Laranas

                  "The pond should have dried long ago".

That’s what the geologist said when he came through, something about the water table and the angle of the hills.
But even in the worst drought, the pond remained. Dark, motionless, a glass eye watching the sky.

And every year, when the heat broke and the frogs began to sing, someone disappeared.

It began with cattle. Then the schoolmaster’s boy. Then Marta’s own sister, long before her eye turned white. Always at night. Always near the pond. Always just after the croaking began. The villagers stopped counting.

They know the stories. The tales whispered from mother to child like lullabies soaked in fear. Laranas, they call her. The Queen beneath the lilies. Her name, once human, no longer fits the thing she became.

But she remembers.

She remembers the betrayal. The promise made in desperation, the price agreed in secret. The way they turned on her the moment it was done. They drowned her where the reeds are thickest. Bound her hands. Filled her mouth with stones.

She didn’t fight.

She only stared as the water closed in, her face unreadable. Stoic. A touch of melancholy in the way her lips parted—not in terror, but in something softer. Grief, perhaps. Not for herself. For them.

Now, she returns each year, not out of vengeance, but duty.

The promise was broken.
A debt remains.

And debts must be paid.

The pond remains. And so does she.

Last night, the frogs began again.

Marta heard them first, waking to that slow, crawling chorus echoing up from the banks. But this time, it was different.
This time, it was not one voice or a hundred. It was a single note, low and sustained, like a warning held too long.

She opened her door. The path to the pond was dry. Mud cracked beneath her feet.

But the frogs were waiting.

A thousand tiny eyes blinked as one. The reeds swayed in a wind that did not blow.
And there, at the water’s edge, 

Laranas.

Not cloaked in moss, not shrouded in mist.

Barefoot. Pale. Still.

Her head tilted slightly, as if listening to something below the surface. Her gaze lifted slowly to Marta, her expression unreadable.

And then, she spoke.

Just one word.

“Marta.”

Then she turned to the water.

And something rose.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      ~D.G