
Stories · How Things Came to Be
The King and the Boastful Butterfly
In a palace garden at dawn, an old king meets a butterfly convinced of its own magnificence, and finds within himself the familiar urge to prove that he is greater. Choosing quiet curiosity instead, he passes a slow day among peonies, moss, and raked gravel, learning from a gardener and a single unmoved stone that the strongest hand is the one that never needs to close.
Retold from Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling.