Once upon a pale moonlit night, the crickets cried at their king’s demise. No cricket strung its legs. On the night the cricket king died, even the frogs (close allies to the cricket kingdom) ceased their croaking. No joyful summer sound was made that night at Cricket Pond. Upon their Lilly pads the frogs lay weeping – leaving the fireflies to overtake the pond. During the week of mourning for the cricket king’s death, the firefly king sent messengers out to all the neighboring ponds with words of war. Once the fireflies signaled their planned cowardly siege to all those within flashing distance, hoards of foreign fireflies flocked to Cricket Pond.
Seeing Cricket Pond surrounded, the cricket queen commenced crying herself (not for her husband’s untimely demise, though, being the one who had killed him, but because the fireflies not intended to seal away her recently acquired throne). All loyal occupants of Cricket Pond saw this revolt as an un-laudatory act of natural treason on the part of the fireflies and voiced their support to the cricket queen. She quickly dried her tears and roused up the neighboring ponds’ crickets and frogs to war.
The war for Cricket Pond soon began, with the flustered cricket queen at the home army’s head. Her own head was covered with flowering Lilly pads the frogs had leg-picked and the seamstress crickets had sewn together with the finest homespun silkworm string. This ordinate crown even caused the fireflies to stare at the cricket queen with awe.
The war continued under moonlight and sunlight until the pond became a bloody flashing battlefield of firefly bulbs, frog legs, and cricket wings floating atop its once peaceful splendid surface amongst broken Lilly pads.
In the end, the cricket king remained unburied – the cricket queen’s wilted corpse fallen at his feet. The crickets were so few that they hopped to the nearby hills to rebuild their clan in the Catfish Stream. Dissected frogs lay in rotting piles upon the pond’s Lilly pad field, and the fireflies dispersed from Cricket Pond chasing the Northern Lights in dazed confusion. And the foreign silkworm took possession of the throne of the vacant pond at its only inhabitant left alive.