The Liche Priests are the undying sorcerer-priests of the Tomb Kings, the withered masters of the mortuary cult who rule the dead realm of Nehekhara in the deserts of the far south. Once the mortal priests of that ancient civilisation, they promised their kings eternal life beyond death — and, through a magic of their own devising, delivered a terrible parody of it.
In life the Liche Priests perfected the rites of mummification and the preservation of the dead, believing the soul would one day return to a body kept whole. When the great necromancer Nagash and his Book corrupted their funerary magic, the awaited resurrection came monstrously wrong: the kings and their people rose not as living men but as animate skeletons, their souls bound to dust and bone. The Liche Priests, who had drunk deep of preserving elixirs, awoke as immortal liches — conscious, unrotting, and doomed to tend the undead legions forever.
Now they are the true power behind the throne of every Tomb King, for it is their incantations that raise the skeletal armies from the necropolis sands and hold the fragile spirits within their crumbling frames. Endlessly they maintain the tombs, catalogue the treasures, and enact the ancient laws, waiting through the slow centuries for a golden age they know can never truly come. Cold, patient, and utterly bound to duty, the Liche Priests are the memory of a dead civilisation that refuses to lie down and be forgotten.