Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

It began as a whisper from beneath the skin of reality. Not a sound, but a knowing—a tremor in the soul of every creature still clinging to life after the Eclipse.

When Mara Quinn opened her eyes, she wasn't sure if they were her own.

The sky no longer followed logic. It pulsed in impossible colors—wet, glassy, and echoing. Mountains hung like chandeliers from the clouds. Rivers flowed upward. The stars blinked like eyes. This was not Earth.

It was The World That Shouldn't Be.

Born from the closing of the Tear, it was a failed compromise—a bastard hybrid of realms that could not coexist. Eldritch and organic. Divine and dead. Every broken truth from the old world stitched itself into this new grotesque patchwork of existence.

Cities floated like corpses in amniotic haze. Forests grew upside-down. Time hiccupped and rebounded in fragments.

And the dead? They no longer shambled.

They watched.

Iri Vance, now barely human, wandered the spiraling ruins of what had once been a chapel. His body had absorbed something from the Veil—a twisting of bone and mind. He heard the world breathe. He could see memories clinging to stone like frost.

Mara found him surrounded by ghostlight figures chanting in reverse.

She didn't recognize him at first.

Neither of them remembered how long they had been here. Days? Years? All moments collapsed now. What mattered was the pull—something was still calling.

At the center of this inverted world stood the Throne of Roots, where She-Who-Dreams-Backwards waited—the first mind to awaken when the universe was still molten with thought.

She was mother to the infection of death, the whisperer to the Ghoul King, the one who taught men to worship rot.

And she wanted out.

The final survivors—those who had touched the Hollow Sermons, those who drank from the Fountain of Antibirth—felt the tug as well. They came crawling, walking, levitating, from every fold of space, to bear witness.

The Throne opened.

And Mara stepped forward.

The Veil Thorn was gone. Her name no longer meant anything. But her will remained, cracked though it was.

The god-being spoke in thoughts. Images. Sobs.

"You closed the wound. But left the sickness."

"I am the echo. The memory. I am what comes after."

Mara understood: this world was the cost of survival. There would be no undoing. No cleansing. This was their inheritance.

And now, the choice—let Her through and merge into permanent madness, or seal her again, and let reality fossilize.

She chose silence.

And with one final act—one thought loud enough to rupture dreamspace—Mara whispered:

"No more gods."

Light. Then nothing.

When the survivors woke, they were in a forest of bone. The sky was still wrong, but quiet. She was gone. Sealed, forgotten.

And though the dead still wandered, though monsters still fed, something like order had returned.

A world rebuilt not by gods…

…but by those who remembered what it meant to be human.