Handbook of Erotic Fantasy: Spawning (Patreon)

Deep in the western ocean, far from the landlocked town of Plotsville, or the sprawling woodlands of the Ivy Throne, or the bustling streets of the Kingdom of TBD where the monarch called Elf Princess ruled, something monstrous stirred.

It was huge and misshapen. Veined with twisting patterns like the roads or rivers or trade routes on some blasphemous map. Like unto a tower it was, and yet more like the strange excretion of a deep sea mollusk cast to a foreign shore, washed upon a darkling tide, and yearning to return once more to the fetid depths from whence it came.

Who can say what hosts of seamen haunted its secret ways? Pale and writhing, massed to surge in furious torrent to the breach, yet having seen neither sun nor life?

It seemed to pulse as it rose: a thing alive, but possessed of neither thought nor scruple. There was only blind and hungry need: instinct as old the first things to crawl and wriggle from the primordial ooze, casting tendrils to a burning sun, and questing without eyes for purchase. For some foothold. For a secret and safe place to anchor and to thrive.

“Come on, baby,” said the purpler mermaid. “Don’t you want to make a half- ancestry?”

“Apologies, my seashelled seraph. I promise you I am striving to concentrate.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Swash’s bluer lover, her genital papilla pulsating with sympathetic anticipation. “Are you close to the brink?”

“You have my word,” said the frustrated triton. “I hover upon the very precipice of the oceanic abyss. It’s just hard to focus with all that architecture surging by.”

“Oh,” said Purple. “You mean the ‘ruined city rising from the deep?’ We get those sometimes.”

“Yeah,” said blue. “We’ve honestly been expecting one for a few weeks now.”

The three fishy lovers turned their heads to the side, pondering the bizarre edifice in all its thalassic majesty. Scale and distance made it hard to judge, but it seemed a certainty that it would break the surface before long.

“Kind of looks like a dick, doesn’t it?” said Swash.

“Eh,” said the mermaids, flippered hands tilting in the universal sign of “eh.”