There is a place in the Moravian highlands where the fog lingers longer than it should, even in summer. The winds hum in strange tones through the hills, and the forests are so old that the trees no longer whisper—they listen. No road runs clean through the village of Dřevnice, and that is perhaps why few remember it at all.

But those who do, speak not of the mountains or the mist, nor of the crooked chapel bell that tolls on its own.

They speak of Alenka.

A quiet girl, born in the time of falling stars, wrapped in linen the color of pale violets. She never cried. Not even once. Her mother, they say, died with a smile on her face, and her father vanished before she could speak his name. It was her grandmother, Babka Lenka, who raised her in a stone house at the edge of the meadows—where the butterflies danced like lanterns above the tall grass.

Alenka did not speak to the other children. Nor did she sing or hum or yell. But she spoke, oh yes—only to butterflies.

Each morning she walked barefoot into the fields, a crown of dandelions on her head, her hands cupped gently as if cradling secrets. The butterflies would come to her like petals in the wind, perching on her shoulders, her hair, the tips of her fingers. And then she would lean in, lips parting in soft murmurs, as though telling them stories meant only for wings and wind.

The villagers watched with wary eyes.

“She’s touched by something,” muttered the baker’s wife.
“Too much moon in her blood,” said the blacksmith.
“Or too much silence,” the priest warned.

But Babka Lenka only smiled. She knew things the others did not. On long winter nights, beside the fire, she told Alenka stories passed down through forgotten bloodlines—of a time when the butterflies were the messengers of the gods, and a girl once held the power to summon them with only her breath.

“They carry what no voice dares say aloud,” Babka would whisper. “They remember the songs of stars, and the secrets of rivers.”

Alenka never replied. But she listened, the way wild things do—with her whole heart.

When spring arrived, she would return to the meadow daily, telling tales no one else would hear. And when the butterflies departed for winter, she would sit beneath the bare tree near the fence and wait for them, even in the frost.

Some say the wind changed when she was near. That wild animals paused in her presence. That if you stood close enough, you could almost hear a language inside the silence—delicate, woven, and ancient.

But even then, even in the early years, the sky above the village seemed to hold its breath.

Something was listening.

And something… was waiting.