# Butterfly

Aquamarine landed silently on the leaf next to her father, her wings beating softly in the warm summer air. She loved flying on a night like this, when the heat that had baked the ground during the day was released in wave upon wave of warmth. It was the whole world breathing out, lifting her on its breath.

But that was the way that Aquamarine saw things, and her father considered her a frivalous creature.

“Father?”

Aquamarine’s father did not turn his eyes away from the battlefield. “Captain,” he replied flatly. He would only ever address her by her rank here on the field of battle. She would have traded every breath the world had just to hear him call her by her own name again.

“How goes it?”

Aquamarine’s father lowered his viewing glass. He looked weary, and his wings were drooping and gray.

“The grass continues its onslaught against the tree’s territory. The earthworms have broken through the northern sea shell barrier, there are slugs on the march …”

Aquamarine grabbed her father instinctively as he stumbled forward, his legs suddenly to weak to support him. His wings had turned a deeper gray, with barely a trace of their original bold red to be seen.

“When did you last sleep father?”

“I will sleep when the garden is secure, when our people are safe.”

Gently lowering her father down, Aquamarine rested beside him on the leaf. Beneath them, the sounds of the garden raged. The leaf trembled, and Aquamarine’s wings fluttered instinctively.

“Fly,” her father gasped. “Fly while you still can.”

“Shhh, there’s plenty of time. I’m only at my third moon.”

“This war has run for more than a hundred moons, child. My father fought, his father, his father before that. What are we fighting for, if not the freedom to fly?”

Aquamarine smiled. “Sometimes, father, I think you fight because you like it.”

“Hah,” the old man laughed. His wings flared with colour for a moment, an explosion of red and crimsons. Blood colours. Soldier’s colours. He struggled to his feet. “I suppose I might have one or two more moons in me yet, Captain.”

“Sir,” replied Aquamarine, and snapped off a clumsy salute before taking once more to the skies. The warm air bouyed her up over the field of battle and she thought, just for a moment, that she her father take his eyes away from the war that raged all around them to watch his daughter fly.

It was a war worth winning, she agreed. It was a war for the freedom to fly.