Growing Pains

Raising an eldritch horror was surprisingly similar to raising a cat, only with more dimensional rifts.

Over the next few months, Squish grew. It went from the size of a beach ball to the size of a large dog. It developed more complex features—mouths that appeared only when it yawned, and a tendency to mimic Arthur’s shape.

Sometimes, Arthur would walk into a room and find a vague, black, jelly-like statue of himself sitting in his chair, trying to hold a teacup.

"No, Squish," Arthur would say, gently correcting the creature's posture. "Elbows in. And you're melting through the upholstery."

Squish would dissolve back into a puddle, looking dejected.

They developed a routine. In the mornings, Arthur would polish the great lens in the Lantern Room. Squish would help by slathering the glass with a translucent slime that, surprisingly, refracted the light better than any polish.

In the afternoons, they would walk the Tidal Shelf. Squish loved the bioluminescent crabs. He didn't eat them; he herded them into patterns. Fractals. Spirals. The geometry of the deep universe.

"You have an artist's soul," Arthur noted one day, watching Squish arrange starfish into a perfect Fibonacci sequence.

But as Squish grew, the sea grew restless.

The Black-Salt Sea had always been violent, but now it was angry. The waves battered the lighthouse with rhythmic, thudding blows. The water turned a sickly, phosphorescent green at night.

Arthur stood in the Lantern Room, looking down at the churning water. He saw shapes moving beneath the surface. Massive, scaled shapes.

* The Deep Ones.*

They were the foot soldiers of the ocean gods. They could smell Squish. They knew their master was here, growing fat on pickled herring and affection.

"They are calling to you," Arthur said.

Squish was beside him, currently taking the form of a large, black wolf with too many eyes. Squish looked down at the water and whined. The sound was high and keen, like a tuning fork striking glass.

"Do you hear them?" Arthur asked.

Squish pressed its head against Arthur’s hip. It was trembling.

Arthur placed a hand on Squish’s head. "Do not listen. They only know hunger. They do not know about warm rugs and tea."

But Arthur knew it was a lie. Squish *was* hunger. Squish was the Void given form. And Arthur was just a retired villain playing house.

That night, Arthur couldn't sleep. He sat in the kitchen, staring at his hands. They were stained with ink and salt.

"I cannot protect him," Arthur whispered to the silence. "I am a preserver, not a creator. I can only keep things as they are. But he is changing."

Squish slithered into the room. He was huge now—the size of a pony. He squeezed through the doorway with difficulty.

He didn't mimic Arthur this time. He just laid his head on Arthur’s lap.

Arthur began to knit. He knit furiously. He was making a sweater. A very large sweater. It was the only magic he had left that felt safe.