The Crest emerged from the rib-like tunnels into the cavern they had hunted for across endless nights which was the Zombie Den. It was not a cave in the natural sense, it was a cathedral of horror, carved from fused bone and flesh, with walls that pulsed faintly like veins feeding a monstrous heart.
A coppery stench clung to the air, thick and suffocating, and beneath it lay the sour rot of corpses left too long in the open. Below them stretched a basin that no map could have contained.
Tens of thousands of undead knelt in ordered ranks, their heads bowed as though in prayer. Human corpses in rotting armor, beast cadavers with ribs jutting out like barbed spines, hybrids stitched from both an army silent, unmoving, reverent.
And at the center, where the Den's were pulsating floor thickened into a mound of flesh and black stone, stood their master.
