new domineering powers that doom themselves in turn the same way. Within that lens of cosmic perspective transcending eras, only the Archivist endures eternal, watching the procession go by as he gathers mementos from those soon forgotten players great and small alike.
In his isolated pocket dimension sanctums far removed from temporal chaos, Trazyn surely recognizes that for all their galactic dominion, even his fellow Necron rulers’ achievements will turn to dust eventually. Thus in obsessively collecting fragments from all such impermanent mighty works now lost to ruins and rebirthing his favorites in living metal, perhaps at some level Trazyn laments all the beauty lesser minds fail to appreciate dies when they fade away. By preserving echoes, the Curator of Eons pays tribute to creative moments his own deathless kind’s existence otherwise lacks.
Or maybe the crazy robotic hoarder just likes surrounding himself with weird novelties? The obsessions of such an ancient eccentric mind remain as inscrutable as the contents of his ever-expanding vaults showcasing both the magnificent and the disturbing…
Conclusion
Trazyn the Infinite remains one of the most fascinatingly nuanced yet enigmatic figures within the Warhammer 40k universe. His endless quest to gather up artifacts, lifeforms, genetic material, battle remnants and more make him closer to a librarian chronicling wars than a warmonger. Yet his methods of coercion, body-swapping deception and coercion means even his own allies face betrayal if that secures another exotic addition to his ever-expanding temporal menageries.
This novel characterization brings welcome depth and shades of light to an otherwise grim setting where most xenos factions focus solely on extermination and domination. Trazyn provides a neutral party operating by his own peculiar rules, more scholar and curator than crusader. Yet the unintended havoc wrought by his actions also makes it clear why others might see him and his kind as threats potentially worse than even the Chaos gods‘ madness. Only time will tell what this quixotic figure has planned for his peculiar collections gathered over 60 million years…and who or what else he might lock within those temporal vaults on passing whims before more dusty relics catch his eye once more.