In the dusty sprawl of Sana’a, where the horizon shimmered with heat and the weight of history pressed against every stone, Adil Rahmani was born in 1978 to a Yemen teetering on the edge of chaos.

His father, a calligrapher who etched prayers onto parchment for mosques, taught Adil the precision of a steady hand, while his mother, a weaver of intricate textiles sold in bustling markets, instilled in him a reverence for patterns that told stories of resilience. Adil grew up surrounded by the hum of their crafts, a boy with eyes too old for his years, absorbing the tales of a land scarred by glory and betrayal. 

He learned early that truth was fragile, easily buried beneath the rubble of war or the weight of a bribe. Yemen in the 1980s was a chessboard for foreign powers, its people caught in the crossfire of Cold War proxies and tribal feuds. Adil watched as neighbors vanished into the night, their names erased by whispers of “subversive” or “traitor.” Yet, in his parents’ workshop, amid the scent of ink and dyed thread, he found refuge, scribbling his thoughts on scraps of paper, dreaming of a world where words could reshape reality.

As a teenager, Adil’s hunger for truth grew sharper. He devoured newspapers, piecing together the contradictions between state propaganda and the rumors that snaked through the souk. At sixteen, he published his first article in a local paper, a scathing critique of government corruption that earned him both praise and a beating from unidentified thugs. 

His parents, proud but terrified, urged him to be cautious, but Adil’s pen was already a blade, and he wielded it with reckless precision. By the time he was twenty, he had earned a scholarship to study history and journalism at the University of Sana’a, where his professors marveled at his ability to unearth forgotten archives and weave them into narratives that burned with urgency. 

He wrote of Yemen’s colonial wounds, of the British and Ottoman hands that had carved up his homeland, and of the modern betrayals—politicians who sold their people’s future for foreign gold. His words were a call to arms, not for violence, but for awakening. He believed, naively, that truth could be a shield.

Adil’s rise as a journalist was meteoric. By his mid-twenties, he was a correspondent for international outlets, his bylines appearing in London and Cairo, his voice a rare beacon of clarity in a region choked by censorship. He married Layla, a poet whose verses captured the ache of Yemen’s mountains, and in 2010, they welcomed their daughter, Noor, whose laughter filled their small apartment with light. Adil’s work took him to the heart of Yemen’s unraveling—tribal conflicts, Al-Qaeda’s shadow, and the growing unrest that would spark the Arab Spring. He exposed arms deals funneled through Sana’a’s elites, documented the starvation policies of warring factions, and gave names to the faceless dead in drone strikes. 

Each story was a risk, each word a defiance. But Adil believed in the power of his craft, in the idea that a single article could shift the tides of history. He was wrong.

The turning point came in 2016, when Yemen’s civil war had turned Sana’a into a graveyard. Adil had just published a series exposing Saudi-backed mercenaries operating in the south, a piece that implicated powerful figures in Riyadh and Washington. The backlash was swift. One evening, as Adil and Noor walked home from a market, a car bomb tore through the street. The explosion was a deafening roar, a wall of fire and shrapnel that swallowed the world.

Adil awoke in a hospital, his body a map of burns and cuts, his ears ringing with the screams of the dying. Noor, his light, was gone—her small body found beneath the wreckage, her eyes forever closed. Layla, unable to bear the weight of their loss, left Adil six months later, her parting words a whisper: “Your truth killed her.” Adil was alone, his faith in words shattered, his heart a furnace of grief and rage.

The man who emerged from that hospital was not the Adil Rahmani who had once dreamed of justice. His tha’r—his blood feud, his vow of vengeance—consumed him. He vanished from public life, his bylines disappearing, his name fading into rumor. Underground, he found others like him, men and women broken by betrayal, their ideals twisted into weapons. It was here, in the shadows of Yemen’s war, that The Obsidian Hand found him. 

Jibril al-Nasr, the group’s strategist, saw in Adil a mind that could bend reality itself. “You’ve seen what truth does,” Jibril told him, his voice low and steady. “It buries the innocent. Join us, and we’ll make the world choke on its lies.” Adil, hollowed by loss, needed no convincing. The Obsidian Hand’s creed—“Through fire, we are forged”—echoed his own burning need for retribution. He swore allegiance in a candlelit cellar, his hand trembling as he traced their insignia, the bleeding crescent moon a mirror to his wounded soul.

Adil’s indoctrination was not a sudden plunge but a slow descent. The Obsidian Hand gave him purpose, a canvas for his pain. They trained him in the art of disinformation, teaching him to forge documents, manipulate media, and seed chaos with a single keystroke. Adil, once a historian who unearthed truth, became “The Scribe,” a master of illusion who stained reality until it bled myth. 

His first operation was a test: frame a Yemeni politician as a traitor collaborating with Israel. Adil crafted a trail of fabricated emails, doctored photos, and leaked audio so convincing that the man was assassinated by his own allies within weeks. The success was intoxicating. Adil realized that lies, wielded with precision, could topple empires. He had found his calling.

By 2022, Adil was the architect of The Obsidian Hand’s propaganda machine. His most audacious coup came that year, when he framed a French diplomat with forged links to a terrorist cell. The leak, disseminated through hacked news outlets, sparked protests that paralyzed Paris for weeks, the diplomat’s career and family destroyed in the fallout. Adil’s manifesto, scrawled in a notebook he kept hidden, declared, “Truth is clay, and I am its sculptor.” 

He operated from the shadows, his face unknown to all but the Hand’s inner circle, his name a whisper that carried terror. He hacked social media to amplify division, planted false flags to misdirect intelligence agencies, and crafted narratives that turned allies into enemies. To The Obsidian Hand, he was indispensable—a man who could rewrite the world’s perception without firing a shot.

In Beneath the Rings, Adil’s lies are the pulse of The Obsidian Hand’s war. His propaganda paints the hostages’ suffering as the West’s sin, each fabricated image a lash of his tha’r. He works in a dimly lit room, surrounded by screens and encrypted drives, his fingers dancing across keyboards as he prepares a new leak, its contents a mystery even to his comrades. The target—the Olympic Games, a symbol of global unity—trembles on the edge of ruin.

Adil’s grief for Noor fuels every keystroke, his daughter’s memory twisted into a weapon that cuts deeper than any blade. He is no longer a man but a force, a fracture in the world’s conscience, reshaping reality to reflect his pain.

Adil Rahmani is not just a propagandist. He is the ink of vengeance, a historian who traded truth for myth, a father who lost his light and chose to burn the world in its place. In Beneath the Rings, his question lingers like smoke: what happens when a mind honed for clarity becomes a forge of lies? 

The answer lies in the shadows, where truth is a casualty, and vengeance is eternal. Beneath the Rings is coming. Share your dread with #BeneathTheRings. 

The desert waits. What price will reality pay?