Zavet, Azad, and Everything Before Them

Good Teeth Required

If you’re new or a steady reader here: Zavet is the first arc of this saga, built on inherited covenants and debts. Azad is the second, built on the messy work of freedom. And this is how it came about, my universe that is.

Why Any of This Started

I am a mother, a grandmother, a daughter — and in every one of those roles I’ve kept myself surrounded by books and questions, which is really the same habit worn three ways. The original idea wasn’t a novel series at all. It was graphic novels, built from columns I’d already written — something that could teach and entertain in the same breath, because I’ve never believed those two things needed separate shelves.

What I hadn’t accounted for was the world I’d need to find a collaborator in. Discord, and whatever species of nerd currently governs it, turned out to have no patience for a spatial brain like mine — or perhaps I had no patience for theirs. Either way, the search for someone who saw the potential ended in nothing, and I stopped looking.

So words became the vehicle instead of the destination, and the images came after — built from the words rather than replacing them. I didn’t plan that. It’s simply what was left once the collaborator I wanted never arrived.

I’m now at 370k views on Pinterest, and some of those views turn into readers who actually come and read — which still surprises me more than it probably should. I try to smuggle the anthropology in while I edit, concept by concept, but I’ve made my peace with what the work actually asks of a reader: this is reality with fiction’s wings grafted on, and it needs someone hungry, with good enough teeth readers to bite in.

A Memoir That Grew Teeth

Early book cover for The COMC Files showing a blonde woman on a city rooftop at night, holding a glowing paper map above her palm — original title art before the series became The Memory Cartographer

It didn’t start as a series. It started as memoir, tangled — deliberately, unrepentantly — with fiction, because the personal and the professional had never agreed to stay in separate files in the first place. I posted a chapter a day. The title I’d given it was the honest one: The Chronicles of a Memory Cartographer. Too long to sit at the top of a daily post without making the post about the title instead of the chapter.

So it got shortened the way anything gets shortened when you’re moving too fast to argue with yourself: to COMC. Not a brand. A filename that happened to survive.

Splitting the Title

Woman's silhouette with a glowing map of Africa overlaid on her back and shoulder, cracked earth and jungle canopy below — visualizing the geography behind The Memory Cartographer's anthropological grounding

The books kept growing past what a daily chapter, or a normal reader, or an ebook file, could comfortably hold. At some point the title had to do the same thing the manuscript did — split into what it actually was. The series took the wider name, The Memory Cartographer. Each book kept the word Chronicles, tied now to whatever ground it stood on — the place, the event, the core the book actually turned around.

One title became many. That’s not a rebrand. That’s just what happens when the thing you’re describing gets too big for a single sentence.

The Birthday Rewrite

Zavet has a stranger provenance than a marketing meeting. I’d used the word once before, on 25/02/25, in a column called Catherina and Kompromat, used in Book III’s third Chronicle. On 30/03/26, my birthday, I rewrote it — the new version simply titled A Birthday Zavet — and the word took root somewhere it hadn’t the first time. It stopped being a line I’d used and became the name of what the first arc had been doing all along.

Zavet — covenant, bequest. Not chosen because it sounded literary. Chosen because it was already sitting in the text, waiting to be noticed. The first arc, 0.x through Book V, is built on exactly that: debts inherited rather than accrued, carried by people who never signed for them and can’t put them down.

What Comes After the Covenant

Blonde woman standing between two stone archway gates labeled Zavet and Azad, holding an open illustrated map, surrounded by scattered books including The Memory Cartographer and COMC Files — the covenant arc giving way to the freedom arc

Zavet explains the first five books. It doesn’t explain the sixth.

Quantum Jump opens on people who’ve already paid what they owed, or stopped pretending they’d ever finish paying it — and either way, inheritance is no longer the operating logic. What replaces it is Azad. Persian and Kurdish, free, liberated. Not the tidy kind of freedom that arrives once and stays. The kind that has to be taken again in every chapter, because nothing enforces it but the choice to keep making it.

Two names for two different physics, not two different franchises. Zavet is what you’re born holding. Azad is what you do once you notice your hands are full and decide to open them anyway.

Same archway scene with Zavet and Azad gates, but the figure now has dark hair instead of blonde, holding the same map amid the same scattered books — the mapmaker's identity shifting as the story crosses into Quantum Jump

On Being Called an Idealist

I’ve been called pragmatic more times than I’ve earned it. I’m not. I’m an idealist who happens to see clearly, and pragmatism is the word people reach for when they want to explain away someone who insists the world is, factually, beautiful, intriguing, and mystical — as if clear sight and enchantment were opposites instead of the same instrument. They’re not opposites. Zavet only makes sense from that vantage: the covenant is a burden and a gift in the same breath, and pretending otherwise is the actual shield.

Continue the series on Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/es/en/series/the-memory-cartographer