"The ant's a centaur in his dragon world." – Ezra Pound, *The Cantos*
From the Fungal Plains the city looks like a cliff that has learned to breathe. Myrmecopolis sits on the Laterite Shelf, a red escarpment four hundred metres above the Pale, and it is built twice over: once for bodies that weigh six tonnes, and once, inside the first, for bodies that weigh four kilograms. The elephant city is the one you see. Ramps instead of stairs, because no elephant climbs a stair. Doorways seven metres high, vaults of rammed laterite ribbed like the inside of a ribcage, streets wide enough for two matriarchs to pass without lowering their ears. Its stone is the colour of dried blood and it holds the day's heat long into the night, so that the city glows faintly warm in the dark, like a sleeping animal. The ant city is the one you hear. Every wall of the elephant city is perforated. Hexagonal galleries run through the laterite like the grain through wood – a hand's breadth wide, then an arm's, then wide enough for a soldier-major to turn around – and in them two ...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.