Ashoka
The words seemed to flow so easily off of Ashoka’s tongue, as though they had been there for the longest time just waiting to be spoken a loud. The blue butterfly found that once he started he couldn’t stop himself, that maybe he didn’t want to stop at all.
“It was near the end of the war, maybe the last raid before the great battle but I’m not sure. It was a small group of us, I didn’t have a name then and I didn’t even care about what we were looking for at that point. I was just afraid and wanted to go home but of course we couldn’t, not allowed too and by coming back anyway we were banished from the nest.
“Things were fine at first, the trip to get to the Ferus’ tunnels went well and by the time we were deep underground we didn’t have any problems. Of course it had to end though, it was war after all. We got attacked by a group of Ferus from the front; we couldn’t go back so we had to fight. It was nothing less than a nightmare.” Ashoka’s voice trailed off for a moment as the memories of that day shot through his mind, the howls of the Ferus ringing in his ears and the sight of their claws and eyes as they bore down on him. “Maybe it was because of the battle or maybe it was just a weak tunnel to start with but there was a cave in, I got pushed into a different tunnel by myself. When I woke up it was dark and I couldn’t breathe, I kept fighting and fighting but everything hurt. When I was ready to give up I ended up breaking through my shell but when I did so I could finally see that my Walker body had been pinned to its side, a boulder had landed on it pinning my arm within the dead form. I tried everything I could to get free but nothing worked. Everything just became a blur after that, I would wake up, struggle to get free then pass out again. I thought for sure that I was going to die in that tunnel, fresh from having died already.”
Ashoka’s eyes were watering again but he didn’t seem to know, his nails digging into the skin where his other arm should have been. “I closed my eyes again, ready to just lie there and die when I thought I saw something down the tunnel. It… It was something bright red, I remember that and it was moving too. I wasn’t sure what it was but I started calling out for it, wanting help of any kind by that point. I didn’t even care if it was a Ferus just so long as I could end my time trapped there. But this thing didn’t come toward me, it just floated further down by the tunnel and for some reason that really ticked me off. I really wanted to see this thing.” Ashoka’s watering eyes soon dried up as they narrowed, as though that little red thing was in front of him now and he still couldn’t see it. “It just came to me then, there was no way how I could make it out of there with my arm. It wasn’t an easy thing for me to do but that red thing was just right there, like it was edging me on. It stayed there when I picked up the rock, it stayed when I started swinging it and it stayed when my arm finally snapped off. I hadn’t even known about my wings until I tried to fly and found that I couldn’t, I just stopped trying and crawled toward that stupid little thing as fast as I could. No matter how far I went it stayed ahead of me, turning around corners but always waiting for me to catch up. It lead me to a tunnel that took me outside but even then it didn’t disappear. It just kept going and going and I just kept following it until I finally passed out from the blood loss. The next time I opened my eyes I was on a Walker’s back, then I was lying down with other Mariposa around me until finally I woke up to find the rest of my arm gone. By then the war was over and the Walkers were turning into Mariposa left and right while others were outside the nest tying to rebuild the world. It felt like I had missed everything, that my time in the tunnel had been nothing but a nightmare. It got worse once I was strong enough to leave the underground nest, no one wants to play with a butterfly with one arm and who can’t play and no one wants a mate like this. Maybe they thing I’ll just be a bad mother or something, I don’t know.
“Sometimes I just wish I hadn’t made it out of the tunnel.”