Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

It stared down at her—not a face of flesh, but a vast mask wrought from smoke and ember, every line of its features warped yet unmistakably hers. Hollow sockets flared where her eyes should have been, burning pits that radiated a pull so strong Mira felt her own gaze trying to leap free from her skull.

The plain bent beneath its presence. The ground curved upward as though gravity itself bowed to the ash-born double, glass shards rising in spirals like blackened petals offering themselves to a new god.

Elena coughed against her shoulder, each breath a rattle of ember and smoke. "It's not a crown anymore. It's you. It's what the vessels wanted all along—a hollow given your name."

Mira's jaw locked, fury trembling through her veins. "Then I'll tear it down."

But when she lifted her shards, the face moved with her. Every twitch of her arm, every stagger of her pulse—the reflection copied it in grotesque scale, steel-sounds echoing like thunder. Her blades were no longer just hers. They were its, too.

A shard slipped from her orbit, hovered, then plunged toward Elena's throat. Mira barely caught it midair, her fingers closing around its edge. The steel cut deep into her palm, blood sizzling on its ember-lit surface.

Her double tilted its massive head, mouth widening into a smile that split ear to ear. From it came her voice, stretched across the plain:

"You already bleed for me. Soon you'll breathe for me too."

Mira's breath hitched. The cut in her hand hissed, veins spidering with ember-light as if the ash tried to root itself through her wound. Her grip wavered.

Elena's cracked voice broke through, thin but sharp. "Don't fight the mirror by smashing it. You'll only break yourself. Change what it shows."

The words struck like flint. Mira's eyes narrowed, burning through the haze. If the face copied her, then every act of hate, every desperate strike would only sculpt it stronger.

She drew in a breath, deeper than the ash allowed, and instead of hurling her shards she folded them. The blades curved inward, orbit collapsing into a spiral over her chest—a sigil of containment, not war.

The reflection faltered. Its ember-sockets flickered, the grin twisting uncertain.

Mira pressed her bleeding hand against the spiral of shards, forcing blood and ember together. The steel hummed, vibrating like a throat catching its first breath. She whispered, not to Elena, not to the ash, but to herself:

"You are mine. Not the other way around."

The spiral flared, light ripping through the plain. The glass ground shuddered as cracks raced outward, splitting the reflection's colossal face into fractures. Its hollow eyes widened, shock burning brighter than rage.

The scream that followed shook the void. Not just sound—memory, pain, fragments of Mira's own past flung back at her in shards: her brother's death, the hunters' betrayal, every moment of weakness she had buried.

Elena's glow guttered at the onslaught, but she clung tighter. "Hold, Mira. Don't let it claim the story. Write it back into you."

Mira's spiral pulsed, each beat syncing with her chest. The reflection's cracks spread, its ember bleeding away. Yet in its collapse, the ash surged denser, coiling inward, not gone but gathering.

The face shattered—only for a body to begin forming beneath it.

And the shape was stepping down from the sky.