"Language is a virus from outer space." – William S. Burroughs
*Synod of the Spinnennetz, Manual of the Thread, fourth revision. Annotations by Aranea the Weaver in the margins, transcribed here in italics.* The two peoples of the Shelf share no voice. An elephant speaks in a register too low for an ant to hear through air; an ant speaks in scent and in the stridulation of her gaster, which an elephant can smell but not parse. The Ground Speech is the language they built between those limits. It has four layers, and every citizen of Myrmecopolis learns at least two. **Rumble.** Elephant infrasound, below fourteen hertz. It travels through air for a few kilometres and through laterite for many more. Ants do not hear it; they *feel* it, through the subgenual organs in their legs. A matriarch's rumble in the Mandible Precinct can be read by an ant standing on bare stone in the Resin Quarter. **Tread.** The deliberate footfall. Elephants stamp and ants drum, and both can read the pattern in the ground. Tread is the oldest layer and the simplest: al...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.