She raised her hand. In her palm rested all the letters of the Georgian alphabet, each one a tiny, breathing butterfly. Ani , Bani , Gani ... They rose as one, a swirling cloud of script and wings, and wrapped around Davit like a cloak.
She smiled. Her lips moved. No sound came, but Davit understood: Papillon qartulad. I never left. I just became the language.
Davit’s heart stopped.
He had found the lost manuscript. But more than that: he had learned that a language does not die when its books burn. It flies. And if you listen very carefully in the old streets of Tbilisi, on a still night, you can still hear the whisper of the Papillon Qartulad —the butterfly in Georgian—waking the alphabet one wingbeat at a time.