The path is invisible. He follows it behind the silent flutter of black velvet wings, his toes unerring in their tired dance from desert’s edge to something else – this great unknown. Perhaps the butterfly knows better than he does, but when they met it rested on the only bloom for miles, beating out the sadness from its fluttering, lace-edged self. It has not spoken once in all that time; or perhaps he cannot hear its voice. But it moves forward, still. Forward, always.

        He follows in its quiet wake, though his steps falter now, no longer the bright gamboling dance of hours – days – lifetimes – before. Every now and then the flicker of blue eyes betrays some deep uneasiness; the silver figure, like a crownless stag, pauses from playing and turns to drink in with uncertain quietude the towering glare of mountains – strange, distant things. They look like animals asleep, or perhaps dead – some long ago leviathan now buried under soft, unthinking earth. His thoughts become a black thing crawling in the silence of his wake.

        With a shake of his narrow head, he leaps after his guide. They have come a long way – long enough that distance leeches heat from the air, though the sun remains. It kisses a shimmering brightness into his hide, though as the shadows lengthen still he glows: a luminescent skeleton, a hollow silhouette built from matchstick bones and canvassed with that too-rich splendid hide, too soft for a land boasting trees. Too thin for the distant, near-extinct promise of snow cradled amongst towering peaks. The place he traverses now rejects him, and he feels its presence all around him like a vice, though he moves forward anyway. Perhaps because it is the only direction he knows.

        The sun paints bloody colors in the sky as finally, the shadows on his horizon turn to trees: high, jagged, long-toothed trees groaning in soft, ancient voices as a breeze threads through and then abruptly dies. At the forest’s edge his guide doubles back, black-patterned wings kicking dusty-soft against his worn-skin face. Then they are up – into the dusk – and gone. “Good bye.” His voice is fearful music to join the chorus of noises beyond, dying quickly under the brighter songs of birds and the feet of small, scurrying things. The butterfly might never have been there; might never have known itself followed, at all. It certainly gives nothing in return before departing, and he watches until his eyes pick out no more than darkness, purple and green.

        The forest is large.

        His tail moves like a blind snake, a slow trundling crawl along his side before it snaps away. He is accustomed to the sight of new things but not this, this place of ground always covered and shadows, shadows moving right and left and behind. Intention quivers on his skin like sweat, but without the butterfly he stands like something carved from marble, errant, and concerned. He is small: a brilliant fleck of light unable to cross wholly yet into that other side.

        And so he hesitates, a wraith on the doorstep – waiting, perhaps, to be let in.