April 4, 2026
As told by a wandering bard at the Inn of the Desert Winds, Tephu, to anyone who will listen
Pull up a chair, friend, and do not be stingy with that wine, for the tale I am about to tell you very nearly had no tellers left to tell it.
You know of the heroes who broke the Ka Pulse in Wati? Who slew Nebta-Khufre and recovered the Mask of the Forgotten Pharaoh? I was there at the end of that story. But let me tell you of the hour before the end — the hour when the gods themselves must have looked down and wondered whether to start composing eulogies.
There were six of them. There nearly were none.
It began with a platform.
Nebta-Khufre — necromancer, cultist, wearer of the Mask of the Forgotten Pharaoh, architect of Wati’s undead uprising — stood twenty feet above the party atop a stone pyramid at the heart of his sanctum, astride a Dire Bat of terrible size. The floor below was a treacherous field of obsidian shards, razor-edged and flash-frozen, difficult terrain in the most literal and painful sense. Two crackling orbs of ball lightning prowled the room under his direction. Mummies with the strength of siege engines prowled the edges. Zombies shambled in confused formation. And Nebta-Khufre himself crackled with haste.
Xander Zeltz, the party’s sorcerer, had already been struck with Feeblemind — his intelligence and charisma reduced to the level of a particularly bored rock. Blade, the Bloodrager, was bleeding from a dozen wounds. Iverson was nearly out of healing. Lishka and her beloved dinosaur Smashy Smashy were both down. The summoner Shavrak Asha was operating on three negative levels, functionally a first-level caster in a room designed to kill seventh-level adventurers.
Only Rochelle Martham remained on her feet with any real capacity to act, clutching her bow and dodging the ball lightning with an almost supernatural stubbornness — that crackling sphere chasing her through the obsidian field round after round like a persistent debt collector, and missing every single time.
Meritef, a cultist prisoner the party had taken earlier, was leashed to Rochelle’s wrist, an inconvenience that had gone from “tactically interesting” to “actively catastrophic.”
And then Shavrak Asha did something with a bat.
Let me be precise, because precision matters here. Shavrak Asha’s Dire Bat — his summoned creature, this great winged thing of sinew and fury — flew up to the platform where Nebta-Khufre stood. It grappled him. It pinned him. A 20 on the dice, as clean and perfect as a scimitar stroke, and suddenly the architect of Wati’s undead plague could not cast a single spell that required movement of hands or body.
Nebta-Khufre broke free. The bat grabbed him again. He broke free again. The bat grabbed him again. Round after round, this cycle repeated — break, grab, break, grab — while the rest of the party bled and crawled and ran out of resources below. The bat, bless its horrible leathery soul, simply would not let go.
Meanwhile, down on the obsidian floor, things were becoming what the military historians call “suboptimal.”
Smashy Smashy fell. A mummy’s crushing fist ended the dinosaur’s story, and Lishka — already bleeding, already desperate — watched her companion collapse beside her. Iverson dropped his last channel of healing energy, an act of sheer faith that barely kept Lishka stable. Shavrak Asha, walking around with three negative levels and the effective power of a first-year apprentice, became invisible and stood over Lishka’s body, guarding her without being able to do much else.
Blade went down. Blade went down hard — Mummy 4 struck him with the particular enthusiasm of something that does not know it is supposed to lose, and when a Bloodrager’s rage ends in death, the numbers get very ugly very fast. He was dead dead, not merely dying.
Xander Zeltz stood at one hit point for two consecutive rounds. One. Hit. Point. The feeble-minded sorcerer, unable to cast anything of consequence, stumbled around the room like a man who has forgotten what rooms are for, while zombies swung at him and missed with a consistency that bordered on the miraculous.
Taz — the thrush, Xander’s diminutive bird companion, possessing eight intelligence and an apparently unlimited capacity for battlefield assessment — flew to Xander’s side and in plain common said, words to the effect of: Get out. Now. I mean it.
Then Shavrak Asha picked up a wand.
Lishka’s wand of Cure Light Wounds had fallen to the obsidian floor. Shavrak Asha, invisible, standing over a dying woman, with three negative levels and no particular skill in the use of magical devices, picked it up and activated it on Blade.
Nine hit points. Just nine. Not enough, technically, to bring a dead Bloodrager back from the abyss created by his own rage ending at zero constitution. But enough. Enough for one breath, one heartbeat, one moment of stubborn animal survival. Blade stabilized.
Then Iverson crawled across the obsidian floor — taking a wound from the razor shards for the effort, because the universe was not yet done with him — and poured a Cure Moderate Wounds potion directly down Blade’s throat. Blade opened his eyes. Blade stood up. Blade picked up his sword and looked at Mummy 4 the way a man looks at something he has unfinished business with.
Rochelle Martham, having spent the last several rounds dodging ball lightning with impressive reliability while Meritef fought against her rope leash, finally got a clear shot. She was not given to bragging about the lightning — she had merely mentioned it, she would want you to know, in passing, once — but she had indeed been dodging it. Every round. While her friends died around her.
She shot Mummy 4. She shot it well. And when Blade finally got his turn, rage burning one last time, he finished it. The mummy fell. The zombies, without their master’s will to animate them, slumped where they stood like marionettes with cut strings.
Nebta-Khufre — still in the grip of the bat, or freshly re-gripped by the bat, depending on which round you were watching — finally fell to the combined work of a spiritual weapon, the bat’s crushing grapple, and Blade’s blade. The head came off. There was, reportedly, a little bit of rage in the swing.
Meritef ran.
Rochelle Martham chased her up the stairs, Taz tucked under one arm, shooting as she went. She hit. She did not kill. Meritef fled into the streets of Wati’s necropolis, carrying whatever cult knowledge she carried, running toward whatever allies remained to her. The party, collectively, decided that further pursuit was not in the cards given that most of them were either unconscious, dying, or had the intelligence of a houseplant.
They barricaded themselves in Nebta-Khufre’s sanctum. They rested. A fire elemental wandered by someone’s watch and, apparently finding nothing appealing about a room full of barely-living adventurers and one dead dinosaur, moved on.
In the morning came the reckoning.
Mummy Rot, that slow and cruel disease, had taken hold of four of the six. Lishka. Xander Zeltz. Rochelle Martham. Shavrak Asha. The constitution damage had begun, and the charisma, and the faces in the firelight looked hollower than faces ought to look on living people.
Iverson cast every remove curse he had memorized. He failed his first two caster level checks. He succeeded on the third — for Rochelle Martham, clearing the curse so that Lishka could follow with remove disease. Xander Zeltz saved on his own. Lishka and Shavrak Asha took damage but survived the day’s progression.
They gathered the necromancer’s possessions — a rod of strong and unidentified magic, a ring, a wand, a spellbook of considerable value, diamond dust, onyxes, holy symbols of Anubis and Pharasma, an unholy symbol of Urgathoa, and the Mask of the Forgotten Pharaoh itself, still radiating its strong necromancy and transmutation — and they made their way back through the tunnels, back through the Brickworks, back into the living half of Wati.
Sebti the Crocodile and Ptemenib were waiting at the Grand Mausoleum. The Ka Pulse was ended. The undead would rise no more. The city could begin the long work of reclaiming its streets, burying its dead, and remembering what it meant to be a city of the living.
Xander Zeltz still could not speak a coherent sentence.
And so ends the tale of the Sepulchre of the Servant, and what happened within it when six mortals stood against a necromancer, two ball lightning orbs, four mummies, and a small army of zombies — and most of them walked out.
Smashy Smashy did not walk out. But that is a different tale, and that tale has a happier ending than it deserved.
The heroes who survived? They carried something else out with them, heavier than treasure and harder to put down: the knowledge that there is a Cult of the Forgotten Pharaoh in the world, that someone called the Sky Pharaoh was to be resurrected, and that a woman named Meritef is running through the desert right now with dangerous things in her head.
The bard drains her cup and sets it down.
I asked Blade afterward what he felt when he opened his eyes to find Shavrak Asha standing over him with a wand he barely knew how to use.
He said: “Like something the universe wasn’t done with yet.”
Given what is coming, I suspect the universe has considerable plans for all of them.