The Labyrinth
Buried deep beneath the scorched dunes of Har’Akir, hidden beneath the bleached ruin of Sute, sprawls an immense and maddening necropolis—The Labyrinth. This underworld of sepulchers, crypts, and forgotten sanctuaries descends in chaotic tiers, tomb upon tomb, each built over the collapsed remnants of the last. Ages of funerary ambition and divine dread have created an endless spiral of decay, where the restless dead outnumber the grains of sand that conceal them.
The Labyrinth beneath the Sands of Sute is more than a necropolis—it is a scar of spiritual obsession, carved ever deeper by fear of judgment and the hunger for eternal rest. What began as a holy city now lies beneath the dunes, layered in grief, ambition, and denial, where the past refuses to stay buried and the dead cannot sleep.
“Bury me beneath my ancestors, that I may forget their failures. Bury me beneath my enemies, that they may never rise. Bury me where the sun cannot find me. And do not follow.”
Architecture
- The Labyrinth is not a single unified structure, but a vast tangle of corridors, collapsed shrines, flooded vaults, and shifting burial pits carved from sandstone, obsidian, and sacred white limestone.
- Many tombs were never meant to be found again, their entrances sealed with soul-locked slabs and their architects buried with them.
- Natural faults and ancient curses have caused entire sections to tilt, sink, or collapse, forming treacherous gaps, impassable hollows, and gravity-defying chambers.
- Stone spirals, some large enough to hold entire temples, drill into the darkness, each level older, more unstable, and more cursed than the last.
Defenses
- Undead priests known as the Buried Hierophants wander the Labyrinth, performing endless rites for pharaohs who no longer remember their names.
- Cursed grave robbers, caught in temporal loops, eternally repeat the moment of their deaths—forever digging, screaming, falling, then digging again.
- Some tombs were sealed with living guardians: sand-wrapped sphinxes, statues that whisper in sleep, and deathless jackal-headed sentinels that stalk intruders through dreams.
- At its deepest levels, the Labyrinth houses a forgotten pantheon, gods stricken from history who now feed on memory, eroding the identities of those who pass near their shrines.
History
- It is said that the First Tomb, belonging to Ankh-Xareb the Unmourned, lies at the Labyrinth’s heart. His soul was never judged, his ka and ba torn from each other by divine error. Some believe this flaw in the afterlife opened the spiral that became the Labyrinth.
- The Sands of Sute, which constantly shift and bury new openings, are believed to be sentient, stirred by ancient curses and the breath of dead gods.
- Few who enter the Labyrinth return. Those who do often carry gilded trinkets etched with forgotten names, suffer from eroding memories, or speak in archaic dialects long since lost.
Tourism
- The city of Sute, once a powerful center of priesthood and burial cults, fell centuries ago, swallowed by the desert after a plague of royal resurrections.
- Rather than bury their dead in a necropolis outside the city, Sute’s embalmers turned their streets and homes into sepulchers, carving down as their space above was devoured by sand.
- As time passed, newer tombs were built atop the old, their foundations sunk into forgotten crypts. Priests and architects vied to bury their patrons deeper, believing the further one was from the living world, the closer they lay to the afterlife.
- The result was an architectural palimpsest of generations, where faith, fear, and ambition mummified themselves in stone.
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