As you step out of the ziggurat’s entrance, you see shapes moving beyond in the rain, advancing from all directions. The three corpses from the camp stand nearby, reaching out to attack you, and out in the swamp it seems as if every dead creature within a mile has risen and is shambling toward you.
There must be thousands of creatures – peat-coated skeletons, zombified crocodiles, hollow carapaces of spiders, and swarms of dead centipedes, bats, and blood-thirsting birds. Swamp water floods around you, filling the passage into the ziggurat, blocking your retreat.
Beneath the cries of the throng, you hear a deep sound, like a huge voice: “Climb!” You scramble up the ziggurat’s sloping facade, to the top of its first tier, as the undead horde closes on the ziggurat.
The swamp itself seems to rise up, pulling swathes of the hungry dead beneath the surface. A titanic serpent rises up and cuts off the approach of the undead. Its half-rotted skull, 20 feet long, snaps its teeth down upon the front line of the horde, and as it devours the dead it locks one enormous, milky white eye on the squad.
This is the Voice of Rot, fey titan of the High Bayou. It speaks to you, its voice both guttural and sibilant.
Most of those that fled your mortal trap were mute beasts, but one had reason. It can be judged. Follow the scent of its homeland. Find it. Cut its flesh.
Kill it, and it will rot. Send it home, and it will despair. Either, and I shall be appeased.