Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

Before the moon fractured. Before the Hollow One whispered from beneath the roots. Before the stag walked…

There was the Black Star.

It arrived not from the sky, but from beneath—a wound in the earth that pulsed with wrongness. It wasn't a meteor or a relic. It was an idea made solid. A hunger so ancient that even the void had buried it.

And in the village of Wetherholt, built on that cursed soil, the night it awakened was remembered as the beginning of the end.

The sky that night was clear. The constellations danced above like old friends. Children laughed by lanternlight, and the town square buzzed with the last warmth of harvest.

Then the air split.

No thunder. No warning. Just a pressure—a vibration in the bones of every living thing.

People screamed without knowing why.

Dogs howled. Infants wailed. Birds dropped from the sky, dead mid-flight.

Then, in the middle of the square, the earth cracked open like a rotten fruit.

A column of black light surged upward—silent, cold, and seething with unknowable shapes. Not fire. Not shadow. Something in between. The villagers who looked upon it were struck blind… and then began to see.

One by one, they fell to their knees, whispering in a language they had never spoken before:

"Kail'therun-vel… Nith-eshara… Rul-thok navin…"

The light flickered once—and then imploded.

Where once there was a town square, now there was only a crater, and at its center:

A child.

Naked. Covered in soot and ash. Its eyes were two perfect voids, and its presence tasted like burnt copper and winter rot.

The midwife who had once lost her baby twenty years ago was the first to approach.

She reached out with trembling fingers.

The child gripped her hand.

She aged seventy years in seven seconds. Bones splintered. Hair turned to dust. Skin curled in like paper.

She fell as nothing but ash.

The child smiled.

They called it the Black Star—though it was not a star, and it bore no name. It aged without aging, and wherever it walked, the natural order twisted. Trees bent away. Fire flickered blue. Reflections looked back with foreign expressions.

Within weeks, Wetherholt became a ghost town. The villagers vanished, not into death, but into something else—twisted echoes of who they had been, shadows stitched together by madness and memory.

Now, deep in Moonwood, beneath a sky that remembers, the Black Star remains.

It does not speak.

It simply watches, waiting for the moment the sky itself forgets its name and begins to fall inward.

The Hollow One dreams of it.

The Stag fears it.

And when the last lantern of Moonwood is extinguished, it will rise again—not as a child, but as a god.

The earth does not mourn the star. It was always its womb.