The Horror and the Wild

cw: starvation, mild ideation
 

By the time it found him, he'd nearly given up.
 
He'd considered giving up. Lay down and tried to give up. Hoped, wished, prayed to give up. Yet still his stubborn heart continued to beat - a ragged engine spinning ever faster, pulsing ever thinner blood through ever weaker veins.
 
He was too dizzy to remember how long ago he'd settled into the grass. It was soft, some distant part of him registered. Had he picked it on purpose, or had he simply fallen here? He couldn't remember.
 
It didn't matter. The grass was soft. His body ached to the bone. His soul ached to desperation.
 
His heart continued to beat.
 
Afternoon sunlight filtered through the cover of the trees overhead, casting dappled shadows across the grass. He'd never noticed so many shades of green. Had they always been there? Yes - yes, they must have been. How had he never seen them before? He'd looked, hadn't he? He'd always tried to look.
 
A dizzying shift in focus. His head didn't move, but his wandering eyes slid, and the world reoriented with a sickening lurch.
 
A red flower. A blue butterfly.
 
Glaucopsyche lygdamus. A woman's voice shattering like glass across his memory. Common name, silvery-blue butterfly. Don't ask me how I know that.
 
How do you know that?
 
We dug up a cache of pinned butterflies once. Beautifully preserved. Labeled with taxonomical and common names. Fascinating, but…all that death. It's a shame all that knowledge had to come at that high a cost.
 
His heart continued to beat.
 
Was his life too high a cost? How much of him was already petrified, spread thin, pinned beneath the glass of some future archaeologist's lens? Its presence hung over him even now. He could feel its eyes piercing through him, fixing him to the grass - a curiosity to be studied, never to fly again.
 
A million shades of green. A red flower. A blue butterfly. The taste of purple.
 
Its shadow enveloped him. He squinted at it and almost wished he hadn't - the subtle shift of his head was enough to make his empty, bloated insides lurch. But he needed to see the shape of his destiny. It loomed in the branches above, a black silhouette of shadowed wings against the leaf-scattered sun, its eyes burning like red coals.
 
“Is this where you stop?”
 
He was so dizzy. He was so tired. How far had he walked, only to end up here, in the grass, alone but for a thing he hadn't expected to be questioned by? He'd thought he was being stalked by a horror. This was...
 
But he knew. He knew it in the taste of purple and the woman's voice. So much death. Too high a cost.
 
His hand closed into a fist in the grass - a million shades of green. The movement startled the blue butterfly into the air. It flurried and danced, confused, frightened, and finally darted away, leaving the little red flower to shake its head in the panicked insect's wake.
 
He couldn't move. He couldn't speak. But his body tensed, the exclamation point at the end of his answer, and his heart continued to beat.
 
“I didn't think so,” the spirit said.
 
The power came flooding into him in a torrent of fire and light and the sound of wings and the taste of the open sky. He drank it down like the first clean water he'd had in days, devoured it like his first meal in weeks.
 
And his heart beat. And beat. And beat.