The Bones of Ailloth

The fields of Ailloth are broad and rolling, with just the hint of hills. At the junction of no less than five ancient kingdoms, and two current ones, these hills have always been a battlefield. They have hosted thousands of battles, in which possibly millions died: soldiers, beasts, poor unfortunate souls who just got in the way. Fell magic was thrown: killing magic, sleeping magic, shadow and flame.

Over uncounted eons, such things leave a mark. The rage, the death, the hunger, the fear. Blood spilled by the drop, by the gallon, by the barrel, soaking into the land, year after year, century after century.

Uncounted graves line the verges of the fields, or lie trampled beneath the boots of yet another war. Just as many bodies were left where they lay, to rot, forgotten, like they were never people with sons, daughters, husbands, wives.

All the souls never shriven, never buried, are caught there still. Every soul that couldn't let go, and the echoes of those who did move on, their pain, their loss. Some of the greatest warriors and mages in history lost their lives there, left their mark there, and perhaps left their corpses in the red earth.

The soil is red, literally, with all that blood. The stunted, twisted, trees are black and mostly leafless, except for a few with red leaves that one would best avoid.

Finally, all the death and horror has wakened the land, and it is angry. Hungry. Scared. All the things that those who died there felt. And it is rising. The dead are rising, lifeless, heartless, but not all mindless. There is a consciousness guiding them, a singular purpose . . . but it is the mind of the land itself. And it has only what goals it has learned from all the battles fought upon it.

Kill. Eat. Destroy. Survive. Conquer.

It feels only what it learned to feel.

Hunger, pain, anger, sorrow, ambition.

It wants what any traumatized child would want, if they had no notion of love.

Justice. Revenge.

The fields of Ailloth are rising, expanding. The dead are its army, the twisted beasts and plants its guardians. And many, many dangerous monsters were used in the battles over the span of millenia. All of them are coming back. And they begin, already, to push at their borders. To raid. To kill.

How do you stop an apocalyptic plague of the undead when its source is no single necromancer, but rather the rage and pain of an abused land?

You should have listened to the druids.