Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

In the aftermath of the Severed Stars, as the night festered and the land soured, a kingdom rose from the grave of the old world.

It was not made of stone or spirit—but of bone, rot, and misery.

The Ghoul King ruled it.

Where once there were villages and forests, now there stretched an endless mausoleum of writhing flesh and blackened tombs. The sky churned with unnatural clouds, and from cracks in the earth poured a mist that whispered the secrets of the dead.

The Ghoul King sat upon a throne built from skulls still whispering the last prayers of the world that had died. His crown was a halo of splintered bone, his scepter the spine of a god.

He had been a man once. A man called Lord Thavik, an arrogant warlord who sought immortality through forbidden rites. When the stars fell and the earth wept, he seized the opportunity to ascend—binding his soul to the endless corpses that flooded the land.

Now, he was many. Now, he was endless.

At the fringes of his crumbling kingdom, a band of desperate survivors crept through the corpse-choked landscape. Among them was Iri Vance, a gravedigger turned reluctant hero, and Mora Quinn, a seer whose dreams bled into waking nightmares.

They sought the Heart Reliquary—an artifact said to be the only weapon that could shatter the Ghoul King's unholy soul.

The path was a gauntlet of horrors. Trees pulsed with veins, the rivers ran with thick, coagulated blood, and the air itself tasted of iron and decay. From the shadows shuffled the Ghoul King's thralls—cadaverous knights, hollow-eyed priests, and starved beasts stitched together from a hundred lost lives.

Each step forward meant another brush with death.

At the kingdom's center, they found the Reliquary entombed beneath the Chapel of Silent Hunger—a cathedral inverted into the ground, where the stained-glass windows depicted not saints, but the Ghoul King's endless feast.

Guarding it was the Mawfather, a living mass of teeth and flesh, singing hymns of consumption in a voice that rattled the bones from the body.

With blade, wit, and terrible courage, Iri and Mora defeated the Mawfather, tearing the Reliquary free from the squirming altar.

But as they fled, the Ghoul King stirred.

He rose from his throne, a tower of fused corpses, his voice a dirge that cracked the stones.

"I see you," he boomed, "Little thieves, little worms. You cannot flee my hunger."

The kingdom itself shifted, the land pulling inward toward the King like a vast, gaping maw.

Iri and Mora ran as the world was devoured behind them.

Above, the sky split, revealing an endless expanse of black teeth.

The Kingdom of the Ghoul King was not a place—it was a beast, alive and ravenous.

And now it was awake.