I remember my first night in Bataklik very clearly. I had never been in a forest before, or even out on the Surface. While the trees there grow tightly packed compared to other Surface climates, it still felt way too open to my senses. The air moved, like it was alive. Perpetual light fogged the air like the miasma of a corpse, coming and going with the cycles, which we learned were called days when they were marked by the sun. Akor’mari new to the Surface walked about with perpetual squints until we got used to the twilight.

And the sounds! No echoes up there, and it was both awe-inspiring and terrifying knowing we could hear for miles instead of just down the next passageway. The whispering of leaves reminded you of the footsteps of the beggar-assassin of Althrasia, trailing you, waiting for a misstep or a heresy before making Her move. The calls of living things were foreign as well: low hoots and howls rather than the clicks and rumbles of subterranean creatures. You would stay awake for as long as you could stay awake, wondering whether the creature you had heard was hostile, and suddenly there would be another call and a flash of eyes peering at you out of the gloom.

I didn’t get much sleep that first night. I was terrified. We all were.

Soon I was to learn that most of these calls were from harmless things, and that animals rarely, if ever, attacked the camps. I remember how much the boys laughed when our officer plucked a cricket from a tree and told us it was what made the loud chirping sounds at night. Everyone had been certain it was some monster making those sounds.

Despite the reason we were out there, we rarely saw any Yeni. Sometimes our trackers would find traces, but they were usually old, and the officers were reluctant to pursue them outside our own borders. We had tamed our part of the woods, in a manner of speaking. The undergrowth was just as thick and full of poisonous plants as it always was, but it grew under our designs. Back then, I could have led you from the source of the Sinister River to the falls of Krachdul in just a few days, along the paths we had marked. Some of our magi specialized in such things, bending the trees to our will in ways that were not so dissimilar to the nature magic of the ilph’mari now I think of it, but I digress.

The traces we found would be of those Yeni who had wandered into our traps. The vines would catch them, the poison-laced spines would pierce them, the trees themselves would make of them their food. Sometimes we would come upon a corpse that had been strewn out by wild scavengers, but...I see that is perhaps too many details for you.

I used to wonder of those caught so. Did they come from a land without such dangerous forests, and what would that be like? Were they as terrified of the Bataklik as all new Seekers were? Unlike us, they had no priest to teach them the ways of the dark woods.

It was of course the same in reverse. Past our tamed trees, the woods would feed on us. The latent magic of Bataklik was stronger in those days, before the Althrasians harnessed it for their plans of invasion. What was past our forests were even more alien. Occasionally an older akor’mar would speak of it: a land of sand and fragmented stone, jutting up in mounds higher than the walls of the Great Den, tussocks like a nekru’s bristles anchored along the water ways, all bathed in the torturous heat and light of the eternal sun. Even the Surfacers feared to tread too long in those lands, it was said.

I never journeyed to see it: not then. That would come later. Our patrols stayed within the confines of Batalik, and eventually, the trickle of Yeni refugees faded to nothing more than a memory.

Sometimes I wondered what had become of my brothers. Sometimes I thought I heard one, out in the forest where the Seeker patrols crossed paths, but they were always gone before I could take a look, and besides, I couldn’t recognize them by sight. We weren’t allowed to call out to other akor’mari if we sensed them. You never knew who was a Seeker, to be trusted and to be loyal to, or who was a Althrasian, loyal to the Althra’aste, who would likely find some way to murder you, away from the city with no witnesses among the priests. Even then the rivalry between our gods was full of bloodshed.

You heard stories of patrols disappearing like that, sometimes. Or, rather, you heard about them disappearing and then speculation as to what untamed flora or manner of beast they found out in the forest to wipe out an entire patrol so easily. Sometimes more patrols would be sent to scope out the threat, but of course, they never found anything -- for it was another patrol that had done the murders, not some natural denizen of the forest. No one ever talked about that though, even in whispers.