"It came in the night like a river that had learned to want." – Ocellus the All-Seeing, field report
*Field report of Ocellus the All-Seeing, Ocular Compact, on the Siege of the Resin Quarter, thirty-one years ago. Dictated in trail to two ant scribes; the original is kept in the Annals and has begun to fade.* I smelled it first at the third hour after dark, on the eastern wind: formic acid, old blood and something like hot iron. It was not a trail. A trail is a sentence. This was a smell with no grammar, the smell of a million bodies that had stopped being separate. You must understand what the Carnophage are, because the city teaches its children a monster and the monster is worse because it is not one. They are ants. They are our cousins, the people of the Pale, who long ago chose flesh. They have no city: they build their nests from their own living bodies, hooked together leg to leg, and break camp every few weeks and march. They have no eyes worth the name. They have no leaders. They follow the trail of the ant ahead, and the ant ahead follows the trail of the ant ahead of her...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.