By the time an Atlas moth tears free of its cocoon, its future has already been bargained away. Everything it will ever spend was hoarded in the green, voracious body of the caterpillar, which ate not for itself, but for the stranger it would become. The adult arrives immense and luminous, a drifting continent of rust and cream, but that splendor hides a brutal simplicity: no mouth to taste, no second chances, only a body built to burn fast and vanish.

So it lives like a lit fuse. Females thicken the night air with pheromones, a wordless beacon that threads through leaves and shadow. Males, guided by feathered antennae tuned to that one invisible trail, gamble their brief hours against predators and wind. Their counterfeit snake heads buy them moments, nothing more. In those stolen instants they find each other, pass on their fragile inheritance, and surrender quietly to the waiting dark.