"Every body is a statement of its use." – Article I of the Mandate
The Mandate is not written down. That is the first thing a foreigner gets wrong. There is no tablet, no scroll, no carved lintel. The ants hold it as a pheromone sequence passed from nurse to larva; the elephants hold it in memory, matriarch to daughter, recited in a rumble that takes nine minutes and is felt in the floor of every chamber it is spoken in. What follows is the ant scribes' transcription, made for the Annals and marked, as all transcriptions are, *approximate*. **Article I.** Every body is a statement of its use. What a body is shaped to do, it shall do; what it is not shaped to do, it shall not be asked. **Article II – The Weighing.** Every citizen shall be weighed twice: once for what it is, once for what it lifts. The first is Mass. The second is Load. Ants shall be ranked by the ratio of Load to Mass; elephants by Mass alone. The Weighing shall take place at emergence for ants and at weaning for elephants, before the Tribunal, in the Chamber of Unseen Weights. **Ar...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.