[Norfleet]

I am utterly mystified. It's POSSIBLE, but VERY unlikely, that a pretender in such good health spontaneously died of spellcasting fatigue, but he'd have to have cast something MASSIVELY fatiguing to accomplish that in his state of health, and the symptoms don't match up at all.

He COULD have been struck and failed an MR save on an instant death spell/effect of some kind(Blood vengeance?), but you said the Sorceresses cast nothing of interest.

It's also possible he was auto-killed by the battle timer, but that doesn't really fit the symptoms you describe either.

Frankly, I'm stumped. Either there's something at work that you failed to notice, or this is just a plain and simple bug. Was your pretender in the HoF? If so, check his hitpoints. If he's at negative several thousand, odds are very good he was killed by some sort of instant death effect, as opposed to battle damage. Battle damage rarely leaves the deceased at worse than -50. If you're seeing something like -9000, that's some sort of death effect.