Pondwallow - The Giant Toad
The pond took the geese first. Nobody noticed until it took something that could scream.
Role in Its Society
South of the Great Oak, where the Weald's tree line thins into a scatter of open pasture, one farmhouse sits alone beside a spring-fed pond that has fed its livestock and irrigated its garden for as long as anyone in the family can remember. Pondwallow has no rivals here and needs none — the pond is small, shallow at the edges and deep enough at its center to hide something considerably larger than it has any right to hold, and for a solitary household with no neighbors close enough to compare notes, a slowly shrinking flock of geese is easy to explain away as foxes, or a hard winter, or simple bad luck.
It doesn't compete with anything for the pond because nothing else has been able to keep it. Pondwallow eats what wanders close to the water's edge, and it has grown fat and confident on a diet nobody has yet connected to a single cause.
Appearance Description
Pondwallow is enormous for its kind, a warty, moss-green bulk nearly the size of a plow ox when it hauls itself onto the bank, with wide, lidless golden eyes that sit high on its skull to watch the shoreline while the rest of it stays submerged. Its skin is slick and mottled with algae, blending seamlessly with the pond's murky shallows, and its throat distends grotesquely when it swallows, a detail the family has never lived to describe firsthand. When it moves on land, it does so in a single explosive leap rather than a crawl — silent, then suddenly not.
Backstory
The pond has always had toads in it — small ones, the ordinary kind that keep the insects down and sing on warm nights. Pondwallow was almost certainly once one of them, though nothing about its growth to its current size has ever been witnessed or explained; the Weald's spring-fed ponds are known to carry unusual vitality in their water; wells and streams near the Great Oak in particular are treated as blessed rather than examined too closely, and a family that trusts its water source implicitly is a family unlikely to ask hard questions about why one toad in the pond kept getting bigger every year while the others didn't.
What is certain is only what the family has slowly, uneasily pieced together: the geese thinned out first, then the barn cat stopped coming around, and now no one goes down to the water alone anymore, though nobody has said out loud exactly why.
