"Nobody can say how much of an elephant's memory is grief." – inscription at the Bone Road gate
*Testimony of Loxodonta the Unforgetting, Matriarch-Justice, rumbled before the Tribunal and transcribed by three scribes working in relay. Pauses longer than a minute are marked.* You asked me how the herds live inside the Mandate. I will tell you how we lived before it, because that is the only way you will understand what we gave. Before the Concord we walked. The Shelf was a place we passed over in the dry season, eating the groves and moving on. Then came the Drought of Nine Rains, and the waterholes of the Pale cracked and turned to salt, and we came up the escarpment because the ants had wells. They had dug for water through four hundred metres of laterite, one grain at a time, for longer than any of us could remember. We could have broken their wells open. We were thirsty enough. *[Pause: four minutes.]* We did not. My grandmother's grandmother put her trunk to the mouth of the first well and an ant climbed onto it and touched her with its antennae, and that was the Concord. ...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.