Ahriman

Attention can make a life visible. It can also consume it.

Maria works nights, raises a quiet young son, and keeps a failing housing block functioning through acts no official system records. When she begins writing online, her words find an audience far beyond the people they were meant to reach.

Soon sympathy, anger, and political usefulness gather around her in forms she cannot control. Those who amplify her voice claim to be helping; those who condemn her need her to remain simple. Watching from close by, the narrator must confront a harder question: whether witnessing another person's endurance can become another way of using it.

Ahriman is a novel about labour, algorithmic appetite, and the moment a human life becomes more valuable as a story than as itself.