The Viole(n)t Flight

The sun pierced through the forest canopy in golden blades, scattering patches of light like coins upon the leaf-littered ground. In one such beam floated a creature of impossible grace — a Purple Emperor, her wings vast and veined with royal hues, glinting violet when they caught the light just right. She danced on air, alone and unhurried, a living scrap of sky made flesh and wing.

But the air above was not empty.

Three Black Drongos perched in silence among the high branches, their bodies obsidian, eyes gleaming like drops of ink. Hunters by instinct, they were masters of flight — curved tails twitching, muscles tense beneath sleek feathers.

The lead Drongo saw her first. A twitch of his neck. A silent signal. The sky snapped.

He dove.

The butterfly jerked mid-glide, feeling the shift in the wind before the shadow fell. Her wings flared wide — then folded — then flared again, her body twisting like a ribbon in water. She spiraled upward, but the bird was already there, fast and precise, slicing the air in lunges.

She veered left — he followed. She dropped — he dipped. She rose — he rose faster.

Then: a flash of black to the right. The second Drongo.

He came not to intercept, but to corral, closing the arc of her escape. The Emperor looped wildly, her wings beating frantically now, the shimmering blur of her form painting streaks of color against the dappled green.

But they were faster.

The third Drongo entered, slashing from above — the air around her grew tight with threats, her space compressed into a shrinking funnel of wings and hunger.

Still, she flew.

She twisted between two vines, a narrow gap no bird dared follow. She dropped inches above thorned underbrush. A tail feather snagged. A gasp of breath, avian or insect, no one could say.

The first Drongo crashed through a branch, leaves cascading like confetti. The second curved to meet her again — his beak snapped shut where her wing had been.

A breath late.

She burst upward into a shaft of light — every beat of her wing now a scream for survival, every gust of wind a silent prayer. Above, the Drongos wheeled, faster than arrows, but she was smaller, slipperier, unpredictable.

She dove.

Straight down into a blooming patch of white — wild jasmine and shadow. The Drongos flared hard, overshooting her descent. They circled, searching. Nothing. Only silence and perfume.

Beneath a bloom, trembling but alive, the Purple Emperor rested. Her wings slowly folded, no longer violet — now a shadowed brown, lost among petals.

Above, frustrated cries. One by one, the hunters vanished back into the trees.

She had outflown them.

For now, the sky belonged to her.