Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The dead city was waking.

Beneath a sky smothered in perpetual twilight, Necropolis stirred like an ancient beast shaking off the dust of endless sleep. Once a graveyard of forgotten empires, now it rose stone by stone, bone by bone, clawing its way back into the living world.

The black towers spiraled upward from the cracked earth, stitched together from mausoleums, shattered cathedrals, and the remnants of countless lost civilizations. Foul winds howled through the hollow windows, carrying the distant tolling of bells that had not been rung in a thousand lifetimes.

At the center of the rising ruin stood the Crown Tomb, a monument to the first and greatest king of the dead: Emperor Veylos, a tyrant so cruel that death itself had refused him rest.

Mira Calloway, survivor of horrors beyond reckoning, staggered into the heart of Necropolis, her lantern guttering against the heavy mist. Every step she took echoed across empty streets, drawing the attention of the sentinels: skeletal monks draped in rotting robes, their empty eye sockets leaking streams of black mist.

Mira's mission was simple yet impossible: to find the Obelisk of Severance, a relic said to sever the soul from the world's cursed cycle and end the rising of the dead.

But Necropolis was alive now.

And it was hungry.

As Mira crept through a boulevard lined with statues of weeping angels, the ground shuddered. Tomb doors burst open in showers of dust, releasing the Acolytes of Decay—withered figures whose mouths were sewn shut, but whose hands wove terrible spells into the mist.

A whispering chant began to rise:

"Return, return, rise with the forgotten breath..."

The buildings themselves leaned closer, like living things eager to smother Mira under their crumbling weight.

Above, the sky split.

From the tear descended Emperor Veylos.

He wore a crown of iron thorns, his flesh stitched with pages torn from forbidden tomes. His eyes were twin suns of necrotic fire. In his hand, he carried a staff made from the femurs of a hundred heroes.

Mira hid, barely breathing, watching as Veylos summoned forth armies of the lost. Warriors who had once defended humanity now marched beneath banners of rot, their armor weeping blood, their bones creaking with ancient rage.

Necropolis was not just rising.

It was marching.

Mira reached the Obelisk at last, hidden beneath a sunken amphitheater where the stones bled and whispered. The Obelisk was a jagged shard of black stone, humming with an eerie power that made her teeth ache.

As Veylos's forces closed in, Mira pressed her palm to the stone and spoke the Severance Rite.

The ground screamed.

The mist boiled.

The rising army staggered, some crumbling into dust mid-step. The towers cracked, their foundations groaning. Emperor Veylos bellowed a curse that shattered glass across every world.

But it was not enough.

Necropolis fought back.

With a final roar, the Crown Tomb exploded in a flood of spectral light, swallowing Mira and Necropolis alike.

When the dust settled, a new ruin stood.

Silent. Watching. Waiting.

Necropolis was wounded—but not destroyed.

It would rise again.

Because some nightmares could never truly die.