long bouts with panic.
My friends, I have made the discovery that shall be the capstone on my storied career - a shortened species of moth that's adult lifespan is a mere three hours (it had gone undetected until this modern age, living in but one forest south of the Nile Delta). It was known to the natives as a destructive caterpillar, and although they had folklore involving the massive transformation of the caterpillars suddenly into massive swarms of flying spirits, no one alive had memory of such an event. Their myths explained this as a giant migration of spirits to heaven. They believed that their ancestors were trapped within their earthly capsule, bound to their corpse after death until such a time as enough souls could gather together, break free from their fleshly bondage and overcome the defenses of the realm of the gods. This tribe's "gods" did not want to share the opulence of their kingdom with the souls of man, and had ruby vultures guarding their Eden. Any soul attempting to enter would be picked clean of all remaining vestiges of their earthly appearance, returning to earth as an empty wraith, unable see or hear, destined to roam. However, if souls were able to pass the perimeter of "Heaven" they would be allowed to stay as gods. For this reason the souls of earth remained until they felt their numbers were great enough to defeat the vultures. The tribe took me to their burial ground, and I waited. After a period of three weeks I awoke to find the ground littered with a strange form of cocoon, and I knew that my patience was soon to be rewarded. I carefully opened a cocoon at each four hour interval, four per day, preserving the caterpillar in each stage of it's transformation. And the change was alarmingly fast. After just two and a half days, I could see that the wait would not be much longer. I forwent sleep, and in the morning hours of the third day, I saw a sight that had never been seen by enlightened man; the ground blistered as thousands of cocoons opened at once, and for three hours a frenzied swarm of moths exerted every essence of their energy to reproduction, refusing even to eat until they fell from the sky, one by one, the ground taking the appearance of autumn - covered in brightly colored leaves. And with that afternoon's rain, all traces had vanished, the delicate wings broken and washed away by the heavy drops.