From the Journal of Faris Khan — On the Bats
People speak of the bats as if they are animals.
That is a mistake born of comfort.
The swarms are not predators in the ordinary sense. They are an extension of the Night’s metabolism—a moving appetite that gathers wherever blood has been spilled too often without consequence. You do not stumble into a bat lair by accident. You arrive there because something upstream has already failed.
They move as one body. Thousands of wings folding and unfolding in patterns too coordinated to be instinct alone. When they descend, it is not a charge but a compression. Air thickens. Sound disappears. Victims do not scream for long. Life is drained quickly, efficiently, without ceremony. The bats do not linger. They do not gorge. They harvest.
Their eyes glow red, not with malice, but with alignment. They know what they are for.
I have watched a patrol scatter at the sight of them—not out of fear, but out of recognition. Even vampires treat the swarms carefully. Hunger that cannot be negotiated is always dangerous. The bats answer no command, wear no insignia, and cannot be bribed. They are loyal only to blood already exposed.
The Qur’an says, “And We did not create the heavens and the earth in play.”
Nothing about these creatures is playful.
There is a verse I return to often: “Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of what the hands of people have earned.” The bats are not the corruption. They are its consequence. They gather where suffering has been normalized long enough to attract something that feeds on it without guilt.
People ask how to survive them.
The answer is simple and unsatisfying: do not bleed carelessly.
Fire scatters them, but only briefly. Silver disrupts them, but at a cost few can afford. Prayer helps only insofar as it steadies the hand and sharpens awareness. Panic feeds them faster than blood ever could.
Those who live long here learn to read signs: sudden silence, an unnatural density in the air, the way dust stops settling. When that happens, you do not run. You disappear. Into cloth, into shadow, into stillness. Movement attracts attention. Intention does not.
The bats remind the city of something the Court prefers to obscure—that violence, once made ordinary, breeds organisms that do not respect hierarchy. Not every weapon answers to a throne. Not every terror can be staged.
“God is swift in account.”
The swarms are not judgment, but they are bookkeeping.
They exist because the Night needs cleaners.
And because no empire, no matter how carefully managed, can spill this much blood without something eventually learning how to drink it back.