Nehekhara lies far south of the Old World across sun-blasted deserts — the Land of the Dead, though its people once called it the Blessed Land. Here, millennia before Sigmar's tribes raised their first walls, humanity built its first great civilisation: Khemri, Zandri, Lahmia, and their sister cities, rich in gold, grain, and monuments. Its kings practised a mortuary cult that promised them resurrection into an eternal paradise, and so they were embalmed beneath colossal pyramids and entombed with legions of servants to await the great awakening.
The awakening came, but not as promised. Nagash, the renegade priest-king of Khemri and father of all necromancy, was cast out by his own people; generations later he took his revenge with a ritual that slew every living thing in Nehekhara in a single night. Then the tombs opened. The mummified kings woke furious, in withered bodies rather than paradise, at the head of the skeletal legions buried beside them.
Greatest of them is Settra the Imperishable, first king of Khemri, who now rules the awakened Tomb Kings and fully intends to reconquer everything he once owned. And from doomed Lahmia had fled earlier fugitives — the first vampires, whose bloodlines haunt the world still as ancestors of the Vampire Counts.