The Loose Stitch

Arthur Penhaligon woke up, or rather, his consciousness simply clicked back into focus like a lantern shutter sliding open. The first thing he noticed was the draft. The second thing he noticed was that his left arm was missing.

He sighed, a sound like dry leaves rustling in a crypt. He sat up in his four-poster bed, the heavy velvet canopy shrouded in centuries of dust, and peered over the edge of the mattress. There, on the floorboards, lay his left radius and ulna, still clad in the sleeve of his tweed sleeping gown.

"Oh, bother," Arthur murmured.

He swung his legs out of bed. His knees clicked—literally—as bone met bone. He picked up his detached limb with his right hand, tucked it under his armpit like a baguette, and shuffled toward the sewing kit on the vanity.

This was the trouble with Lichdom. Everyone warned you about the eternal damnation and the insatiable hunger for souls (which Arthur had managed to curb with a strict diet of chamomile tea and existential dread), but no one mentioned the maintenance. The stitching on his shoulder had been fraying for weeks.

Arthur sat in the pale, grey light of the morning, threading a bone needle with heavy black thread. Outside the thick glass of the lighthouse window, the ocean roared. It was the Black-Salt Sea, a body of water so dark and violent that sailors claimed it didn't have a bottom, just a direct drain into hell.

"Hold still," Arthur whispered to his arm as he reattached it. He pulled the knot tight with his teeth.

Once he was whole again, Arthur went downstairs to the kitchen. It was his favorite room. It smelled of dried sage, old paper, and the faint, sweet scent of formaldehyde. Copper pots hung from the ceiling, interspersed with bundles of dried herbs and the occasional talisman made of crow feathers.

He filled a kettle and set it on the iron stove. He didn't need to eat or drink, but the ritual was important. It was what separated him from the monsters. Monsters didn't use coasters. Monsters didn't wait for the water to reach a rolling boil.

He poured the tea into a delicate porcelain cup painted with violets. He sat at the scratched wooden table and stared at the empty chair opposite him.

"Wind’s picking up from the East," he told the empty chair. "Might bring in some driftwood."

The chair didn't answer. It never did. That was the point of the Black-Salt Lighthouse. It was the furthest point on the map, a jagged tooth of rock jutting out into the nothingness. Here, Arthur could rot in peace. Here, he couldn't hurt anyone.

He finished his pantomime of breakfast, washed the cup, and put on his heavy oilskin coat. It was time for his morning patrol.

The Tidal Shelf was treacherous. It was a vast expanse of slick, black rock revealed only at low tide, riddled with pools that glowed with bioluminescent fungi. Arthur walked carefully, his boots finding purchase on the slime. He wasn't afraid of slipping—drowning was just a boring inconvenience when you didn't have lungs—but he hated getting salt in his joints.

He was looking for timber to shore up the garden fence (where he grew poisonous nightshade and very confused carrots), but instead, he found the anomaly.

It was lodged between two sharp crags of basalt. It was about the size of a beach ball, obsidian black, and wet.

Arthur poked it with his walking stick.

The object didn't thud. It squelched.

Then, an eye opened on its surface. It was a yellow, reptilian eye with a horizontal pupil. Then another eye opened. And another. Within seconds, the object was covered in blinking, wet eyes, all staring at Arthur.

Arthur froze. He knew what this was. He had spent two hundred years as the High Cultist of the Void, chanting verses that made ears bleed. He had summoned things that ate cities.

This was a spawn of Azathoth. A Shoggoth-larva. A baby Elder God.

The logical part of his brain—the part that had written treatises on magical containment—screamed that he should cast *Banishment* immediately. He should crush it before it grew up and consumed the reality barrier.

The egg pulsed. A low, vibrating sound emanated from it. It sounded... lonely.

Arthur looked at the bleak, grey horizon. He looked back at the lighthouse, standing tall and empty against the sky.

"Well," Arthur said, his voice cracking. "You can't stay here. The tide is coming in."

He reached down. The thing was warm. It vibrated against his skeletal fingers. He picked it up and tucked it into the crook of his arm, right against his newly stitched shoulder.

"Into the bucket with you," Arthur muttered, turning back toward the tower. "But if you eat the carpet, you're going back in the ocean."