The Fire Between Us

They said love would clip my wings. I didn’t realize it would poison the pond.

⸻

I

I came from the rafters—black wood, restless sleep, a choir of squeaks that bounced off limestone like nervous thoughts. The colony spent its nights counting moths like pennies and preaching the gospel of hunger: catch, gulp, vanish. Eat fear before fear eats you. The creed worked for everyone but me.

On the third new moon of shedding season, I slipped past the outer veil of roost‑smell and flew toward the marsh. I told myself I craved fat June beetles, but I was chasing the pulse I’d heard nights earlier: a high, harp‑bright song riding the damp air. A single note, stretched thin, refusing to break.

At the water’s edge I found her.

A frog, pale jade under moonlight, lifting her throat in slow‑motion prayers. Each croak landed on my ribs like hands testing for cracks. She saw me hovering and didn’t flinch.

“Stay or go,” she said, voice swallowing the night’s echo. “Just don’t pretend the choice is anyone’s but yours.”

Her eyes—oil‑slick, reflective—held my face until I folded my wings and dropped beside her on a lily pad quivering under the added weight. Frogs are cold; I was colder. We shivered ourselves into conversation. Names were traded. She was Traia. I was Chiro.

She offered me a cricket, still wriggling. I offered her a mosquito, already drained. We laughed—strange, choked noises from mismatched throats. In that tiny trade I felt a bridge click into place: bones over water.

⸻

II

Weeks melted. My absences stretched like dusk to dawn. The matriarch noticed first. Where do you vanish, son? I fed her silence. She stuffed it down my throat with warnings—about owls, cats, daylight. She forgot to warn me about wonder.

Down at the pond, Traia spoke in riddles about tides, spores, and the stars rotting into dawn. Between riddles we tasted each other, uncertain and hungry. Once she curled on my chest, listening to the tremor beneath my sternum.

“Your heart,” she said. “It stutters.”

“It’s learning a new rhythm.”

“You’ll outgrow me.”

“Or molt into you.”

She hummed, a vibration that trickled into my teeth. “If you stay, the colonies will starve.”

“They can hunt without me.”

“Love is a net. Every thread you tie here unravels someplace else.”

I told her I didn’t have a choice. She laughed. “That’s what everyone says right before they choose.”

⸻

III

We married by accident. One night, the moon bruised full, we stood on a drowned log sharing the same dragonfly—her pulling at the thorax, me at the wings—until the carcass split like a wishbone. Blood dripped into the water, casting metallic rings. The pond answered with a chorus louder than any ceremony. In that feral music, frogs and fireflies bowed. Even the cattails bent. We looked at the mess on our tongues and knew: vows could be edible.

“Take half of me,” she whispered, “and fly.”

“Take half of me,” I answered, “and swim.”

We swallowed. The swamp crowned us with silence. That was enough.

⸻

IV

Word flew faster than any of us. A heron carried rumors upstream; a raccoon carved them into mud. My colony learned that I’d traded roost for muck, wings for webbed devotion. They reacted like hearts dropped in ice water: shock, then cracks.

Matriarch sent envoys—sharp‑toothed cousins slick with cave mildew. They circled the pond, refusing to land, spitting accusations at my reflection.

Traitor.

Glutton of grief.

Return before dawn or be eaten by oblivion.

I spread my wings above the lily pad throne, showing them veins flushed emerald from weeks of algae kisses. They shrank at the color—alien, amphibian. They fled.

That should have been victory. Instead it felt like a bone pulled loose.

⸻

V

The trouble arrived with white fungus—chytrid—clinging to my cousins’ feet when they came to reclaim me a second time. They landed on half‑submerged cedar, threatening violence if I refused. We yelled, squeaked, croaked. No blood, but spores drifted from their ankles, snowing over the water.

Traia tasted it first: a numbness in her skin. She hid it behind jokes about love sickness. Within a week, young tadpoles floated belly‑up like seeds gone bad. Adults grew sluggish mouths, peeling lips. Songlines fractured.

I begged the colony for the cure they carried in cave lichen. They withheld it unless I returned.

“You cursed us,” they said. “Fix it with your absence.”

To fly back meant renouncing her. To stay might kill every frog, maybe her too. The decision was a cliff. And the fall was already happening.

⸻

VI

At dusk on the equinox, we gathered on the log where we’d married. Frogs blinked dull eyes, legs trembling. Bats skulked in branches, waiting to see if I would break. The air smelled of rot, of farewells engraving themselves into damp bark.

Traia pressed her snout to mine. “I know what choice looks like. It’s ugly. Make it anyway.”

“I can’t leave you to drown in my contagion.”

“Then end the contagion.”

A thought hatched in my tongue: fire. Cave lichen is flammable when dried. Spores die in heat. So do wings.

I flew—first time in weeks—straight to the roost. I tore gnarled sheets of lichen from the ceiling, filled my mouth until acid stung. I ignored the screams, the pleads, the claws that scored my flanks. I carried the fuel back, throat ablaze.

On the log I built a pyre of cattail fluff, dragonfly husks, broken reed spears. I spat the lichen, struck sparks with flint‑tipped teeth. Flames leapt, orange gnawing blue, smoke snarling upward like a new pantheon. Bats shrieked, frogs croaked, night crackled.

I caught Traia's eyes through the haze. She nodded once, slow as moonset.

We leapt in together—the frog bride and the bat groom—into our shared furnace. Skin blistered, fur curled. Spores hissed, died. Wings charred to lace; webbing crisped to charcoal. I tasted her breath one last time, flavored with ash and pondwater memory.

The fire snuffed when our bodies stopped feeding it. Dawn crept, pale and embarrassed. Survivors—bats coughing from treetops, frogs blinking in muck—watched smoke spiral like a severed chord to the heavens.

⸻

VII

They say the pond healed. New tadpoles hatched unblemished. The colony found richer hunting grounds after the cave’s lichen regrew. Balance, that cruel accountant, recorded my debt as paid in full.

But legends silt in the water.

On windless nights, a shadow circles above the pond, wings tattered and glowing ember‑red. At the same time, ripples disturb the surface though nothing breaks it, as if a phantom frog still practices her vowels. When the two pass through each other—air meeting water—fireflies extinguish, and the chorus holds its breath.

They remember what was traded. The one that ended a love story and salvaged two tribes. The one that authored a villain and a saint in the same burned skin.

I watch with what’s left of my eyes and feel no regret. Only the quiet hum of having once chosen—and the pond, unpoisoned, humming back that it was worth the blaze.

Epilogue – The Last Echo

They built it dangling — a saloon slung beneath the roost by fraying ropes, hovering just above the pond. A place where frogs with cracked croaks and bats with crooked wings come to lose names and forget kingdoms. No one’s turned away at The Last Echo.

The floor sways with each step. The air smells like damp feathers, spilled cricket wine, and old ash.

Rumors say the place was founded in memory of a wedding that burned. That the ashes from that fire still drift down in the quiet hours, flavoring the drinks with something bitter and old.

They say there’s always a shadow in the corner booth — behind the flame of a low, trembling candle. No one’s seen its face. Only the curl of a wing, the glisten of a webbed toe, the stitched cloak that clings to both scale and fur.

Some call it the Echo. Others call it what’s left.

It never speaks.

But every time someone breaks the rules for love — every time a bat and a frog share a drink — the candle by its table flares. Just for a second.

And the pond murmurs.