Settra the Imperishable

Settra was the first Priest King to rule all Nehekhara and, by his own unchallenged assessment, the greatest man who has ever lived. He unified the golden cities by conquest, carried his standard beyond every horizon his cartographers could draw, and raised Khemri to a splendor no human city has matched since. Only one rebel defied him to the end: death. Settra commanded his priesthood to conquer it as he had conquered everything else, and the Mortuary Cult was founded for that purpose. It labored the length of his long reign and failed; the best it could offer was a bargain. Sleep now, the priests promised, and wake in a paradise of gold, young and imperishable, to reign forever. Settra took the bargain the way he took all disappointments — as treason to be corrected later.

He woke in the dark beneath the Great Pyramid in a body of bone and windings, in an empire of corpses, cheated twice over: by the priests whose paradise was nowhere to be found, and by the traitor Nagash, whose wild ritual had dragged every king of Nehekhara from sleep at once. The fury of that waking is still spoken of quietly in Khemri. But rage has never once made Settra less effective. He rose, called his legions up from the sand, and went out to survey the squabbling monarchs of the fallen empire. Some knelt at the mere sight of his standard; the rest knelt soon after. The Land of the Dead had a King of Kings again, and the interruption was declared to be over.

Pride is the engine that drives him where a heart no longer beats. Emissaries of Nagash have offered him power beyond death; darker things still have offered him godhood for the small price of a bended knee. All of them learned what Nehekhara has always known — Settra kneels to nothing in this world or any other. He does not mourn his stolen paradise, for mourning is the habit of lesser kings; he intends to repossess it, one reconquered dune at a time, and he regards the young nations of the world as tenants who have not yet read the terms of their lease. The Liche Priests whisper that when the last grain of Nehekhara's sand is his again, the Great Hawk of the Heavens may finally rest. None of them whisper it twice.