The Nightbringer, known by the ancient Necron name of Aza'gorod, and as Aza'gorod the Nightbringer, is one of the C'tan, and was once the mighty Star God of death, darkness, and destruction. Legends tell of the Nightbringer as the first and most powerful of the C'tan, and in ancient hiero-scripts it is depicted as an ever-hungering god of death, feasting upon the pain and anguish of entire species. Star systems, planets and civilizations have all fallen before its dark scythe, and even the Necrons fear it.
The Nightbringer is one of the C'tan who was defeated by the Necrons during their great rebellion against the C'tan masters who had forced them into the bio-transference of their minds into their undying mechanical forms. The Nightbringer's essence was divided into dozens if not hundreds of C'tan Shards, each held captive within a device known as a Tesseract Labyrinth. Each C'tan Shard is only released by the Necrons when the contingencies of the battlefield have so turned against them that no other weapon will prove able to carry the day. In such circumstances, the Necrons will release a C'tan Shard, whose constituent energy has been sealed within a mechanical body composed of the same living metal Necrodermis as the Necrons themselves. The Nightbringer's C'tan Shard is armed with a powerful C'tan Phase Scythe, and is usually manifests as a dark, towering cloaked reaper that shines with dark light, with gray and black colours similar to the traditional human mythological image of death known as the Grim Reaper. It is an image that resonates deeply in the primal subconscious of many lesser races, and all who look upon the shard feel the cold fingers of death upon their throats, for in its terrible and majestic form is the inevitability of their destruction. This stems from the Nightbringer's great slaughter of younger races during the War in Heaven, which reached a point where servants of the Old Ones learned their fear of death from him and his image entered the collective unconsciousness of many races as the personification of Death. Only the Orks, the descendants of the Old Ones' warrior race known as the Krork, are rumored to have been spared his attentions, and that is potentially why the Orks do not fear death.
Millions of years after the 'demise' of the C'tan, shards of the Nightbringer still remain the most dangerous and difficult to control for the Necrons. Somewhere deep within these fragments linger the memories of the Nightbringer as it was, and its unending hatred of the race that betrayed it.