First appearance: Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG · watch it on YouTube
Nehebka is a Knight of the Void stationed at The Dread Fortress: a masked, sand-wreathed guardian who was made, not born, to protect someone else’s power. She was played by CriticalBard, and by QR0WNTV in the fourth chapter. In the first arc of Pieces of a King she was the squad’s oracle, interrogator and, when needed, its sandstorm. By the arc’s end she had become something stranger still: the living vessel for a fragment of The Shadow King. She bears the Fortress’s markings, but she has made it clear she serves exactly one master, and it is not the Grandmaster.
Story
Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG
The arc opened on Nehebka alone in a dark chamber, heating a bronze scimitar over a small fire and sprinkling sand onto it from an empty hand. It was her quiet daily blessing: “The sand provides the sand… I may not be where the sands reside, but the sands are with me, for I am it.” Dread Commander Caim interrupted the moment to summon her. While he spoke, a snake of sand crept across the floor toward him, itching to grab hold. It slumped once she heard it was official business.
In Knight Commander Stolas’s star-chamber, she went straight for the books on travelling to planes that may no longer exist. She learned that leaving The Void at that scale takes a whole court of mages or an artifact of tremendous power. Grimnar Stormclaw noticed and muttered that he knew she was “anxious to leave,” and her sand aura went briefly spiky. When Stolas briefed the squad that the Shadow King’s power seemed to be gathering on the world of Dämmerung, Nehebka felt his heartbeat through the floor and confirmed that his concern was real. She also overheard Grimnar’s very loud “whispered” request that Stolas look after his brother. At the portal relay she settled a dawdling relay master’s attitude in one line: “The sands have guided us here, and the sands tell me to decapitate you if you do not put us through to where we need to go.”
In the planar vein she alone saw a black hole above them and felt a vast, neutral presence regard her as she regarded it. She also got to know Muffy, the fennec fox painter. Nehebka watched her brush slice paper in two and declared, “There is a warrior within you.” Then she poured a cage of sand into Muffy’s mouth to settle around her heart and keep death away.
The squad landed in the middle of a losing battle against the Warmind’s constructs. Nehebka’s lower body became a tornado. She shredded one construct and packed its scraps into a coffin of sand, sandblasted another into the earth, and buried a third with its hands shaved down to stubs. When the last scout demanded she surrender to the Warmind, she answered, “The only one that I serve is the Lord, and you are not him.” She heated the leftover sand around it until it glowed red and the machine began to melt, and she watched it suffer with her chin up and a hint of a smile. Lightning from Grimnar’s storm briefly turned her cheek to glass before fresh sand covered it again. As the retreat began, she became a giant whirlwind and scooped up a screaming Muffy, carrying her clear of the artillery barrage.
Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL
At the Rust Blood Alliance war camp, Nehebka spotted more than anyone else. She was the one who overheard that “another knight” had already passed through. In the council tent she faced down Gund Ashbrow: “It is not about if we can be trusted. It is about what our purpose is.” When he bristled, she warned him that sand would go down his throat, and added, “I do not threat. Everything I say is a promise.” She took the war’s grim history coolly. To her, the Alliance had not suffered a cruel irony but “a natural consequence to action.” When Gund protested, she replied, “Forgive me if you thought I cared.”
Alone in the barracks, she drew an ankh in a circle of sand and prayed to her God-King. A voice answered, as if air had filled lungs that had not breathed in millennia: “Shadows link them. Chaos beckons.” It told her of a new king rising, of scattered pieces with reflections, and to “look where the darkness gathers.” She concluded that the two strangers ahead of them were tied to the Shadow King. At the mess she refused a hummus chip because “I was not created to eat. I was created to protect.” Grimnar ate the chip, and one of her fingers with it. Later that night she walled off the squad’s cots with stone summoned from sand, and she sculpted a forlorn glass statue of a hobgoblin soldier named Calvin.
When The Physician, the mind flayer who leads The Nightingales, asked to read their thoughts, Nehebka stepped forward alone. He found pyramids, sarcophagi and “this entirely imposing figure who is darkness and power itself”: the dark lord she originally served, and still serves. He pulled back shuddering, flecks of sand falling from his hands. Her God-King had let him know that while he dug in her mind, the God-King would be digging right next to him. Once the Nightingales left, Nehebka visibly struggled to hold herself together.
Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead
Nehebka does not sleep and does not dream. She spent the night kneeling in a slow cloud of drifting sand, and her morning divination showed the two strangers pressing on through dark tunnels, one of them wounded. At the war council she made a startling admission: “I was the war mind for my domain.” She explained that she was made to protect, and pressed the Physician on whether he stood with his creation or with his people. When War Mistress Trissavin probed Muffy’s loyalties, Nehebka stepped between them: “I would hope that your intentions do not turn your malevolent gaze towards us.” Trissavin promised she would “not dream of it.” Nehebka replied, “As one who does not dream, good.”
At the Solar’s Grave, where the Alliance was harvesting a fallen angel to build its warhead, she felt a strange familiarity with “something summoned and discarded like this.” When the Warmind attacked, she wrapped sand around Grimnar’s heart to ward off death, and he copied the spell onto Muffy with his lightning. She told Grimnar, “Let your storm strike true. If it includes me, so be it.” Then she stepped into a tree and out deep behind enemy lines, taking Muffy with her. A construct’s blade passed harmlessly through her body. “You were saying?”
Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind
In the flashback to the battle, Trissavin was blasted to Nehebka’s feet. Sadness simply does not compute for her, but she propped Trissavin up with sand to keep her breathing and promised to finish the job “with or without you.” When Trissavin swore she would be honoured forever, Nehebka was blunt: “I do not care for your honor, nor do I care for your mortal debts.”
In the tunnels under the Warmind’s mountain, she swapped places with Grimnar through the sand to take a bolt meant for him. She barely winced: “You should keep your wits about you, Grimnar.” In the Warmind’s chamber they found the two strangers, Glauccous and Taupe, knights of an Order of Shadow serving a rival “Grandmaster of Shadow.” Nehebka refused to strike the helpless knights. When Glauccous asked whether she even had the capacity for empathy, she answered without so much as mentioning the Grandmaster:
“Not unless the God King commands it.”
Then she smiled, put a finger under his chin, and let it turn to sand. The sand crawled into his mouth and bent his will until he cheerfully helped the party dig the remnant, a finger bone of the Shadow King, out of the dying Warmind’s brain.
After sharing Grimnar’s vision of the bone’s history, the two of them agreed that, for now, neither Grandmaster should have it. Nehebka had her own reason: she hoped such pieces might help her return home, or mend whatever had been broken and shunted into the Void. She explained that she once guarded her God-King’s pyramids, and that other elements were made from her to guard specific pieces: “You all will call them canopic jars.” Then she ripped open her own chest and sealed the remnant, in its warded cylinder, inside: “I am not human. I am not humanoid. I am merely a vessel. You cannot corrupt me.” Reaching toward the bone, she sensed that “somewhere out there, the God King lives,” so her purpose remained her purpose. At the planar gate she bound the charmed Glauccous with a thirty-day oath of alliance, which he chose not to resist, and the squad followed him toward Umbracor. At the table, her player put it plainly: “I’ve never said Nehebka was a good person.”
Personality and Abilities
Nehebka has dark skin and greenish-tan eyes that shift. She wears wrapped linens and a long headpiece set with a blood ruby and splayed silver, and a mask always covers her face. Her hands are rough and scaled, like coarse sandpaper. A sand aura hangs around her at all times and betrays her moods, slithering when she is annoyed and bristling when she is called out. She speaks in mantras (“the sand provides,” “It permeates all,” “Time, as the sands say, will tell”) and treats idioms and small talk with flat incomprehension. She cannot be talked into slack: “I could cut many things. Slack is not one of them.”
She is “the sand, the sand is she.” She can dissolve into a tornado or a whirlwind, pass blades through her body, and turn sand to glass for sculpture. She can raise walls of stone, erupt the earth into shrapnel, heat sand red-hot around an enemy, and leave glass fingerprints on those she blesses. She feels heartbeats through the ground, which makes her a natural lie detector. She divines answers from her God-King inside domes of sand, and she seeds her allies with grains so she can always find them. She fights with a bronze scimitar she blesses daily. She is fiercely protective of her squad, cold to almost everyone else, and loyal above all to a desert God-King whose realm she longs to restore.
Relationships
- Grimnar Stormclaw: Her squadmate and fellow knight, who reads her restlessness all too well. Together they shared one body and one vision as “team stained glass.”
- Muffy: The small painter she guards with sand around her heart. Nehebka saw a warrior in her from their first conversation.
- The Physician: The mind flayer who read her thoughts and recoiled. She trusts neither him nor his Nightingales.
- Gund Ashbrow: The Alliance’s chief artillerist. She threatened him on first meeting and pegged him as “the single piece of sand that will break the hourglass.”
- Grim: The redcap leader who rescued the squad and vouched for her “total mastery over the earth.”
- The God-King: The dark lord she was created to serve and still serves, and the only master she truly acknowledges.
Memorable Quotes
- “The only one that I serve is the Lord, and you are not him.” (Pieces of a King Ep 1 — DӒMMERUNG)
- “I do not threat. Everything I say is a promise.” (Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL)
- “I was not created to eat. I was created to protect.” (Pieces of a King Ep 2 — THE WAR COUNCIL)
- “I am born of the desert sands. What exactly do you think water would do?” (Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead)
- “As one who does not dream, good.” (Pieces of a King Ep 3 — The Warhead)
- “I am not human. I am not humanoid. I am merely a vessel. You cannot corrupt me.” (Pieces of a King Ep 4 - The Warmind)