Ants were created as a way for Queen Regina to learn about the world and communicate with its inhabitants. They are inherently childish, trusting, and very curious creatures. Ants don’t understand the concept of ‘self’ since they are telepathically linked to every other ant at nearly all times. Privacy and selfishness are alien to them. Since other species don’t have such connections, ants consider their deaths to be tragic losses of memory and experience. They use speech to converse with other species, but between each other, they simply send quick mental signals. Their delicate hands, industrious ethic, and superb synchronization make them excellent manufacturers and artists. With alchemy, each ant is essentially a living cauldron, expelling ‘potions’ along with their bile. It makes ant bodily fluids a prized ingredient of many medicines and poisons in other cultures as well.
After Queen Regina’s death, ants have become a lot more isolationist and mistrustful of other creatures, only truly trusting the skorgardotur since they were their first neighbors and a template for their own forms. Ants are now born through a process of alchemy, utilizing repurposed organic material. They are now less diplomats and more scouts, probing for weakness and information with their telepathic powers, all while smiling and putting up a friendly childish act. They often offer gifts laced with memes to influence strangers, in addition to emitting pacifying mind waves. To be allied with ants is to live in a perpetual state of surveillance. If given a choice after the initial psychosis of war and vengeance, they would rather control and disarm than kill, still seeing death as too costly. But even the nicest ant will seek to kill a satyr at any cost, accepting the loss of precious life as necessary for their atrocities. After developing the ability to disconnect from the hive mind, some ants become at risk of never reconnecting and developing personalities of their own. They are pushed away as hiveless.