Khorsekef

Khorsekef the Infinite, also known as the Ultralich, the Lord of Decay, and the King of Death, was the first pharaoh of the Khemharan Empire. He ruled over Khemhara for over 3,000 years, where he lived as a god-king before he was thrown to the Abyssal Waste, where he ruled over the Court of Decay as he planned his return to Khemhara.

History

Timeless rule

Khorsekef was the first pharaoh of the Khemharan Empire. He ruled over an unchanging desert, where he used his power to ensure that his people thrived. Uknknown to the Khem-hor, his power also denied the people the ability to change or grow. The people worshiped Khorsekef, who never died, generation after generation. Due to the desert's isolation from the world, the Khem-hor thought that this was the cycle of the world. The Khem-hor were born, lived their lives, and died in an unchanging existence.

Civil war

Lady Agatamori from Higara crossed into the desert, eager to chart new lands. Khorsekef quickly captured Lady Agatamori and her retinue, hiding them in one of his pyramids, or hedrons. He was not fast enough to fully hide her existence, and word spread of this traveler from another land, of other humans in the world. Before the rumor could die out, one of the Pharaoh's guard, who had become overwhelmed by Lady Agatamori's humanity, smuggled her and her crew out of the Great Tet and into the Atenopolis. Understanding of the outside world, of the timeless cage they were kept in, spread through the Khem-hor like a virus. Lady Agatamori's vizier discovered Khorsekef's secret - the hedrons were not mausoleums for dead noble citizens, as he had told them. Instead, were set in astronomically significant positions. The Khem-hor brought this knowledge to the Heironauts, the pharaoh's cadre of wizards, who were able to realize that they had been tricked with lives of luxury and privilege.

The Heironoauts discovered Khorsekef's great lie: he was absorbing time from their reality and storing it in the hedrons, creating a time-looped reality. The hedrons transmitted the stored time into Khorsekef to preserve his life while his domain stagnated, trapped in a timeless realm. The Heironauts began to drain power from the hedrons and explore new lore, discovering new spells over a few short days. They reached a limit to their new learning, then focused their attention on the hedrons, draining them of their stored time to fuel their magic. Khorsekef fought back, using the power given to him by the hedrons to oppose the Heironauts. The War Against Time soon spread across the Atenopolis, then ripped the very fabric of the manifold, spilling out into the Real.

With the Heironauts growing more powerful, Khorsekef enacted his emergency measure and opened the Great Tet. While the other hedrons were like batteries, storing time briefly, then releasing it to perpetuate the manifold, the Great Tet had never released any of its stores of time. The Infinite Pharoah absorbed the millennia stored within, but the power it contained proved too great for any physical vessel, even Khorsekef, to contain. His corporeal form was obliterated, his atoms bursting with time, leaving behind only his will, transforming him into the Ultralich.

Facing a newly dead god who would soon annihilate them, the Heironauts, with ideas from Lady Agatamori, did something no other Khem-hor had done for millennia, and improvised. They invented a ritual using the remaining power in the hedrons and inverted the geometries of the manifold Khorsekef had created to spill the Atenopolis back into Orden. At the same time, the fabric of the pocket universe wrapped back against itself, against the being who had created it - Khorsekef.

Abyssal Waste

Khorsekef was hurled into the Abyssal Waste as the very fabric of the time-looped manifold he had created imploded into him. There, he ascended as the Lord of Decay and the King of Death, ruling from the Last City, the necropolitan ruin at the center of the Waste. He gained the loyalty of the Court of Decay, which skirmished with the other courts of the Abyssal Waste. He sought a way to return to the Atenopolis and find a way to restore his infinite rule over his people. Khorsekef vowed he would return, and the oracles of Khemhara predicted his return for the last several millennia.