Role

Chapter 14

I was. I drank nectar, and I am now too big to do so, but I can
pluck honeysuckle off the vine and feel fine flower sweetness on my
new tongue. Taste is not the same. Thinking is not the same.

Butterflies have no idea what heartbreak feels like, but I know. I
would be a butterfly again, but it seems best to stay an Elf, since
I will live a thousand years, and learn from my mistakes, and some
day even find love that will not recoil from me when I say what I
am. Was.

I was a butterfly in Darsylon, and while I was a butterfly, I drank
nectar in the palace gardens, which have the finest blossoms in all
of Thera, as far as I am concerned. While I was a butterfly, I
cared for very few things but to drink from flowers and to fly and
to watch the palace guards escort the princess around. I was brave
for a butterfly, and I often flitted right up to the guards and sat
on their shining armor.

After a while, I became different. I remembered the face of one of
the guards. I came to him only. I thought he surpassed the garden
flowers in beauty. I did not know the word, but now that I do I
can say I loved him.

I know it is miraculous for me to have come to this realization,
since butterflies live for perhaps a month once we emerge from our
coccoons. I was perhaps twelve days with my wings, two days into
my love, when I became depressed. Even a butterfly knows it
cannot be an Elf's mate. I wished to be an Elf also. I wished it
to the flowers, the trees, the ground, and the sky. I wished it to
the other butterflies, who did not understand and flew away. I
wished it to everything I knew, which was a very small world only a
time ago--but my wish came true.