Tomb Guard

The Tomb Guard were the household warriors of the kings, champions who earned the highest honor Nehekhara could bestow: to be embalmed with the same deep rites as the monarch himself and laid to rest around his sarcophagus, an honor guard for eternity. The lesser dead rise as dry bone; the Tomb Guard rise with sinew, skill, and purpose intact, their gilded wargear kept bright across the ages by mortuary attendants who never stopped working.

Their blades are anointed with the cult's funerary venoms, so that the smallest cut blackens and withers living flesh. In battle they are the unbreakable core about which the legions wheel: silent, exact, arrayed about their king in the same formation they held at his funeral procession. Grave-robbers tell stories of pyramid halls where the statues carry poisoned bronze and take one step forward each time a torch gutters. The stories are true in every detail but one: they are not statues.