Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The Iron Gates of Carrion Keep hadn't opened in over a century. Forged from blackened steel, etched with ancient runes, and locked with no visible keyhole, they stood as a grim reminder of the war between the living and the things that lurked beyond sleep. Legends claimed the gates held back a city not of this world—a place where the dead ruled, and time had forgotten its name.

Tonight, they groaned.

Evelyn Blackmoor stood before them, breath fogging the air, revolver holstered but useless. Behind her, the city of Greyhollow stirred uneasily. The storms had stopped. The rain priest was gone. But something worse now listened through the silence.

A messenger had brought her here—a boy with black eyes and no tongue, bearing a sealed letter written in her own handwriting: "It ends at the gates."

She wasn't alone.

From the mist came Jasper Crane, pale, shovel in hand, eyes sunken with insomnia. "Voices in the soil say they're waking," he rasped. "All of them."

"The Cult?" Evelyn asked.

He shook his head.

"No. The sleepers beneath the city."

They had gathered—Madame Grin from the tavern, still bleeding from her eyes, Clara Veil wrapped in shadows, the Hangman's Shadow barely seen but always there. All marked by darkness. All touched by something unholy. And all were drawn here, to watch the gates open.

At the stroke of midnight, the first clank echoed.

The runes flared crimson. Screams, muffled and buried, rose from beneath the stones.

A hand reached through.

Bony. Regal. Wrapped in funeral silk.

The gatekeeper.

He stepped forward, mouth sewn shut, eyes sewn open, wearing a crown of rusted nails. In his hands, he held a silver urn—the same urn Evelyn had seen in her dreams, the one whispered about by the Ash Prophet.

He held it out to her.

"No," she said, but her hands moved anyway.

When her fingers touched the urn, a pulse rang through the air. All time stopped.

The wind died. The fire in the lanterns froze mid-flicker. The cultists behind the gate all turned in perfect, synchronized motion.

The urn opened on its own.

Ash and blood spilled forth—not onto the ground, but into the sky, forming runes of impossible geometry. Shapes not meant to exist spiraled upward. A howl, like a choir of unborn children, erupted from the threshold.

The gates stood fully open now.

From within came a figure.

Tall. Wreathed in shadow. Face hidden by a mirrored mask.

The Hollow One.

"Evelyn Blackmoor," it spoke, voice like a blade dragged across bone. "You have been chosen."

She fell to her knees—not out of worship, but because the ground bent beneath her. The city itself groaned.

The Hollow One raised a single finger.

And pointed at the moon.

It cracked.

As the first shard of silver light shattered across the land, a new truth was born:

The dead no longer slumber.