They are called the long ones, or the legged folk, or the deepkin. They are sapient centipedes, and if they have an endonym, it is not one they’ve deigned to share with us.
A common trope when imagining deepkin is to believe them to be a race of trespassers and thieves. This not unlike the perception of mantes as monsters fain to hunt and kill mercilessly. Untrue? Yes, except many own the idea with pride.
Dwelling in caves, only on occaision daring to raid or traverse the surface, deepkin have an uncanny sense for hollow spaces into which they next may crawl. But there are only so many natural caves — the far more reliable crevices to dwell in lie among the labyrithine tunnels of mantlespinners or the basement-burrows of chorus-roaches, into which deepkin oft invite themselves, welcome or not.
Deepkin cannot see beyond a coarse perception of light and dark. Their hearing is keen to the point of echolocation and their many legs discern precisely even minute tremors, but the true apprehension of deepkin is the deepsense.
Oft mistaken as a kind of “blindsight”, the deepsense is mostly predominately a form of telenoia. Deepkin antennae are profound and synesthesic sensory organs — they touch, they smell, they hear, but most of all, they grow a carefully maintained cultivar of ghostrot between the delicate setae. Deepkin are attuned to perceive enervate, especially the adumbrations of minds and cognition.
For this reason, the species excels at stealth. As a rule, they will have perceived you long before you’ve detected them, and if they reveal themselves to you, it’s likely deliberate.
Deepkin are at once territorial and highly gregarious. Perhaps the word is insular. Once they have found a crevice, they defend it viciously; yet cooperation has its advantages. If an deepkin allows another to live with it, they immediately get along, as if a switch flippped. They are adaptive and forgiving — living indefinitely in tight confines does not lend itself to holding strong, specific preferences.
Deepkin cannot speak; instead, they entwine their antennae and convey intent and expression through deepsense. They can learn to influence another kind this way, but it inevitably feels invasive and manipulative.
So they prefer to stay out of the way of other bugs, living in their walls and helping themselves to whatever they like. Their deepsense gives them a good reckoning of whether their targets yet suspect anything. Once one is on the verge of intuiting the presence of a deepkin, the deepkin often announces themselves with an offering, a tool or treasure or work of art wrought with the care of many legs.
Deepkin live among other bugs, sometimes out of fear or necessity (finding — let alone evicting — a deepkin is no simple matter, and deepkin may simply kill their hosts if they like), but deepkin know how to be most helpful — indeed, they can often sense exactly what must be done to remain in their hosts’ good graces.
And at what costs? Deepkin live in small, thin crevices few others could enter, let alone dwell, and can lay days without eating, retreating into a kind of torpor while they wait.
Time perception is different, when you can easily live for a century or two, when a month can easily pass in a nearly uninterrupted trance. Deepkin do not even develop linearly; it takes ten molts for sexual characteristics to emerge, but it can take a year or ten before a deepkin molts; it only happens when they will it.
Each molt appends legs to their body, and deepkin never stop molting — thus, some adults are small enough to ride on mantlespinners, and some are several times heavier than a gravid euvespid queen, all depending on how many times they’ve chosen to molt.
As much as they prefer to hide, if ever caught by their hosts, deepkin have one of two responses; sometimes, they are never seen again. If this is because the deepkin has left in shame, or redoubled their efforts to hide, or entered a torpor-trance, it often takes a while to be sure. (If the exchange of gifts and housework continues, is it even the same deepkin?)
And sometimes, the deepkin instead becomes more flagrant, less guarded, revealing themselves to the hosts more and more often. (Much more likely, if the host has some fondness for them.) When taught to speak with aid of therid speech-instruments, deepkin offer fragmented, elliptical speech — enough that they were long suspected to be subsapient.
When taught to write, however, they pen long, convoluted treatises that can take several reads to parse, let alone interpret — but inevitably reveal an intricate depth of thought fit for a being that would think nothing of spending a year pondering a single thought.
Deepkin are intelligent, then, and the elliptical nature of their speech is simply that they consider silence adequate punctuation and connective tissue, with sparse fragments emerging like the scaled back of a river beast undulating in dark water.
For all that seditary patience characterizes them, deepkin are more than capable of bursting into frenzy motion when needing to hunt prey or scurry to safety. Most prefer the long peace of living in harmony with other kinds.
For those that don’t — the ones who take without ever giving, who strike like lurking death in the dark — their knack for stealth means they can predate like this for quite a while. But the best way to root out a deepkin is with another deepkin; they make best assassins, especially for their own kind.
But for this, there must be a number of deepkin who travel far and wide, helping out here and there without settling down for long. When traveling, deepkin often wear sealed coats to prevent themselves from drying out. This does little to alleviate the pall of mystery over their kind. They hide and hide, and when they can be spotted, it’s as a cloaked form snaking over the land.
But deepkin have reasons to travel that go beyond looking for new crevices or odd jobs to do.
The dual of deepkin’s urge to hide is their urge to seek. Deepkin have a itching curiosity to detect and investigate the crevices of another, follow their trails across the land. The more legs a deepkin has, the craftier they become, laying traps and contraptions in their hidden passageways.
Deepkin are just as fond of stealing from themselves — if they can find someone’s crevice, and navigate to the treasure room, taking whatever they like is their right.
Perception is a kind of defeat — to find and know someone means careless failure or submisssion on their part; to reveal yourself to them in turn is to meet their weakness with your own.
This explains one of the sharpest features of deepkin cognition — to them, friendship is mutually exclusive with respect.
Which is why deepkin do not mate. You would never have children with someone you live with. When a deepkin wishes to become a mother, she seeks out a male’s trapped crevice. If she detects the male at any point, or finds herself unimpressed by the design of his crevice, she leaves. Otherwise, she steals his spermatophore from the treasure room and vanishes.
If she leaves with anyone, they may notice and ask where she found her husband — but she’ll never share.