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Reforming in your cocoon, you’re waiting to bloom. From the pit we dragged out the dead things of Azkaban and molded this into a chrysalis for you to grow inside. You thought being sent here would be a death sentence, but while you were carted off, I took that horrible place beneath golden amber wings. I’ve been told the green expands beyond my eyes, engulfing everyone under its glare in a ring of deadly magic from my very veins. I could never lose my passion, in Sirius’ memory, posthumously exonerated or not. Too little too late, so I set in to pull apart the strings. Wizards built the webs for our own spiders, dementors, which we kept like pets. Feeding them our own, feels sort of like a violation. One step removed from cannibalism, regardless of the crimes of those being eaten.
So I pulled in Hermione and Luna, a tiny order all its own of fierce devotion to justice and strange magical creatures. Hermione, our clever luna moth and Luna our peculiar buckeye. Luna and Hermione, obviously, insisted that dementors are just magical creatures trying to survive.
It’s not the spider’s fault that it must catch moths and butterflies in order to survive. Everything must eat, after all. So we ended a day of argument agreeing to fight for a reserve for the dementors. Still protecting our own spiders.
So that is what’s led us here. I see your pupa through the glass, a film because it’s no longer a webbed cocoon like it was when you arrived. I see the enlightened ferocity in your eyes as you emerge from your ideological metamorphosis and hold my hand out to you.
“Come with me,” I say and you stretch your wings, auburn, speckled white and black lined. Queen to my emperor butterfly.