"The weight of the world is love." – Allen Ginsberg
The Chamber of Unseen Weights is the oldest room in the Mandible Precinct and the only one in the city with no galleries in its walls. The ants were not permitted to bore it. Its laterite is solid, polished by two centuries of elephant flanks, and so silent that a visitor can hear her own blood. In the middle of the floor stands the scale. It is the size of a small house. Its beam is a single ironroot, grown rather than cut, and its two pans are resin cast over bamboo, each wide enough to hold a standing elephant. Every Weighing of the last two hundred and twelve years has taken place on it – every calf at weaning, every ant at emergence, the calves in the left pan, the ants in the right, a column of scribes on the steps recording Mass in one ledger and Load in another, and the Matriarch-Justice standing at the head of the room with her trunk resting on the beam. Not to steady it. To feel it. The scale is a demonstration. When the Mandate was made, the first Matriarch-Justice had the...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.