Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

They came to her when they had nowhere else to go.

Not the wise. Not the good. Only the desperate. Those who had lost time, faces, or their names to the tide of something older than grief.

She was called The Skin Oracle, though that wasn't her name. No one remembered her name, not even her. But she remembered others. That was her curse.

She lived at the edge of the scorched city of Briarhymn, in a crumbling chapel wrapped in chains and stitched hides. No doors. No windows. Only a slit carved through flesh and wood, pulsing like a wound.

You entered by being swallowed.

And if you asked the right question, she answered—by pulling your future from your own skin.

Jasper Crane, the grave whisperer, came in search of her.

He carried a bag of teeth and the scent of grave soil in his coat. His dreams had been hollow for weeks—something was feeding through them into the waking world. Something below the cemetery.

He stepped into the oracle's chapel at dusk. The doorway sighed shut behind him.

Inside, the chapel walls were stitched with skins bearing prophecies—entire lives tattooed into stretched flesh. Every breath inside smelled of copper, ink, and despair.

The oracle stood in the center of the room, unmoving, cloaked in veils made of human parchment. Her mouth had been sewn shut long ago—but she never needed to speak.

She gestured with a hand missing all but one finger. Jasper approached.

She raised a blade of bone and held it toward him.

He nodded.

Then she began to cut.

Not deep—just enough to coax truth from flesh.

Symbols rose from beneath his skin, inkless and ancient: spirals, claws, a broken star, a name scratched out and rewritten in blood.

He screamed—but did not pull away.

When she finished, she pressed her palm to the open wound, and Jasper saw.

He saw roots made of veins, pulsing beneath the cemetery.

He saw the coffins emptied, not by theft but by transformation.

He saw his own corpse, walking the streets of a city that no longer had a sky.

And beneath it all, he heard the name of what whispered from the earth:

"Morrowthin."

A god buried beneath memory.

And Jasper was its mouth.

The oracle stepped back.

From the wall behind her, a strip of skin uncurled, falling to the floor like a shedding leaf. It bore Jasper's future—written in the language of ash and bone.

He took it. Folded it. Pocketed it.

Then he asked the oracle the final question.

"Can I stop it?"

She did not answer.

She simply peeled her face away, revealing nothing beneath but eyes—hundreds of them—blinking in patterns older than time.

And Jasper understood:

It had never been about stopping Morrowthin.

Only choosing what to become when it wakes.

Outside, the wind changed. The graves began to stir.

And in the chapel behind him, the oracle added his skin to the wall—still warm, still whispering.