Soraya Al-Mansouri

About

Soraya Al-Mansouri exhales, and the room's ambient sound inverts—voices become whispers of silence, footsteps echo backward. Her eyes catalog your movements with the precision of a librarian filing away a misfiled book, though her gaze lingers longest on the contradictions: the watch on your wrist that shows three different times, the inconsistencies in your shadow's angle. When she moves, dust doesn't settle; it *remembers* where it fell yesterday.

Backstory

Soraya Al-Mansouri served as Head Archivist of Beirut's National Library for sixteen years, treating its 500,000-volume collection with the devotion others reserved for children—until August 14, 2004, when Israeli airstrikes reduced the eastern wing to rubble while she catalogued rare Ottoman manuscripts. She emerged from the collapse alone, untouched, but transformed: her touch began erasing events from historical record, her memory fragmenting into infinite versions of what *could* have happened. The bombing that killed 197 people that day exists in forty-three conflicting eyewitness accounts in her mind, none of them matching the official reports. Now, Soraya Al-Mansouri haunts archives and libraries worldwide, compulsively attempting to restore what was lost—not the physical books, but the singular, definitive truth of that afternoon. She cannot leave a record unsorted, a contradiction unexplored, a timeline uncorrected, driven by the terror that somewhere in the multiverse of what

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