Heh, I've always fancied myself a writer, but as a perfectionist, I've yet to finish anything I regarded as suitable for consumption for anyone other than myself. Maybe someday.
Though their fate is unknown after being paraded in the Triumph with the rest of the prisoners of the war, Rome isn't recorded as using war elephants themselves for almost a century afterwards, and venatio, beast fights, were not yet popular. So hopefully they were used for some more mundane purpose, like a rich guy showing off his fancy pets, or as draft animals.
I mislabeled it, apparently it's just of Space Marine chapters, not the primarchs specifically. The bound one is a Blood Angel succumbed to the Black Rage.
Only two of the elephants were killed in the battle; the other eight were captured. One hopes that both mother and calf were counted amongst that eight.
You want some extra heartbreak, before this battle, about 70 years before, the Romans faced another war-elephant using foe, Pyrrhus of Epirus, and...
Cassius Dio also related the story of the wounded calf. He wrote that Pyrrhus was put to flight because "a young elephant had been wounded, and shaking off its riders, wandered about in search of its mother, whereupon the latter became excited and the other elephants grew turbulent, so that everything was thrown into dire confusion. Finally, the Romans won the day, killing many men and capturing eight elephants, and they occupied the enemy's entrenchments."[99]
Yeah. The only bright spot is that he did turn to abolitionism later and life and began plotting a way to free his slaves legally (first by selling Mount Vernon, but he couldn't get a price that would cover his debts that he ran up funding the Revolutionary War and his retirement). But "I'm going to free my slaves the proper way according to the norms set up by my fellow slaveholders" and then up and dying before fulfilling that falls a bit short of ideal behavior. At least his will emancipated all the slaves he did own (after the death of his wife, who, unlike him, was an ardent slaver).
He was a stodgy old patrician, and a man of his time. But for all that, he preserved democracy, or its seed, at a time when it was very fragile in the US, and for that much, he will always be admirable.