Khemri was the first city of men to call itself eternal, and it has never seen reason to stop. Raised where the River Vitae bent toward the sea, it grew under the first Priest Kings into the capital of all Nehekhara: a forest of gilded obelisks and stepped pyramids so old that rival cities counted their own foundations in years since Khemri taught them to build. At its heart stands the Great Pyramid, tomb of Settra himself, a mountain of dressed stone raised to hold a king who meant to outlast the world.
When the awakening came, Khemri's dead rose in numbers no rival necropolis could match, for a capital buries capital armies. Its legions are the measure by which the Tomb Kings reckon splendour: skeletal spearmen in the old royal panoply, gilded chariot squadrons, Tomb Guard in burnished household bronze, all marching beneath the sun-standard of the King of Kings. The city remembers being the centre of the world, and does not consider the memory past tense. By decree of the Imperishable, every other crown is a vassal's and every rival necropolis a province that has forgotten its place, and the long labour of the dynasties is merely to make the map agree once more. Khemri's dust has been the heart of an empire before, and has nothing but time in which to be so again.
Order of battle
The Khemri field the units of the Tomb Kings of Khemri, a detachment from the roster:
Other Tomb Kings of Khemri formations
LybarasCity of the High Queen, sacred to Asaph and rising from Nehekhara's eastern reaches. Lybaras stirs when vampires stir, for its serpent-crowned legions are bound to Khalida's long vengeance against the treachery of Lahmia. Its arrows are said to bite twice: once with bronze, once with the goddess's venom.
MahrakThe City of the Gods, holiest ground in all Nehekhara, where every temple of the great pantheon raised its spires and the priest-councils once held power enough to humble kings. Its awakened defenders are as much relic as army: guardian constructs and censer-bearing dead marching beneath the icons of Ptra and Djaf. Mahrak still insists the gods, not the kings, own Nehekhara; Settra permits it to lose that argument slowly.
NumasThe city of the plains, whose kings counted their wealth in grain, herds, and the loyalty of the river-folk who worked its wide fields. Numas woke gentler than its rivals, but gentleness in a Tomb King is a relative thing: its skeletal legions still sweep the dunes clear of tomb-robbers, and its dead farmers still tend fields that have grown nothing for three thousand years.
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