Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

Deep beneath the rotting fields and shattered temples, older than the Ghoul King, older even than the Eldritch Choir itself, something vast and dreaming stirred.

It had slumbered through eons of silence, its hunger buried under mountains, its mind seeping into the roots of the world.

The survivors whispered its name in terror: Dreadroot.

When the Ghoul King's kingdom began to collapse under its own monstrous weight, the ancient soil cracked—and from those fissures, Dreadroot's children were birthed anew.

Massive vines, black as coal and veined with greenish fire, tore through the mausoleums and corpse-fields. They strangled the dead and the living alike, dragging their writhing bodies down into unseen depths. Where these roots touched, rot accelerated, and life withered into ash within seconds.

The Ghoul King, arrogant and ravenous, dared to command Dreadroot's tendrils. He thrust his scepter into the ground and called upon his dark authority.

But Dreadroot did not bow.

The earth convulsed, and a terrible voice—not spoken in words, but felt in the marrow of all things—replied:

"You are a child. I am the root. I am the end."

In a nearby ravine, Iri Vance and Mora Quinn watched in horror as a mountain rose from the soil.

It wasn't stone—it was flesh. It was bark. It was all the bodies of the old world, fused into a titanic tree whose branches clawed at the bleeding skies.

From the trunk spilled eyes and mouths, speaking riddles in dead languages. The ground quaked as the First Thorn emerged—a guardian of Dreadroot, armored in petrified bone and wielding a whip of screaming vines.

Mora clutched the Heart Reliquary tightly. It pulsed in her hands, eager to be used, but she knew the Reliquary's power was tied to death—and Dreadroot was older than death itself.

"We can't kill it," she whispered.

"Then we trap it," Iri said grimly.

Their only hope lay in the Shackle Sigils—ancient glyphs that bound elder horrors before the first cities rose.

Scattered across the ruin were the remains of those sigils, buried under centuries of mud and corpses.

As the First Thorn lumbered toward them, Mora and Iri raced against time, scouring the dead lands for fragments of forgotten magic.

For every glyph they restored, the ground trembled harder, and Dreadroot's body twisted in rage. Roots lashed the air, dragging entire sections of the Ghoul King's army into screaming pits.

It was a battle of time versus annihilation.

In the end, as the final sigil blazed with blinding violet light, Dreadroot let out a bellow that shattered the bones of all who heard it.

Its monstrous trunk recoiled, the roots withdrawing, binding themselves in a coil of writhing agony. The tree-thing was forced back into the bleeding cracks from which it had risen, imprisoned once more.

For now.

Mora collapsed, the Reliquary smoking in her hands.

Iri pulled her up, both of them staring at the pulsing, sealed wound in the earth.

"Nothing stays buried forever," Mora said, her voice hollow.

Iri nodded. He knew the truth: Dreadroot would dream again.

And next time, it would not dream alone.