Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

At the edge of Moonwood, where the trees grew gnarled like knotted fingers and the mist hung low all year round, there stood an idol no villager dared approach.

It wept.

Always.

From hollow eyes, dark tears trickled down its moss-covered cheeks—never ceasing, never drying. No one knew who carved it or when it had appeared, but it was said to mourn for the world before.

The villagers of Grendel's Brook warned travelers: "Don't look into the idol's eyes. It'll show you the sorrow you forgot you carried."

But Orlen Hark, a scholar from the city of Varnwick, had no time for superstition.

He came with ink-stained fingers and a satchel full of rubbings and glyph books, determined to uncover the truth.

The first night he camped near the idol, the weeping kept him awake. The sound wasn't quite water—it was thicker, like oil slipping through cracks. He convinced himself it was a trick of acoustics, the way wind moved through the clearing.

The second night, his dreams changed.

He saw a faceless child standing beneath the idol, clutching a decapitated raven. A voice whispered in a forgotten tongue, and the earth trembled like it was sobbing.

He woke to find the idol turned slightly, its gaze no longer fixed on the woods—but on him.

On the third day, Orlen began his study.

He scraped away moss, revealing a language older than the gods of any known pantheon. Not words—emotions etched into stone: Regret. Loneliness. Shame. A sigil beneath the tears resembled a spiral collapsing inward.

The Hollow One's mark.

Orlen laughed bitterly. "Another cultic relic," he muttered, "meant to frighten children."

That night, he dared to stare into its eyes.

The world unraveled.

Not with violence—but with grief.

He saw himself as a boy, burying a twin brother he had forced to cross thin ice. His mother's hand, trembling as it slapped him once—never again. The way he had forgotten that pain, buried it beneath books and logic.

He screamed.

But the idol showed more: lovers he abandoned, friends he let drown in addiction, moments where a word of kindness could've saved someone—and he said nothing.

Each tear the idol cried was a weight on his soul.

He collapsed in the frost, chest heaving.

The idol whispered now—not words, but a sound like someone mourning beside you in the dark.

He crawled forward and pressed his forehead to the stone.

"Forgive me," he wept. "Please…"

The idol shuddered.

And for the first time in centuries, it stopped crying.

The next morning, Orlen was gone.

All that remained was his journal, soaked in tears not his own, and one final entry:

"The idol does not weep for itself. It weeps for us, until we remember how to mourn. When we forget again, it will begin anew."

By dusk, the tears had returned.