Zainab grew up amid the rumble of military convoys and the stench of oil fires, a girl with a gaze that cut through lies like a blade. She learned early that trust was a luxury, easily shattered by a neighbor’s betrayal or a soldier’s whim. Iraq in the late 1980s was a crucible of fear, its people caught between a dictator’s paranoia and the world’s indifference. Zainab watched as her classmates vanished—some to conscription, others to mass graves—yet in her mother’s lessons, decoding patterns in numbers, she found solace, her mind wiring itself to unravel the unseen.

As a teenager, Zainab’s intellect burned brighter than the desert sun. She taught herself to code on a battered computer her father salvaged from a looted government office, her fingers dancing across keys to build programs that predicted patterns in chaos. At seventeen, she hacked into a local militia’s radio network, redirecting their communications to expose their plans to her community. 

The act earned her a scholarship to study computer science at Baghdad University, where her professors marveled at her ability to weave algorithms that seemed to anticipate human behavior. She wrote of Iraq’s wounds—chemical attacks on Kurds, the sanctions that starved her people, and the foreign hands that stirred the pot of suffering. Her code was her voice, a quiet rebellion against a world that had abandoned her nation. She believed, foolishly, that knowledge could shield her from betrayal.

Zainab’s rise in Iraq’s intelligence community was swift. By her mid-twenties, she was recruited by the Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secretive agency, her skills in surveillance and data analysis making her indispensable. She designed systems to track dissidents, her algorithms sifting through phone calls and emails to pinpoint threats. After the 2003 U.S. invasion toppled Saddam, Zainab, now a freelance operative, worked with coalition forces, believing their promises of a rebuilt Iraq. 

She married Amir, a fellow coder who shared her dreams of stability, and in 2012, they welcomed their son, Tariq, whose tiny hands seemed to hold the future. Zainab’s work took her to the heart of Iraq’s sectarian violence—ISIS’s rise, militia turf wars, and the drone strikes that turned villages to ash. She built networks to intercept terrorist communications, her code saving lives while her conscience wrestled with the blood on her hands. She thought she could navigate the shadows, that her intellect could outwit treachery. She was mistaken.

The breaking point came in 2018, during a covert operation in Damascus. Syria’s civil war had turned the city into a maze of snipers and spies, and Zainab, now a contractor for a Western intelligence agency, was tasked with infiltrating a jihadist network. Her team, a mix of Syrian rebels and foreign operatives, relied on her surveillance web to guide them through the city’s ruins. 

But trust, her fatal flaw, betrayed her. 

One of her Syrian allies, bought by a rival faction, fed her false coordinates. The ambush was merciless—gunfire shredded the night, her team cut down in seconds. Zainab took a bullet to the chest, collapsing in an alley as her blood pooled beneath her. Left for dead, she clawed her way to a safehouse, her body screaming, her mind replaying the traitor’s smirk. Amir and Tariq, back in Baghdad, were targeted in retaliation—a car bomb reduced their home to rubble. 

Zainab, recovering in hiding, learned of their deaths through a grainy video sent by her enemies. Her that—her vow of vengeance—ignited, a fire that would consume her.

The woman who survived Damascus was not the Zainab Al-Fahd who had once coded for hope. Her tha’r reshaped her, her algorithms now tools of retribution. She vanished into the underworld, her name a ghost in intelligence circles. In the chaos of Syria’s war, she found others broken by betrayal, their loyalty forged in shared pain. 

It was here that The Obsidian Hand found her. Hassan Suleiman, the group’s exiled commander, saw in Zainab a mind that could see through walls. “You’ve tasted their lies,” he said, his eyes burning with conviction. “Join us, and we’ll make their world blind.” Zainab, hollowed by loss, needed no persuasion. The Hand’s motto—“Through fire, we are forged”—mirrored her own searing need for justice. She pledged herself in a blood-soaked oath, her fingers tracing their insignia, the bleeding crescent moon a reflection of her shattered heart.

Zainab’s indoctrination was a baptism in shadows. The Obsidian Hand honed her skills, teaching her to weaponize surveillance, hack global networks, and turn data into chaos. Zainab, once a protector who mapped threats, became “The Watcher,” a menace who saw all. 

Her first mission was a test: infiltrate a Turkish military database to redirect a supply convoy into an ambush. Zainab’s code was flawless, her algorithms rewriting GPS signals so precisely that the convoy drove into a kill zone. The success was electric—she realized that data, wielded with intent, could burn empires to ash. 

By 2024, she was the Hand’s master of surveillance. Her most daring act came that year, when she hacked a U.S. drone network, redirecting a Hellfire missile to a rival militia’s stronghold. The strike killed 80, the flames lighting the night as Zainab watched from her screens, murmuring, “Betrayal breeds ash.” Her web of intercepts—phones, satellites, encrypted chats—choked her enemies, her that're a silent stranglehold.

In Beneath the Rings, Zainab’s surveillance is the Hand’s eyes, her intercepts strangling the hostages’ rescuers. She operates from a hidden bunker, her screens glowing with data streams, her algorithms hunting for weaknesses. Zainab’s grief for Amir and Tariq fuels her vigilance, their memory a blade that cuts through trust. She is no longer a woman but a force, a fracture in the world’s sight, watching all while unseen.

Zainab Al-Fahd is not just a hacker. She is the gaze of vengeance, a coder who traded hope for ash, a mother who lost her future and chose to blind the world in its place. In Beneath the Rings, her question lingers like a shadow: what happens when a mind honed for protection becomes a web of retribution? The answer lies in the darkness, where trust is a casualty, and vengeance is all-seeing. Beneath the Rings is coming. Share your dread with #BeneathTheRings. The desert waits. What price will betrayal demand?