Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The sea screamed louder than the dead.

As the shattered boat scraped onto the black rocks, Esmé Dreadmoor stood unmoving, staring at the solitary lighthouse ahead. It flickered with an eerie green glow, pulsing like a heartbeat. The sky above churned with thunder, but no rain fell—only ash.

The island was not on any map. Solomon had found it etched on the spine of a drowned sailor. It wasn't supposed to exist… yet here it stood, wrapped in salt and whispers.

"This is the place," muttered Mister Vex, brushing barnacles from his coat. "Where time drowns."

They climbed the narrow path. Bones littered the shore—seagulls with hollow eyes, sailors twisted in mid-scream, their bodies caught in loops of time. One man kept drowning every few seconds, face vanishing beneath invisible water.

Talia sketched in silence. Her page began to weep ink.

Inside the lighthouse, reality shifted.

Corridors folded into one another. Staircases looped back. Windows showed tomorrows that hadn't happened yet—visions of their deaths, some violent, some eerily calm. Nara Hexley saw herself as an old crone, whispering spells to a burnt forest. Gideon Moth saw only rot.

The Keeper waited at the top.

He was faceless, robed in oil-soaked fabric, and his lantern held not light but a sliver of void. "Welcome to the Nowhere Hour," he intoned, voice stitched with centuries.

"Why are we here?" Solomon asked.

The Keeper raised the lantern. Inside it spun a black sun. "You seek the end of ends, the final truth. But first—your stories must be undone."

The light hit them.

Each fell into their own tomorrow.

Talia awoke in a world ruled by her drawings—monsters of charcoal and blood. She bled ink and could not scream.

Gideon was trapped in an endless graveyard, burying the same body—his own—over and over.

Nara faced a swamp of living shadows. Her mother's corpse sang lullabies in reverse.

Mister Vex wandered a ballroom where everyone wore his face, dying again and again as the clock hands spun faster.

Solomon? He stood in a library that stretched into the stars. Every book was about him. And all the endings… were lies.

But Esmé, blade-dancer of the haunted woods, saw through the veil.

Her spectral blades hummed as she slashed the false future, breaking the loop. She climbed the final stair and thrust her blade into the Keeper's lantern.

It shattered—unleashing screams, centuries of lost tomorrows, and one singular truth:

There is no future until the last gate opens.

The island trembled. The sea rose. Time screamed.

They awoke on their ruined boat, drifting toward shore.

The lighthouse was gone.

But in Esmé's hand was a shard of black glass—still warm, still ticking.

And in the reflection… she saw herself die. Again and again.