Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The sky cracked open with a sound like weeping stone.

From the shattered heavens spilled an unnatural twilight, an endless, choking ash that fell like snow over the dying world. The Ashen Eclipse had begun—a prophecy whispered among the deranged and the damned, now fulfilled in grim spectacle.

In the center of the decay, the twisted ruins of a once-proud cathedral twisted upward, as if clawing at the black sun that now hung bleeding in the heavens. Gargoyle-like creatures, half bone, half smoldering ember, lined the edges of the broken spires, their eyes lit with hunger.

Below, the ash gave birth to nightmares.

Shapes formed and slithered in the drifts—withered priests, children with hollow sockets, beasts whose mouths split open to reveal endless rows of gnashing teeth. Each creature bore a mark: a black ring burnt into its flesh, the sigil of the Ashen Eclipse.

Jonah Wren, lone survivor of the Silent Pilgrimage, staggered through the ashen streets. His every breath scorched his lungs; every heartbeat was a drum summoning the sleeping horrors around him.

He remembered the old tales:

When the black sun rises, the ash shall birth the forgotten,

And the world shall be unmade in sorrow.

He hadn't believed—until now.

Jonah's goal was madness itself: to reach the Bell of Mourning at the cathedral's heart. Said to be forged from the bones of fallen gods, the bell could summon the last vestiges of light and drive back the creeping darkness… if only for a time.

As Jonah moved deeper into the city, the ash thickened. Phantom hands clawed at him, whispering forgotten prayers and curses in languages no living tongue could recall. Buildings wept blood from their stones. The air itself moaned with the weight of ancient despair.

And always, above him, the black sun stared down, an unblinking eye of ruin.

He reached the cathedral as the eclipse reached its apex.

The Bell of Mourning hung shattered, its broken pieces buried beneath mountains of ash. A figure stood before it—something not quite man, not quite beast. Cloaked in shifting veils of smoke and sorrow, it turned to Jonah with a grin carved too wide across its face.

It was the Ashen Harbinger, the herald of the end.

"You seek salvation?" it rasped, its voice the death rattle of worlds. "There is none."

Jonah raised the shard of an old relic—a piece of the first sun's crown—and plunged it into the ash beneath the Harbinger's feet.

The ground screamed.

Ash erupted in a volcanic storm, tearing the Harbinger apart in a cyclone of agony. For a brief moment, the ash thinned, and the cathedral glowed with a pale, sorrowful light.

Jonah collapsed, his body dissolving into the very ash he fought to banish.

When the ash settled, there was silence.

The black sun still hung above, but now… it flickered, uncertain.

A single toll echoed across the desolation—the Bell of Mourning, struck once by unseen hands.

And somewhere, deep within the ash, something ancient and terrible stirred anew.

The Ashen Eclipse was only the beginning.