Elation swept through the Drounge at its unexpected epiphany. Never having felt itself trapped, it hardly knew how to react to being free. Exhilaration was a sensation with which it had never before had to come to terms. Uncertain, tentative, it could only try.
As the tiny cluster of astonished, fragile creatures it had come close to killing looked on in wonder, the enormous butterfly that had materialized before their eyes spread six-foot wings of prismatic emerald and opalescent crimson and rose from the bleached desert floor, haltingly at first but with increasing confidence, into a cloudless and welcoming clear blue sky.
XX
“Let me have another look at that hand.”
Simna wordlessly raised the arm by which he had been attached to the lumbering horror. Rotting flesh had been miraculously renewed, nerves sutured, skin regrown, the bleeding stopped. With the impossible butterfly vanishing into the distance and his restored limb hanging healthy and normal from the end of his shoulder, his attention kept switching back and forth between wonders.
“By Gravulia, what—what was it?” he mumbled as his rangy companion critically inspected first palm and then individual fingers. “One minute I could see it clearly and the next, it wasn’t there and something beautiful was.”
Ehomba replied without looking up from his examination. “Disease is like that.”
The swordsman blinked. The hallucinatory, spectacular butterfly was gone now, swallowed up by the sky and imagination, leaving him to contemplate his right hand. Moments ago it had been a putrefying, decaying ruin. Now it was restored. A small whitish scar, souvenir of a fight in a chieftain’s hut on a distant steppe, had vanished from his index finger together with the more recent corruption.