—
Late Year 999
As the old world approached the end of its millennium, as whispers of change stirred beneath the Veil of Belief, a child was born in the mountain-shadowed village of Nurael.
Her name was Biji.
She was not born under stars that danced, nor did the sky crack with omens at her first cry. The world did not tremble, and no flames flickered to life.
She was born quietly — like a small note in a vast, unread song.
When she was three, her parents died in a winter landslide, their bodies lost beneath the snow. Biji survived, pulled from the frozen wreckage by her grandfather, a stone-faced man who never spoke of grief.
She grew up in silence, raised by old hands and weathered hearts. Her grandmother taught her how to cook, how to wash, how to gather mountain herbs and read simple glyphs carved on village stones. Her grandfather taught her how to carry water in the rain without spilling it, and how to hear the wind when it changed.
At fifteen, both grandparents passed within weeks of each other — one by sickness, the other, it seemed, by sorrow. Biji buried them alone.
She did not cry.
---
The village didn't know what to make of her.
She wasn't strange. She wasn't gifted. She didn't preach, nor seek. She simply… existed. Quietly, persistently, she walked the same paths every day. She ate little, spoke less, and asked for nothing.
When asked how she survived, she only said:
> "I believe I can adapt. And… overcome."
It was not a grand belief.
It did not make the skies bend.
No winds answered. No sparks danced.
But it kept her standing.
In a world where the mighty proclaimed truths into being, and children shouted dreams that lit fires in the sky, Biji whispered her belief into the cold earth.
It did not bloom.
Not yet.
But the Veil of Belief stirred.
Something — perhaps the world itself — had taken notice.
---