"History is a set of lies agreed upon." – attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte
Every child in Myrmecopolis learns two stories of how the city began, and learns at the same time that it is impolite to ask which one is true. They are taught on alternate days in the Chrysalis Cloisters. The calves hear them in rumble and the larvae in trail, and by the time either can speak, both have been told so often that they have stopped sounding like contradictions. **The Tusk** is the story of the Ironroot Tribunal. In the beginning, the Shelf was a god. It was a fungus, white and endless, and it lay under the whole of the Pale and dreamed, and its dreaming was hunger. Everything that walked on it, it ate slowly from below: roots, carcasses, the dead in their thousands. The first Matriarch came up from the dry country with her herd, dying of thirst, and she stood on the god and felt it dreaming through the soles of her feet. She knelt and drove her tusk into the ground, down and down, through the white flesh of the god to its heart, and where the tusk went in, water came ou...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.