In the old quarter of a city whose name no one remembers, there lived a cartographer named Raheem. But Raheem did not draw rivers, roads, or mountains. He drew time .

“The Year has teeth,” Raheem would warn. “And if you do not know its jawline, its grinding molars, its canines of loss and harvest—it will swallow you whole.”

From that year on, the salt flats bloomed with a new village. And on the first wall of every home, the people drew one thing: a single, careful tooth. Not to worship the Biting Year. But to remember: what tries to devour you can also be drawn, studied, and outwalked.

On the sixth day, the fever turned. In the village, it became a red cough that filled lungs with stone. The stayed ones perished.

So he drew. His sketches were strange: spirals of tiny triangles (the small bites of daily worry), wide crescent arcs (the sudden deaths that came in autumn), and near the center, a single dark circle with jagged edges—the great bite, the month when famine or flood or betrayal struck without mercy.

Every morning, he unrolled a fresh sheet of parchment and dipped his quill in ink made from crushed lapis and burnt rosemary. His neighbors called him mad, for Raheem spoke of the year not as months or seasons, but as a creature—an immense, unseen beast that circled the world once every twelve moons. He called it , the Biting Year.