Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

Time had broken.

Not shattered like glass, nor torn like cloth—but rotted, slow and unseen, until it crumbled into madness.

In the world that remained, the Whispering Epoch began.

At first, it was the clocks: their hands spun backward, forward, sometimes freezing altogether. Then came the whispers—tendrils of sound threading through the mist, murmuring in languages older than dreams. People vanished, leaving only their shadows burned onto crumbling walls.

The few who endured spoke of an entity born from the collision of time and nightmare: the Keeper of the Whispering Epoch, a creature neither alive nor dead, its form constantly unraveling and reweaving itself in impossible ways.

Jonas Wren, an exhausted drifter wrapped in layers of tattered cloth and iron charms, stumbled into the heart of the Epoch by accident—or perhaps by fate.

He had followed a thread of music—a children's lullaby, haunting and beautiful—that led him into a valley where the world itself seemed to bleed. Above him, the sky fractured into endless mosaics, each shard showing a different reality: a world where trees sang, where oceans burned, where cities wept rivers of ash.

In the center of the valley stood the Monolith of Woven Time, a colossal spiral of bone and rusted metal. Around it, figures danced, their faces hidden behind masks carved from ancient stone. Some moved in slow motion, others flickered too quickly to track.

Jonas knew the stories.

The Monolith was a doorway—and a prison.

The Whispering Epoch was not just an era; it was a being, trapped here, forever whispering itself into existence.

As Jonas approached, the masks turned toward him.

A voice, ancient and endless, seeped into his mind:

"You are the fracture. You are the seed."

The dancers parted, revealing the Keeper.

It looked almost human—save for the fact that its skin was made of flowing script, words too ancient to read. Its eyes were clocks with shattered faces, spinning and grinding, leaking black sand.

The Keeper extended a hand, offering Jonas a choice: to stay and be part of the new dream, to have a place carved into the shifting epoch—or to be erased entirely, his existence unwritten.

Jonas hesitated.

Memories of his lost family, his fallen world, flared within him. But so did something else: a terrible, gnawing curiosity.

With a trembling hand, he reached for the Keeper.

Time folded in on itself.

Jonas became many things: a child playing by the river, an old man dying under a crimson sun, a shadow flickering across alien skies. In each life, the whispering followed, growing louder, shaping him.

Until, at last, he returned to the valley—not as a man, but as part of the Epoch itself.

Another mask.

Another dancer in the endless spiral.

Above, the Monolith pulsed with new energy. New stories. New fractures.

And across the broken worlds, the whispers grew stronger:

"We are the past. We are the future. We are the forgotten song of time."