The Temple of Ssathiss

Four days' travel into the green hell stands a ziggurat that has no business being there: black basalt smothered in strangler figs, yet dry and warm inside as a reptile's den. Caravans vanish here, and the villages along the jungle's edge keep losing their young. You follow the trail of a stolen child all the way to the temple steps.

The snake-people who rule here do not kill their captives. They change them, vial by vial, ritual by ritual, slowly into something that hisses and crawls and forgets its old name. Beneath the temple sleeps their god, a colossal primordial serpent, and High Priest Ssathiss, High Priest of the Serpent God, believes that enough transformed offerings will finally wake it. The child's transformation will be complete in two nights.

You creep through steaming corridors thick with scales and prayer, sabotage the brews in the breeding chambers, and free captives who are halfway gone and no longer sure they want saving. You choose your path: silence and cunning through the sacred layers, or fire and steel straight to the altar, while giant serpents uncoil from the shadows.

The turn: the ritual is further along than you feared, and the altar-blood of the offerings has already set the primordial serpent stirring. In the lowest chamber, by the churning light of the sacrificial fires, you must defeat Ssathiss and drag the child from the boiling pool before the god opens its eyes, for once it wakes, the whole jungle becomes its nest.