Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The stars fell long ago.

Not in fire and brilliance, but in quiet betrayal—plucked from the heavens like rotting fruit and sealed away, their light imprisoned in a book stitched from the skin of forgotten titans.

They called it the Book of Severed Stars.

Now, in the suffocating twilight after the Ashen Eclipse, it surfaced once more, cradled in the gnarled hands of the last Star-Scribe, a withered figure known only as Myrrin the Broken.

Myrrin limped through the dead valleys, ash clinging to the hem of his ruined robes. Behind him, the sky was a black canvas, empty of any celestial glow. Above the land hung a single, oozing scar where the stars once burned, pulsating like a wound too deep to heal.

He whispered names from the Book as he walked—names of stars no tongue should speak aloud. Every syllable unraveled a piece of the world around him: trees crumbled into dust, rivers turned to black mist, stones melted into quivering flesh.

Each step forward was a dirge for existence itself.

Within the shattered walls of an ancient observatory, he found them waiting: a handful of survivors, hollow-eyed and desperate. Among them stood Serah Vane, a hunter of relics, blade sharp and soul heavier still.

"You have it," Serah said, voice shaking. It was not a question.

Myrrin merely nodded and lifted the Book. It throbbed in his hands, its cover stitched with constellations that shifted and screamed in silence. The ink within was made of the liquefied essence of dying stars—impossible, forbidden.

"I can end it," Myrrin rasped, "or I can remake it."

Serah stepped forward, weapon drawn. "You'll destroy what's left."

Myrrin smiled, a cracked, miserable thing. "There's nothing left to destroy."

The Book fell open, pages fluttering in a phantom wind.

From its depths spilled a vision: countless worlds writhing in chains, skies split open to reveal monstrous things lurking beyond time itself. Hands, too vast to comprehend, reached down and plucked souls like insects from their bodies.

The survivors screamed, blinded by the awful majesty of it.

But Serah, through sheer force of will, held her ground.

She hurled her blade at Myrrin. It struck true—but the old man merely staggered, and the Book drank the weapon's spirit as if it were wine.

It was too late.

Myrrin spoke the final Word.

The world convulsed, folding in on itself like a dying flower. The stars that had been imprisoned were loosed, but they returned not as light, but as malignant, rotting corpses that filled the sky with grotesque, flickering mockeries of constellations.

Each "star" birthed horrors upon the earth—gods that crawled and slithered, singing songs that hollowed out the minds of any who listened.

The Book of Severed Stars burned in Myrrin's hands, fusing to his flesh, merging him with the vast, broken firmament.

He had become the first of the Woundbearers—a living scar upon reality.

As the new night spread, Serah fell to her knees, gazing up at a sky no longer her own.

The stars were dead.

And what rose in their place hungered for the world yet to come.