"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way." – William Blake
Article III is three short sentences long, and the Verdant Barracks exist to enforce its last one. *No body shall eat a body. Leaf, root, bark, fungus and nectar are given; flesh is taken. What is taken shall be answered.* Both peoples of the Shelf have always eaten plants. The leafcutters among the ants farm fungus on chewed leaf in the deep galleries; the elephants eat two hundred kilograms of grove a day. When the Concord was made, the shared diet was an accident of biology. The Mandate turned it into a creed, and the creed into a border. Everything that eats flesh is outside the Covenant, and everything outside the Covenant is, by the logic of Article III, owed an answer. The Covenant's theologians – the Mycelium Choir in its sermons, the Tribunal in its glosses – distinguish three kinds of eating. Grazing takes what grows back. Harvesting takes what was offered: nectar from the flower, resin from the weeping tree, ivory from the dead with the Bonekeeper's leave. Taking is every...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.