Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The silence after the storm was worse than the wailing.

Ash hung in the air like a thousand fading constellations. Each speck glowed faintly, pulsing at irregular intervals, as if the fragments were breathing. Mira held Elena against her chest, her own skin blistered and raw, but the heat no longer came from outside. It was inside—pressing, whispering, tasting the air through her veins.

Elena stirred, her fissures smoldering, golden light flickering faintly beneath her skin. Her lips barely moved, but Mira felt the words against her collarbone.

"They're not gone. They're inside the air… inside me."

Mira glanced up at the drifting ash. The motes seemed to shift when she looked too long, forming patterns, faces, mouths opening soundlessly before dissolving again. Each pulse sent a tremor down her spine. The plain was no longer empty. It was haunted by memory.

The ground beneath them cracked with a low groan. Not shattering—breathing. The glass plain rippled outward in concentric waves, as if something massive had stirred beneath its surface. Mira tightened her hold on Elena, her shards snapping to orbit defensively.

"Elena," she whispered, "you can't stay here. This place is feeding on you."

But Elena shook her head weakly, hair falling across her glowing eyes. "It's not the plain. It's them. Every ember I unmade—they're still tethered. They want back in."

As if answering, the ash swirled into a slow spiral above them. The faint glows began to synchronize, no longer random—now rhythmic, like the beating of a colossal, disembodied heart. Mira's own heartbeat stumbled to match it, her breath catching.

Then the voices began. Not screams this time, but whispers. Dozens, hundreds, speaking all at once, threads of language twining through the air. Mira couldn't catch all the words, but what she did chilled her blood:

Chosen. Hollow. Return. Burn. Return.

Elena shuddered violently, clutching at her chest. The fissures across her body brightened, light bleeding through her skin as though her flesh was only thin paper. Mira grabbed her wrists, forcing her to look up.

"Don't listen. They're not you. They're fragments—scattered, broken. You unmade them. You don't owe them anything."

Elena's laugh came out jagged, almost a sob. "That's the problem, Mira. They are me. Every ember scattered is still bound to my core. I can feel them pressing… begging…" Her voice cracked. "If I let go, they'll swarm back. If I hold them, I'll tear apart."

Mira's shards shivered in the ash-filled air. For the first time, she felt something new inside the motes—a pull. Not toward Elena, but toward her. As if the embers had noticed her, too.

The spiral of ash tightened, descending slowly, faint motes drifting closer until they brushed her skin. The contact seared and froze at once, a taste of something vast, something that remembered. Mira gasped, nearly dropping Elena as a chorus of alien memory knifed into her mind—visions of burning skies, endless choirs, the crown remade again and again.

Elena's voice yanked her back.

"Mira—don't let them in!"

But it was too late. The ash had chosen.

Mira's shards screamed, their edges glowing as the embers threaded toward her orbit, twining themselves into her steel.

The plain thrummed like a drumhead.

And Mira realized, with a sick twist of dread, that the vessels were not gone. They were reforming—through her.