Equdans

They tell the story from below.

Not because the Equdans cannot imagine the sky, but because the sky has never mattered as much as what presses in from every side. Weight has always been their first teacher. Pressure their first language.

In the old tellings, before the chambers were measured and the tunnels named, the Equdans were already many. Too many. Their bodies filled the earth in writhing heat, a living pressure that pushed against itself until the planet groaned. They fought then, as all early beings do, not for ideals or futures, but because collision was inevitable. When two paths crossed, one had to break. When two colonies met, one dissolved into the other or vanished entirely.

The dead did not disappear.

They piled.

At first, the bodies were nourishment. Protein. Recycled warmth. The planet accepted them back into itself, and the Equdans continued as they always had, dig, clash, expand. Death fed life, and life pressed outward again. This seemed sustainable. This seemed eternal.

But there came a season when the soil stopped sweetening.

The tunnels began to rot. Fungal blooms choked chambers meant for brood. The air grew heavy with a sickness no mandible could cut away. Larvae failed to harden properly. Workers slowed. Warriors grew erratic. Collapse did not arrive as catastrophe, but as stagnation, a creeping heaviness that settled into every passage.

It was the Mothers who noticed.

Not queens in the later sense, no crowns, no thrones, but females whose bodies were not shaped for endless collision. They did not rush the tunnels or join the crush of bodies. They stayed. They counted.

They traced where the dead accumulated. They listened to how the planet’s breath changed over cycles and seasons. They felt the subtle difference between a chamber that fed life and one that slowly poisoned it. Where others saw victory and loss, the Mothers saw imbalance. Where others saw enemies, they saw waste.

They made the first terrible decision.

War did not stop. The Equdans were not fools, nor idealists. Conflict was as natural to them as digging. But it changed shape. Battles were contained. Kill-zones were rotated. Entire tunnel networks were designated for violence and then sealed once they grew foul. Bodies were removed, processed, returned to the soil with care rather than abandon. Conflict became something managed, not celebrated, endured rather than glorified.

This is how the Equdans learned that intelligence was not the absence of violence, but the ability to survive it without poisoning everything it touched.

As generations thickened, so did the world beneath their feet. The Mothers became planners. Planners became rulers. Rulers became a class. Those born for war and labor were shaped ever more narrowly, stronger mandibles, thicker carapace, instincts honed toward obedience and task. Choice was reduced. Efficiency increased. Those born to think were given something far rarer: time, silence, and chambers far from the crush.

From this division came stability, and from stability came culture.

Art did not arrive as beauty.

It arrived as structure.

Perfect curves that distributed pressure evenly across vaults. Murals carved not to be admired, but to mark airflow and fault lines. Rhythms beaten into stone to measure shifts in the planet’s hum and the approach of subterranean storms. Philosophy was not spoken aloud. It was etched into load-bearing walls, encoded into architectural ratios, embedded so deeply that to destroy it would mean collapse.

The Equdans did not ask what life meant.

They asked what life required.

And slowly, inevitably, they became very good at answering.

The sky intruded as a problem, not a dream.

Disease spread fast among the close and the many. A single sickness could ripple through chambers faster than any cave-in. The Mothers understood this immediately. They had mapped death before; this was merely another pattern, another pressure threatening equilibrium. The planet could be negotiated with. Biology was less forgiving.

Their solution was crude. Brilliant. Misunderstood.

They bound their young to stone.

Eggs sealed into rock, wrapped in protective layers grown rather than forged, launched not with elegance but with certainty. Calculations were exact, even if the tools were not. Angles mattered. Mass mattered. Velocity mattered. Whether the destination was welcoming did not. Survival, at scale, does not wait for ideal conditions.

Some stones drifted forever. Some shattered against atmospheres or tore themselves apart in empty cold. Some landed on worlds that fed them, quietly, without ceremony or announcement. New colonies formed deep beneath unfamiliar soils, repeating old patterns with small, necessary changes.

The Mothers did not watch them go. Watching did not improve outcomes.

This is why the Equdans do not think of themselves as conquerors.

They did not leave home to rule.

They left because staying meant suffocation, stagnation, slow extinction pressed in from every side.

They have never believed themselves superior.

They have never believed themselves lesser.

They believe only this:

A civilization is not defined by how it dreams, but by how much pressure it can endure without poisoning the ground it stands on.

And so they remain what they have always been,

A thinking mass.
A careful violence.
A people who learned, early and painfully, that even the planet must be negotiated with.