The morning air was no longer filled with the aroma of dew, wet promise of growing algae. Instead, it was thick with the flavour of charred iron and the choking scent of drying silt. What had once been a glittering, deep-diving paradise, a realm of endless blue, had been strangled by the unrelenting, unblinking sun. The horizon was now a rough, brown wound of broken earth, a thirsty land where the water had receded so far that it seemed to have given up altogether.

Quackers, a mallard whose once iridescent feathers were now filmed with a fine grey dust, waddled frantically across the parched basin. His movements were jerky, driven by a nervous energy that covered up a hollow, gnawing grief. He leaned down to examine a shimmering patch in the mud, but instead of the cool caress of water, his beak hit a surface as hard as a kiln-fired brick.

“Ouch! My beak!” Quackers cried out, his voice a frantic, raspy quack that echoed too loudly in the emptiness. He spun around, looking for his companion. “Hopper! Did you move the bottom of the pond, or did the world just get smaller overnight? This used to be an endless blue; now it’s just a brown scar where the water used to sing.”

The reeds are brittle, the mud is dry,

The blue has vanished from the eye.

From the shadow of a sun-bleached rock, Hopper emerged. The frog was a shadow of his former self. His skin, which used to glisten like polished emerald, was now matte and papery. He moved with a heavy, sticky lethargy, every hop a calculated risk against dehydration.

“I did not move it, Quackers,” Hopper croaked, his voice sounding like two dry stones rubbing together. “The Big Sun is drinking our home like it is a giant cup of tea. It drinks and it never gets full. My skin, it feels like a dry leaf about to crumble in the wind. I am losing my green and turning to brown, becoming part of the dust before I am even dead.” He looked around at the skeletal remains of the vegetation. “I search for a single wet lily pad to sit on, but they have all curled into fists and died in the heat.”

Quackers scurried towards a glint of neon blue nestled in a crevice of the dried mud. For a moment, his eyes sparkled with a glimmer of hope. “Look at this. I thought the spirits had finally heard us. I thought I found a giant, shiny berry.” He pecked at it, but the sound was a dull thwack.

“It is hard, Hopper,” Quackers whispered, his excitement collapsing into bitterness. “It is that Forever-Skin the Two-Legs drop behind. It does not melt in the heat, and it does not grow in the rain. It is a ghost that never sleeps, cluttering the world and confusing my tummy when I am desperate enough to try it.”

Hopper nodded solemnly, his large eyes reflecting the debris-strewn wasteland. “I saw a fish yesterday, Quackers. A silver-scale, gasping in a pool no bigger than a hoofprint. It was wearing a Forever-Ring around its neck. It looked like a crown of silver, but it was a noose. It
could not swallow the very water that was disappearing. The Two-Legs call it plastic, but to us, it is just a slow poison that chokes the breath out of the streams.”

The silver ring, a silent snare,

Brings a death the Two-Legs do not share.

Quackers paced the perimeter of their shrinking world, his webbed feet clicking against the parched earth. “They leave their Forever-Skin everywhere, Hopper. It does not belong to the earth, yet the earth is forced to hold it. It does not provide shade, it does not offer food. It just sits there, watching us fade away while it remains shiny and new.”

As the sun climbed higher, slashing at their backs with an unfiltered intensity, Quackers looked toward the northern edge of their world. The skyline was no longer a soft fringe of green.

“The shade, Hopper. My favourite willow tree is gone.” Quackers wailed, his wings drooping. The Metal Teeth machines came, those loud, stinking beasts and they chewed it down in minutes. They did not even eat it, they just left it in piles of bone-white dust. Now the sun bites my back, and there is nowhere to hide my ducklings from the heat. We are naked in a world that used to clothe us in shadows.

Hopper looked toward the horizon where the Two-Legs lived. “They are building their nests of stone and smoke now,” he said, watching the grey plumes rise from the distance. “They think the pond is just a trash bin to be filled and the trees are just sticks to be snapped. They do not realize that the world is a heartbeat. If the frog stops hopping and the duck stops diving, the whole world loses its rhythm and falls into a silence that no stone nest can fix.”

The Metal Teeth leave wood in piles,

While the Big Sun watches for a thousand miles.

The heat was not just a temperature, it was a weight. It pressed down on the mud, forcing the silt to become a burial ground for ancient bubbles and forgotten currents. Hopper sought to escape the heat by digging, but the earth was too obstinate, too dried out by the Big Sun to offer any respite.

The air wavered in waves above the hot mud. A heavy silence fell over the pond, punctuated only by the distant, mechanical hum of the nests of smoke. But in the silence, a new fire was lit in the eyes of Quackers.

“Well, I am not going to be a Quiet Duck,” he said, puffing out his dusty chest. “I am going to fly to their windows. I am going to quack until their ears ring, until they are forced to look at the devastation they have wrought. We are not just scavengers, we are the protectors of this water.”

Hopper felt a tremor of energy return to his sticky limbs. He stood as tall as a small frog could on the parched earth. “Then let us make some noise,” he agreed. “If they won’t feel the heat that burns us, let them hear the heart of the pond through our voices. Are you ready?”

The water calls from deep below,

Where the Two-Legs fear to go.

They stood together on the edge of the silt, a duck and a frog, two small sentinels against a changing world. As the shadows vanished against the wall of the encroaching heat, they began their song, not a song of defeat, but a sacred anthem of survival.

The mud is baking, the pond is small,

The shadows vanish against the wall.

The Forever-Skin and the heat stay long,

But we will raise a different song.

Guardians of the water’s edge,

From the deep silt to the river hedge.

To save our home is a sacred trust,

Before our green world turns to dust.