Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

In the deepest archives beneath the ruined Cathedral of Saint Thorns, locked behind chains of bone and prayer, lay a blade wrapped in oiled cloth. It bore no name. Only a whisper.

The Dagger of the Dreaming Gods.

Evelyn Blackmoor had traced its myth through half a dozen madmen's journals and cathedral blueprints inked in dried blood. All led her here—to a vault sealed by sleep. The monks who once guarded it had long since perished, their corpses now dreaming forever in silent, sealed catacombs.

The final inscription at the gate read:

"To take the dagger is to wake what should never dream again."

Still, she entered.

The catacombs pulsed with warmth—wrong warmth, like breath from a beast that should not live. Stone coffins throbbed with distant heartbeats. Evelyn pressed forward, lantern swinging low, pistol drawn but useless in this sacred dead place.

She reached the final chamber, its door opened by a symbol she had carved into her own palm—the sigil of the Hollow One, bleeding still.

Inside sat a pedestal of carved obsidian. Upon it, the cloth-wrapped dagger, humming faintly.

But she wasn't alone.

A figure stepped from the shadows. Robed in gray, face hidden beneath a porcelain mask cracked across the cheek.

"It dreams still," he whispered. "To take it is to feed it."

"I'm not here to feed it," Evelyn said. "I'm here to kill it."

"Then you are already lost."

He rushed her.

The scuffle was brief. Her blade found his throat, and he crumpled like a rag doll—his blood hissing on the floor as if the stone itself rejected it.

She turned to the dagger.

Unwrapping it felt like peeling back reality. The cloth fell in slow motion, and the blade beneath shimmered not with light, but memory.

Every angle was wrong. It was too sharp for steel. Too quiet for metal.

It pulsed with dream.

Evelyn reached out.

The moment her fingers closed around the hilt, the world split.

She was standing in a place that wasn't real.

A sky of shifting eyes. Oceans of skin. Trees with mouths that sang lullabies in tongues unborn. And at the center—a god without a name, asleep beneath a veil of golden thread, turning in its sleep with earthquakes that echoed backward in time.

She saw herself—falling into its chest. Becoming its breath. Becoming its dagger.

A voice boomed across the void:

"Cut the veil, and I awaken. Cut the world, and I return."

Then silence.

She woke on the cold stone floor. The dagger still in her hand. But it now bore a single inscription, etched in blood only she could see:

"Use me, and the world shall dream no more."

Evelyn tucked it into her coat.

Some evils slept beneath the skin of reality.

And she was beginning to wonder if waking them was the only way to kill them for good.