The butterfly sword of chaos is never the same twice.

But then, neither is its wielder.

The sword changes those who bear it, transforming, transfiguring.

The temple where you found it was a ruin, roof caved in, snow-covered floor. When you took it from the statue of the smiling god in the temple, it didn’t look like a sword at all. It perched on that stone hand, a frozen butterfly, its forlorn wings outstretched. You thought for an instant, poor thing, to have strayed here, so far from summer, and in a moment of compassion, took it in your hands to breathe warmth into it.

Sometimes, you wonder if that compassion is what saved you.

Or if you even can be saved.

You don’t wield it. It wields you. It makes you what it needs. And what it needs is to do its master’s bidding.

Its master—one of the old gods. The ones that the Emperor and his priests have forbidden. Excised from human awareness. You were able to read a few inscriptions on the walls before the blade tugged you away. So you know the god of light, life, and renewal became the god of destruction and change when he assumed his brother-aspect. You learned that the sword is the “light of knowledge.”

That it exists to destroy ignorance.

You’d never have guessed that it would have a sense of humor about that.

In the first town, where the snow drifted hip-high, its icy fingers clutching at your skirt, and where the locals were burning books that their priests had declared licentious or heretical—there, the sword compelled you to leap into the book-pyre. But you did not burn. You stood there unafflicted as a saint. It expanded in your hand, its wings extending out into a luxurious fan of ostrich feathers attached to ivory spindles.

You danced in the fire, your clothes burning away, leaving nothing but licentious flesh, and the words sprang up from the burning pages to clothe your skin in runes of fire. The fan concealing, revealing, as knowledge and fire and beauty burned in the awestruck crowd.

“Witch!” the priest screamed. “Kill her!”

And then the fan’s ivory sticks snicked together in your hand, and when you flicked it open again, a blade emerged, steel replacing feathers, like an oversized balisong, a butterfly knife. You folded the ivory handles back to form a hilt, smiled, and said, “Did you want to dance?” as the words rose on flames to kiss your cheeks. Became an armor of linked symbols that made the soldiers hesitate to raise their swords against yours, against where you stood, sheathed in an armor of fiery words.

The townsfolk burned their priest on that same pyre.

And when you exhaled, smoke curled from your lips, forming words that drifted out over the countryside. Toward the capital, where the Emperor reigns, never seen outside the Hidden Temple, his laws carried out to the rest of the land by his manifold priests.

If there he does dwell. If he isn’t merely a convenient fiction perpetrated by those same priests. The words that caress your cheeks in curls of smoke whisper these kinds of heresies. Become a key to unlock your mind. The minds of others.

You followed the smoke, because who can say what words like that will do once loosed? Like the beat of a butterfly’s wings, they might birth a storm.

The next town over, where the parents were telling children not to ask so many questions, you became an old man with a long beard who treated them like children. Reminded them how many questions they’d once had. And the sword became a glowing lamp, letting them read stories to their children late into the night, long past the Emperor’s curfew.

But still, you were compelled to follow the words. And you did, shaped like a crane, a crone, a soldier, a fool. Wherever they went, they lit fires in the people’s minds and hearts, a glow that speaks of revolution, as they whispered their tales of hardship and pain.

You heard tales of how steep the temple tithes are, a burden over and above the taxes of the state. You heard stories of children sent into the armies of the Emperor to pay their parents’ taxes. How they returned, scarred and missing limbs. Or how they didn’t return at all.

You heard tearful confessions on the wind of mothers who smother newborn daughters, lest they be called into the temples to become the Emperor’s brides—hallowed to the new gods, vacant-eyed and pale, whispering his laws as he speaks them in his Temple, but never to utter a single word of their own.

A world of resentment, of loss, of pain,

And now that you’ve arrived at the Hidden Temple, alighting as an owl in one of the mulberry trees, you know that you have one final transformation to make. One final message to bear.

You become a caterpillar. You eat the green leaves and spin your cocoon. You sleep inside, your organs turning to liquid, reforming, transforming.

And when skilled fingers pluck you from your branch to unthread your cocoon, they almost drop you, and then bring you, with all haste, to the Emperor’s own hand. A fool, you know at his touch—or at least a man sheltered and naïve of the world and its truths.

“A miracle, my lord! No creature inside—just this pearl, nacreous and black.”

And as you, one with the sword, fall into his hand, you begin your long work. You whisper into him all the words you’ve gathered from his people.

All the words his priests have ensured he cannot hear.

He must change. He must transform. The pearl, the sword, will ensure it.