Darius grew up running barefoot through bullet-scarred streets, a boy whose fists were quicker than his words, his body learning the language of violence before he could read. Somalia in the late 1980s was a graveyard of hope, its people crushed between warlords and foreign meddlers. Darius watched as his neighbors were gunned down over clan loyalties, their bodies left to rot under the sun. Yet in his mother’s quiet moments, stitching wounds by candlelight, he found a flicker of purpose, his young mind vowing to protect what little remained.

As a teenager, Darius’s strength became his currency. He scavenged in Mogadishu’s ruins, trading looted goods for food, his knuckles bloodied from defending his share. At fifteen, he killed a man—a rival scavenger who tried to steal his haul—snapping his neck with a single twist. The act was not rage but necessity, and it marked him. Clan elders noticed his ferocity, recruiting him into a militia loyal to a local warlord. 

Darius learned to wield an AK-47, his body hardening into a weapon, his silence a shield against the chaos. By nineteen, he was a feared enforcer, his name whispered in the souks as “the boy who breaks bones.” He fought for no cause, only survival, his loyalty tied to those who fed him. He believed, naively, that strength could carve a path through betrayal.

Darius’s rise in Somalia’s underworld was brutal. By his mid-twenties, he was a mercenary for hire, his services sought by warlords and foreign contractors alike. He led raids on rival strongholds, his machete leaving trails of blood through sand and stone. 

In 2006, he joined a militia backed by Ethiopia, believing their promises of stability. He met Amina, a nurse who bandaged his wounds and saw past his scars, and in 2009, they had a daughter, Leyla, whose laughter softened the edges of his rage. Darius’s work took him deep into Somalia’s anarchy—Al-Shabaab’s insurgency, U.S. drone strikes, and the starvation that turned villages to dust. He guarded convoys, executed traitors, and built a reputation as a man who could silence any threat. He thought his strength was his armor, that it could protect his family from the world’s cruelty. 

He was wrong.

The turning point came in 2013, during a botched operation in Kismayo. Darius was hired by a Western private military company to secure a port against Al-Shabaab. His unit, a mix of Somali fighters and foreign mercenaries, trusted him to lead the assault. But greed betrayed them. One of his own men, bribed by a rival faction, leaked their plans. The ambush was a slaughter—RPGs tore through the night, his unit shredded by gunfire. Darius took shrapnel to the leg, crawling through blood-soaked sand to escape. He returned to Mogadishu to find his home burned, Amina and Leyla gone—executed by the same faction to send a message. Their bodies were left in the street, Leyla’s tiny hand still clutching her mother’s. Darius, kneeling in their blood, carved a jagged scar across his own face with a shard of glass, a vow of silence until his tha’r—his blood feud—was complete.

The man who rose from that ash was not the Darius Khan who had once fought for survival. His tha’r forged him into a storm of violence, his silence a promise of retribution. He vanished into Somalia’s shadows, his name a curse among those who crossed him. In the lawless borderlands, he found others broken by loss, their rage a mirror to his own. 

It was here that The Obsidian Hand found him. Fadi al-Bashir, the group’s arms dealer, saw in Darius a force that could shatter armies. “Your pain is our fire,” Fadi said, his voice smooth as a blade. “Join us, and we’ll burn their world to cinders.” Darius, hollowed by grief, needed no words. The Hand’s creed—“Through fire, we are forged”—echoed his own burning vow. He swore allegiance in a desert camp, his blood dripping onto their insignia, the bleeding crescent moon a reflection of his scarred soul.

Darius’s indoctrination was a crucible of blood. The Obsidian Hand sharpened his violence, teaching him to channel his rage into precision. They trained him in urban combat, explosives, and interrogation, but Darius needed no lessons in killing. He became “The Enforcer,” a scourge whose presence meant death. 

His first mission was a test: eliminate a Yemeni smuggler who double-crossed the Hand. Darius tracked him to Aden, snapping his spine with bare hands, his silence louder than the man’s screams. The act was intoxicating—he realized that violence, wielded with purpose, could rewrite fates. By 2019, he was the Hand’s deadliest weapon. 

His most infamous act came that year, when he led a raid on a Saudi military outpost. He slaughtered 30 soldiers, his machete a blur, and carved a mirror of his scar into the last man’s face, growling, “Carry my vow.” The massacre sent shockwaves through the region, Darius’s name a synonym for terror.

In Beneath the Rings, Darius’s fists are the Hand’s hammer, his blows shattering the hostages’ defiance. He stalks the dungeon’s shadows, his scarred face a mask of silent fury, each strike a lash of his tha’r. But his gaze lingers on one captive, a spark of recognition flickering in his eyes. A secret from his past stirs, a ghost from Mogadishu’s ruins, and the dungeon’s air grows heavier. Darius’s grief for Amina and Leyla fuels every blow, their memory a blade that cuts deeper than steel. He is no longer a man but a force, a fracture in the world’s flesh, breaking all who stand in his path.

Darius Khan is not just a killer. He is the storm of vengeance, a warrior who traded survival for ash, a father who lost his light and chose to shatter the world in its place. In Beneath the Rings, his question lingers like blood on stone: what happens when a heart honed for protection becomes a fist of retribution? The answer lies in the shadows, where mercy is a casualty, and vengeance is unbreakable. Beneath the Rings is coming. Share your dread with #BeneathTheRings. 

The desert waits. What price will fury demand?