When a Bahro was freed by an explorer completing the Path of the Hand, it joined a colony that lived in the Great Shaft and other locations in the D'ni cavern system. Many were seen in K'veer when Dr. Watson began his quest for the tablet that bound them to D'ni.

In the caldera, there are a number of petroglyphs that were made by free Bahro. They tell incidents from Yeesha's life and important events that lead up to her birth.

This glyph represents the early days on Myst island. The people are, from left to right, Atrus, Catherine, and Ti'ana. The two smaller figures are Achenar and Sirrus, who were born there. There is Bahro writing above the mountain peak.

The early days on Myst were happy ones for the family, but that time came to an end all too soon. While Ti'ana had been taught some of the basics of writing Ages by her D'ni husband, Aitrus, she had no formal training. Aitrus was a member of the Guild of Surveyors, so his ability to write was mostly self-taught. Their son, Gehn, had been enrolled into the Guild of Writers as a child, but only received a year or two of basic education when D'ni fell. Atrus and Catherine were both taught the Art by Ti'ana and Gehn, which meant that their teachers were both people who did not know very much about the Art themselves, and all of them had to figure it out by trial and error. Because of that, they were able to accomplish feats of writing that the D'ni wouldn't have believed because they didn't have any preconcieved ideas about what could be done. On the other hand, it meant that they had no knowledge of the rules and methods the D'ni Guild of Writers were taught to keep their Ages safe, and had no knowledge of the methods used by the Guild of Maintainers to test an Age for danger.

This lead to a tragedy that left deep scars on the family, and which would change their fates for the worse. Catherine wrote an Age whose name she never spoke again, and Ti'ana visited it. While there, Ti'ana contracted a disease that caused her to fall into a slow decline, and eventually caused her death. The loss of Ti'anna made Atrus throw himself into his work out of grief, and as a result he neglected his sons, which caused them to stray into dark paths that forever shaped their lives afterward. Catherine was devastated that her work had robbed Ti'ana of her life, and never wrote another Age again. Sirrus was about eight years old when Ti'ana died, and he and Achenar began to take unsupervised trips to the Ages Atrus had written, eventually falling in with the pirates of the Black Ships in the Mechanical Age. This gave Sirrus a taste for domination and wealth, and Achenar a taste for hunting and killing.

This glyph represents Atrus and Catherine's later life on Myst Island with their sons, Sirrus and Achenar, after most of the construction is done and Ti'ana has passed away. This was the period when the family was falling apart.

This glyph represents the story of Atrus and Catherine escaping from Riven by jumping into the Star Fissure.

This glyph represents Atrus and Catherine's attempt to rebuild D'ni. They had decided to try to find any survivors of the Fall, and were successful. Knowing that the plague that had killed off so many was gone, they returned to the caverns and collected the bodies of the victims for burial, and then started an attempt to rebuild the city. That proved unsuccessful, because the damage was too severe from earthquakes that had occurred since the Fall. This lead Atrus to search for a new home for the D'ni. While searching for bodies, they had broken into the Tomb of the Great King and found the book of Terahnee, and when they found that the Ronay culture there was alive and thriving, they made contact and began planning for the D'ni to rejoin their cultural brethren. The Terahnee were welcoming and enthusiastic about having found missing Ronay descendants.

That plan came to an end when Atrus and the D'ni representatives with him discovered the truth behind Terahnee's utopic lifestyle. It was based on a form of slavery that horrified Atrus' group. The people of Terahnee had come to regard anyone not of Ronay descent as being subhuman, and only fit to be the labor class in their society. For the D'ni, whose culture had taught them that a citizen should work for his own prosperity, this was intolerable. (Note that knowledge of the Bahro was not common among the D'ni, and even today we do not know what they did there or why they were bound in the first place.) Before any real conflict could arise between the D'ni and Terahnee, a plague began to spread that targeted the Terahnee and caused death to many of them. It was learned that the D'ni were carriers of diseases from their own history that the Terahnee had no defenses against. The slaves of Terahnee revolted, and broke the control of Ronay people on the world. Atrus and the D'ni returned to Earth, where Atrus decided that the only real solution for D'ni was to write a new Age where they could go and live in peace. This was the beginning of Releeshahn.

This glyph represents the birth of Yeesha in Tomahna.

This glyph represents the events when Yeesha learned of her two brothers still being alive in prison Ages. She decides to visit them and learn more about them. Sirrus deceives her about his true character.

After the death of Sirrus and Achenar, and when Yeesha was old enough, she left Tomahna to live alone in the Cleft for a time. She was on a journey of self-discovery, as her mind was still damaged from Sirrus' attempt to remove her consciousness from her body. Sirrus had planned to trap Yeesha's mind in the Dreaming of the Age of Serenia, then masquerade as Yeesha long enough to learn the Art from Atrus, after which he would kill him and Catherine.

Yeesha traveled to D'ni, and while exploring Ae'gura, she crossed paths with Calam, a surviving master of the Guild of Writers. He recognized a talented pupil when he saw one, and took her on as his apprentice. After an initially rocky start because Calam's resistance to Yeesha's wild ideas about how to write — ideas she had picked up from her father and mother — he came to accept her approach and helped her create a fusion of traditional D'ni techniques and her stretching of the boundaries of the Art. When Yeesha first apprenticed to Calam, she wondered if he was the Grower predicted in Words of the Watcher. Calam, for his part, began to wonder if she was. After Calam was murdered and Yeesha defeated his killer, she found the Bahro and began to add their methods to her style. That was the time frame when she began to believe that she was the Grower.

This glyph represents Yeesha meeting the Bahro and deciding to free them. This was to become her life's work, and defined who she was right up until Dr. Watson finally accomplished what she could not.

At first, she created a plan a method that freed one Bahro at a time, which I believe may be represented in this glyph.

This glyph may represent her first plan to free the Bahro one by one. Each of the Bahro called an individual explorer to D'ni, and she and her assistant, Jeff Zandi, guided that person onto the Path of the Hand. Every time an explorer completed the quest, the Bahro who had called him or her was freed from the influence of the master tablet.

Many explorers became disillusioned after finishing the Path, feeling that Yeesha had used them and then cut them loose with no purpose for being in the cavern any longer. Her influence and teachings also caused rifts in the DRC, who were not part of the plan and who simply wanted to rebuild D'ni and make it safe for people to visit and live in. The board members were at wit's end because of the backbiting and infighting caused by some of their contractors sympathy with Yeesha's stated philosophies, and because the influx of people with no affiliation to the DRC greatly increased the possibility of accidental injuries and deaths. It also drained their finances, because they felt that they had to help take care of the people who came to the cavern, interlopers or not.

This glyph represents the time when Yeesha was concentrating on the secret of the stone tablet that the D'ni had used to bind the Bahro. The second person in the glyph is her nemesis, Esher. Esher was a D'ni survivor who also thought he was the Grower of prophecy, and who also wanted to claim the tablet. However, both Yeesha and Esher failed the tests that had to be passed to be accepted as the tablet's master. They also learned that one could only undertake the quest once. Thus, both began to assist explorers who also stumbled across the quest, while each trying to sway the explorer into doing what they wished. This battle ended when Dr. Richard A. Watson gained control of the tablet and succeeded where others had failed.

Pictures of the petroglyphs in the caldera:

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