When he surfaced, sputtering, she was sitting on his head. Dry. Purring.
Glot, still dripping, crawled to Mewra’s paws. “What are you?” he whispered. cat god amphibia
Her name was Mewra, though the mud-skimmers called her She-Who-Purrs-Below . She arrived not in a clap of lightning, but in a dropped fish bone—a stray cat, half-drowned and utterly unimpressed, paddling onto a lily pad the size of a dinner plate. The bullfrog chieftain, Glot, found her there: a ginger tabby with one torn ear, licking brine from her paw as if the entire swamp owed her a better meal. When he surfaced, sputtering, she was sitting on his head
It landed in the Gullet with a wet thump . And Sszeth—old, enormous, made of rot and resentment—choked. The hairball expanded in the acid dark, a tangled mess of fur, mud, and what looked like a single, iridescent scale from a fish that had never existed. The Gullet convulsed. The ground shuddered. And then, with a sound like a thousand glass frogs shattering at once, Sszeth sneezed. Glot, still dripping, crawled to Mewra’s paws
Mewra looked at him. Then she looked at the new axolotl-thing, which was already trying to climb her tail. She yawned again. A tiny froglet hopped from her mouth—not eaten, just stored—and sat on her nose, blinking.
Mewra blinked once. Very slowly. Then she reached out, hooked a claw into Glot’s dewlap, and dragged him face-first into the water.