Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

They came at dusk, barefoot and blindfolded, clothed in linen stained with sap and blood. Twelve villagers from Dagger's Hollow, led into the heart of Moonwood by an old tradition no one remembered the origin of—only that it was followed, year after year, or the Stag would come hungry.

They called it the Sacrament. But it was no offering of peace.

It was penance.

At the front of the procession walked High Matron Durell, eyes bound like the rest. Her staff was carved from alder and adorned with bones of prey animals. She guided them past the old stones, each etched with a different sigil: sunken eyes, fractured spirals, blooming antlers.

All around them, the forest exhaled fog.

None dared speak. The hush wasn't sacred—it was enforced. The woods listened. The Stag listened.

When they reached the Glade of Antlers, they formed the circle.

It was there the bones jutted from the ground like trees made of ivory—massive, twisted antlers of beasts long dead or perhaps never living. Some still dripped with old blood.

High Matron Durell struck her staff three times.

The fog parted.

And he emerged.

Staghorn.

The guardian of Moonwood. Or its curse.

He stood twice the height of a man, his frame both skeletal and covered in fur, with antlers that stretched out like the branches of a dead tree. His eyes glowed—not red, but a soft, mournful amber.

He moved with silence unnatural for his size, hooves never touching soil.

"Which of you bears the rot?" he asked—not with words, but with the weight of guilt pressing against the mind.

No one answered.

He didn't need them to.

He pointed to Elra Vint, a young mother who had poisoned her husband with nightshade to be with another. She had confessed only to the forest.

She fell to her knees.

"Forgive me," she whispered, trembling.

Staghorn knelt.

With one hand—clawed and ancient—he touched her brow. Her body froze. Roots burst from beneath her skin. Her eyes grew pale.

The others watched, unable to look away.

She did not scream. She did not move. She became a tree.

Twisted, gnarled, blooming red flowers from her lips.

It was done.

The Sacrament had been accepted.

The villagers turned and left. None wept. None spoke.

Such was the price of peace with the forest.

But High Matron Durell lingered, watching the great stag wander back into the shadows. Her lips pressed tight. She had seen his antlers before—in an old sketchbook hidden beneath church floorboards, from before the first Sacrament.

The truth gnawed at her:

The Stag had not always been a god.

He had once been a man.

That night, as the wind howled through the trees, another flower bloomed on the edge of the glade.

White.

Silent.

Waiting.