Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The stars weren't right anymore.

Clara Veil was the first to see it—not through a telescope or chart, but behind her own eyelids. Each time she blinked, the constellations danced out of alignment, spiraling into impossible geometries that didn't belong in any sky.

She hadn't slept in four days.

Not since the voice in her dreams whispered,

"You are not one mind. You are many. And the stars are watching."

Clara had been a street performer—fire dances, mirror illusions, sleight-of-hand for coins and smirks. But her talent, she'd learned, came not from skill, but from fracture. There were versions of Clara, echoing in other places, other worlds, and now?

Now the barriers were thinning.

It began when she looked into the broken mirror of a pawnshop in East Wyrmgate.

Her reflection didn't blink.

Didn't smile.

It only mouthed a question:

"Do you know which one you are?"

Then the sky cracked.

Not literally—but inside her, a shattering. Thoughts not her own. Voices speaking in perfect synchrony with her heartbeat. One voice cried. One laughed. One begged to die.

She collapsed in the alley.

When she awoke, her eyes were glowing faintly, and the stars above had begun to rearrange again—this time in perfect spirals.

Clara fled the city.

Every night, she saw more. Not dreams—memories that belonged to someone else. One Clara was a warrior, another a priestess in a world of endless ash. One had burned to death. Another had never been born.

And in the sky above them all, the same alien pattern of stars blinked.

A lattice of impossible thoughts—a celestial mind-map.

She wasn't being haunted.

She was being synchronized.

On the fifth night, the stars above Clara's world aligned into a perfect eye.

A black pupil.

A ring of gold.

And a blink so slow the wind itself paused.

Then came the voice—not internal now, not hallucination. The sky spoke:

"All of you are fragments. We are the lens."

"Your minds are ours to bind."

Clara screamed, and it echoed across infinite planes—hundreds of her, screaming together, some with mouths, some with claws, some without form at all.

But one Clara, somewhere else, did not scream.

She smiled.

And her voice overpowered the others.

"I accept."

In that moment, Clara Veil in this world opened her mouth—and starlight poured out.

The next day, she returned to East Wyrmgate.

No longer afraid.

No longer fragmented.

All her selves had merged.

And behind her pupils swirled stars that didn't belong to this universe.

She spoke once more.

"We are Clara.

We are the vessel.

And the stars have chosen to wake."

From that night forward, anyone who looked up at the sky saw it shift. Slowly. Softly.

And eventually—

it stared back.