It stopped above the wild fig tree in his own courtyard.

When the dawn came, she was gone. But the fig tree was covered in butterflies—ordinary white cabbage butterflies, the kind you see everywhere in Georgia. Davit touched one. On its wing, no bigger than a pinprick, was a single letter: ნ ( nari ). The letter for "face," for "to see," for "Nino."

One rainy evening, a young woman appeared at his workshop door. She was soaked, trembling, holding a bundle wrapped in a Soviet-era chokha cloak. "You are Davit the restorer?" she asked in a rural dialect.

The painted wing shivered. It lifted from the ash. It fluttered once, twice, and flew out the open window into the Tbilisi night, trailing a thread of gold.

And then it happened.

She smiled. Her lips moved. No sound came, but Davit understood: Papillon qartulad. I never left. I just became the language.

Davit ran after it. Through the crooked lanes, past the leaky pipes of the Abanotubani baths, up the steep staircases carved into the cliffside. The butterfly-letter flew not like a fleeing thing, but like a guide.

Under the tree, the ash from the manuscript cover began to spiral upward, reforming not into pages, but into a shape. A woman’s shape. Translucent, made of dust and moonlight and the ghost of calligraphy.