The cavernous road to the Pale Gate is ancient, far moreso than the Tomb that now occupies it, and the builders of the Tomb were not the first to note its significance, even among mortals (the gods who created it presumably knew from the start, as would their servitors). Little is still known about the builders of the complex that the Processional Way passes through beyond the sixth Stair.
In more recent centuries, during the generations when the Tomb was first being built, a wizardess who spent her last decades feeling that she was on the cusp of unlocking some great mystery of that complex which would lead her to phenomenal power. Such was her obsession that she defied death itself, sequestering herself in the Tomb as a lich.
A lich in the Tomb has both an easier and a harder time of it than a lich elsewhere. Easier, because the natural power of the Tomb makes the dead harder to distinguifrom the living. Harder, because the Final Court does not allow mortals to slip their grasp easily, and in the Tomb one sits on their doorstep. Doubtless bribery played a role in enabling her to hold this place.
She has forgotten her mortal name, though she has not forgotten her rivals. She has painted smooth rocks to look like skulls and given them names like Murten and Olbreect, and periodically picks one up to tell them about how her latest discoveries have vindicated her entirely, or to poke holes in a half-remembered argument she had with one of them. Her necromantic senses would preclude her using an actual skull of the wrong person for this; the knowing that she is using someone else as a stand-in would be too strong for her to properly gloat.
Some of the linens in her personal trunk survived; bedsheets and even a fine dress, the thread grown finer and wispier with age. Aside from that, she has a room of apparatus and reagents to run various tests only some of which are meaningful on things she digs up (where, exactly, she sources her reagents is a secret she keeps to herself), and several rooms of storage of artifacts of various kinds she has dug up from the temple complex below, catalogued with descriptions of half-understood visions her necromantic senses have given about them, and the results of her tests, supporting some argument about the history of the place below. She has written out some of it.
She is quite ornery of late, as the stairways down have been blocked off with light from the stolen twin topaz suns, and she dares not approach them. She has taken that time to focus on preparations for the next push of her study and analysis of the considerable amounts she has already gathered, but still wants to return downward. Depending on her mood she may offer to reward adventurers who remove the light wards from a stairway, or she may simply refuse to speak to them at all. She has been known to work with visitors and ghosts, though she tries to avoid diverting ghosts too long or drawing too much attention to herself and her place in the Tomb.
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Ten Leagues Beneath the Earth 