Amonkhet: The Trials and the People

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Story Chapters

1. 01

   Liliana and Jace find the machinery below the promise

   The embalming chambers reveal that Amonkhet's dead rise automatically and are controlled through their cartouches.

   Liliana's search for Razaketh led her and Jace below Naktamun's public streets. Mummies carried the freshly killed initiates through an efficient embalming operation. Its murals linked the afterlife's promised passage to a demon Liliana knew through her own binding contract.

   When the dead turned on them, ordinary necromancy could not simply replace their orders. Ambient magic raised the corpses; the cartouches supplied physical control. Pulling one free destroyed its wearer rather than delivering a useful servant.

   Temmet discovered the outsiders and challenged their knowledge of the God-Pharaoh. Jace temporarily controlled him to hold off the mummies while they escaped. He did not erase the vizier's memory. Their discovery gave the Gatewatch a warning and made Liliana's personal bargain part of a much larger system.

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2. 02

   Nissa finds a thread inside the Trial of Knowledge

   Nightmares and visions expose Amonkhet's corruption without giving Nissa a complete explanation or command of its gods.

   Nissa could sense diseased power beneath Naktamun's beauty. Seeking Kefnet brought her into a trial where instinct repeatedly trapped her in nightmares. She escaped its first restraints by studying their magical structure instead of accepting another apparent awakening.

   The visions suggested an older pantheon corrupted by a winged intruder, hidden labour and a chain of events extending beyond this plane. An angel resembling the figure from her Emrakul ordeal challenged her sense of agency, but was an illusion, not evidence that the titan had left Innistrad's moon.

   Kefnet then threatened to dissolve her mind. Nissa recognised leylines in his own being and altered one small pattern enough to end the attack. She survived with a new connection she did not yet fully understand. That was neither a cure for Bolas's corruption nor mastery over a god.

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3. 03

   Gideon's search for faith reaches Bontu's toll

   The Trial of Ambition requires the surviving initiates to take hearts from people they have trained beside.

   Oketra's kindness helped Gideon imagine a form of divinity different from the one that had failed him on Theros. Joining Djeru's crop put that hope inside a system where each new chamber reduced the group through dangers and deliberate sacrifices.

   At the final crossing, Bontu demanded a heart from each successful initiate. Djeru killed Meris while believing he was preserving his friend for paradise. Gideon's attempt to intervene was stopped; his own protective magic did not free the others from the god's terms.

   He confronted Bontu and refused to purchase passage that way. The god dismissed his judgment and ordered him out. Seeing the dead carried away as anointed workers left his original question painfully unresolved: divine warmth and a community's sincere faith could coexist with a machine that spent their lives.

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4. 04

   A childhood journey gives Samut a different history

   Samut's loss outside the Hekma becomes the beginning of a search that overturns the God-Pharaoh's founding story.

   As children, Samut, Djeru and Nakht ventured beyond the Hekma. The desert held ruined evidence of a past their approved lessons did not explain, but the expedition cost Nakht his life. Samut and Djeru carried the same loss into very different ideas about safety and meaning.

   Djeru followed the Trials toward the promised afterlife. Samut returned to forgotten structures and fragments of writing, preserving their discoveries in a mural and pursuing the questions her friend had left behind.

   Eventually she recognised the supposed saviour as an outside invader. Bolas had not rescued this world from the catastrophe represented in its ruins; he had caused the catastrophe. Her resistance grew from investigation and grief, not simply an unwillingness to obey rules or a stranger's warning about a dragon.

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5. 05

   Samut saves the life Djeru wants to surrender

   Gideon helps stop Hazoret's final blow, but Djeru experiences survival as the destruction of his intended future.

   The final Trial placed the captured Gatewatch and other dissenters against the remaining initiates. Hazoret's battle magic and the loss of their ordinary spells made the confrontation more than a straightforward opportunity to talk people out of their training.

   Samut fought beside Djeru to keep him alive, while he pleaded for her to receive the glorious death he still wanted. When Hazoret prepared to grant his own final wish, Samut tackled him aside and Gideon blocked the spear.

   Djeru was furious rather than grateful. Fear that an unworthy soul would cease to exist had shaped his understanding of death. Samut offered a future of helping people and growing old, but did not instantly persuade him. The approaching alignment of the sun interrupted their conflict; saving one body had not yet dismantled a lifetime of belief.

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6. 06

   The Gatewatch helps break Razaketh's hold

   Liliana kills one of her demonic creditors, while the brutality of her revenge unsettles the companions who helped her.

   Razaketh could make Liliana's body obey through the terms of her contract. The Chain Veil and her threats were not enough to turn that control into freedom. Jace reached her mentally, and the others entered the fight to give her a chance to act.

   With the demon injured and distracted, Liliana used dead crocodiles against him and shared their senses as they consumed him. Her desire for liberation became an appetite for the destruction itself. She kept going after Jace recognised that the demon was already dead.

   Razaketh's defeat removed a real hold over her, not every obligation she had made. The Gatewatch's assistance mattered, and so did their reaction to what they had witnessed. Liliana celebrated a victory she had wanted for years while Naktamun's wider catastrophe continued around them.

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7. 07

   Rhonas discovers whom his strength has served

   The Scorpion God's fatal strike breaks the corruption hiding Bolas's reshaping of Amonkhet.

   Rhonas initially understood the unfamiliar divine attacker as another challenge worthy of the returning God-Pharaoh. He fought with strength and venom, apparently bringing the Scorpion God down. The killer recovered and pierced his skull.

   As the poison severed his life, the magic suppressing his memory also unravelled. Rhonas remembered that Amonkhet had once had eight gods, and that Bolas had rewritten their purpose and their people's sacred practices. Even the attacker was one of his stolen siblings.

   His last effort transformed his staff into a serpent that restrained the killer long enough to buy time. It did not restore him. The remaining gods were left with his accusation and their own uncertainty as the Locust God's swarm began consuming the barrier that protected the city.

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8. 08

   Hapatra's rescue work outlasts a collapsing pantheon

   Poison, animals and improvised help protect civilians even as Kefnet and Oketra fall before the returning killer.

   When the Hekma failed, Hapatra acted with tools she understood. Her poison could stop moving corpses even if it could not remove the curse that animated them. She used Tuya and the animals of the Holding against the attackers, helped children arm themselves and joined Samut and Djeru.

   Kefnet and Oketra seemed to defeat the Scorpion God together, but its ruined body reformed. It killed Kefnet, then fatally struck Oketra when she intervened between the killer and Hapatra's basilisk.

   Hapatra did not respond by declaring all divine care fraudulent. She blamed the absent architect of the disaster and demanded that Gideon confront the intruder from his own wider world. Her immediate task remained local: find the surviving gods and preserve the people who still needed them.

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9. 09

   The Hours are lived one unfinished life at a time

   The Eternals' assault destroys the private hopes that Naktamun's public language of glory cannot describe.

   The assault was not only a battlefield seen from above. Ordinary people tried to reach shelter, find someone they loved or use a familiar route while an army of perfected dead cut through the city. Their training offered no reliable protection from the purpose for which the Trials had prepared them.

   Genub found Makare, but the woman he loved had been turned against him under an Eternal mage's influence. Kawit carried an arrow from the fallen Oketra and tried to strike Bolas; he stopped it with almost casual attention, and the Eternals closed in.

   Amenakhte used his own wounded body to cover a child who was not his, asking a passing woman to save them. The scene does not provide a reassuringly confirmed rescue. These lives matter beyond whether the survivors' next military plan succeeds: the catastrophe destroyed futures before anyone could count its victory.

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10. 10

    Survival becomes a promise made in both directions

    Samut, Djeru and the survivors help Hazoret defeat her pursuer, then leave the ruined city rather than confront Bolas.

    The Scorpion God pursued an injured Hazoret through the storm. After it stung her arm, she severed the limb before its poison could consume her. Samut attacked the heat-weakened carapace while the survivors' spells and Djeru's rope team forced the killer toward an obelisk.

    Hazoret burned the impaled attacker from within. Her gratitude to Samut recognised that mortals had protected their god, not merely received protection. In that moment Samut's spark ignited; she briefly reached another, unfamiliar world and immediately fought her way back home.

    Bolas's confrontation with the Gatewatch was still ahead of the nearby survivors. Hazoret chose the desert and the duty to keep her people alive, and they promised to guard her in return. Their endurance was not a claim that Naktamun had been saved. It was a different relationship from the Trials' demand for obedient deaths.

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