Still can't get over Djoseras's character arc. Heroically tragic, morally invalidated - structurally genius, since we rediscover him at the same speed Oltyx does, layer by layer as he peels his deceptions away. There is something deeply unhinged about the way Djoseras saw life while he himself was alive, in a way the standard necron contempt towards organics can't match.

He's merciless. He's loving. He's a rival, he's a mentor, he's untrustworthy. He's the best brother Oltyx could have had. He's a mirror for princes. Most of what he says is wrong, because he does not know better, or a lie, because his princehood is an unwilling burden and has become a fundamental dishonesty. He's a terrible DJ. His best friend was his enemy. Spiritually he has joined his brother in exile, setting himself apart in the landscape closest to Sedh their crownworld has to offer. His malice is almost entirely in Oltyx's imagination. He wasn't thinking about how wrong he was about everything 'since [he and Oltyx] spoke in the desert'. He's actually been thinking about it since Oltyx got exiled, spending hundreds of years carving apologies upon his own soldiers. They're even less capable of protesting whatever he brings upon them than they would have as necrontyr. They're not the people he destroyed, and not the people who can grant him forgiveness. If they could throw aside their hierachies and see one another person-to-person, they wouldn't owe him a damn thing, and he knows that and it kills him which is just as well because Oltyx killed him too.

His best-lived self belonged entirely to Oltyx. And Oltyx forgot about him, twisted the memories into something he was not, and he locked Djoseras away where neither he nor his elder brother could reach until it was too late. (Though the moral teachings kept leaking out, like pus from a wound.) Djoseras was already dead from the moment we saw him in the desert. In a way, he too is a 'twice-dead king', except he never wished to be a king and so he just keeps dying and dying until there's nothing more of him left to die. But they're necrons. They're all dead. They don't change, they never come back, only Oltyx can come back and not in a form commonly acknowledged as necron. Djoseras would've had a hard time without being as inflexible as he was, but that was the path he chose and broke like iron he did. There are not enough tears in the world