And as he wrote each letter, it trembled. Then it lifted. Then it flew out the window, joining the other butterflies under the fig tree.
"I was. Now I'm just an old man who drinks too much chacha ."
He stared at it for an hour. Then two.
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."
And then it happened.
That evening, Davit sat down with a fresh sheet of vellum and a quail-feather quill. He began to copy, from memory, the Papillon Qartulad . But this time, he wrote not with ink, but with the ashes of the old cover mixed with the water from Nino’s grave.
In the crumbling backstreets of Tbilisi’s old town, where grapevines clawed at wrought-iron balconies and the sulfur scent of the baths hung in the air, lived an old manuscript restorer named Davit. His hands were stained with ochre and rust, his eyes failing from a lifetime of peering at 11th-century Asomtavruli script. He had one obsession: the Papillon Qartulad — a legendary illuminated manuscript no living soul had seen. papillon qartulad
He wept.