Chapter 1: The Night Mystery of Venice

In a gloomy backstreet of the city, where the glow of streetlights shyly skirted the cracked sidewalks, stood a man. A stocky, sturdy former soldier, now a mercenary, he resembled warriors from the days when a man had to be his own weapon. With his broad shoulders, outlined jaw and scars worn like ordinances, he looked like he was carved from stone. His face was stern, with a history engraved in it - brutal, cold and merciless. Clenching his hand on the cool grip of his beretta, he gazed at the tarry waters of the canal, as if at the bottom of his own memories.

There was something lurking in his eyes that few would want to see. How deep beneath the rugged shell lay a man? Was it still human? In those eyes were reflections of people he knew - people who had passed away, mangled by bullets, knives, poison, and sometimes just by him. They formed a whole gallery of ghosts there, and he was their guide and executioner. He was like a machine of destruction, callous, indifferent, but too aware to ignore it. Each new mission, each new task stripped him of the remnants of his old emotions, reminding him that with each pull of the trigger he was losing something of himself that perhaps once had some meaning.

He took a step forward, feeling the uneven cobblestones under his boots - real enough to know that he had not yet sunk into nothingness. The air was cold, heavy and thick with the stench of moisture. The wind smeared his face like a blade. This city, all its rotten glory, had him in its grip, as if he were just a pawn in a game that someone had long ago planned for him. Fury boiled inside him at the thought of how little his will was in this game. The task was clear, yet completely obscure - a target without a face, a principal without a name. Nevertheless, he knew he had no choice.

He felt the weight of this mission, like the weight of steel at his belt, the metal promise of death - and he was ready to keep it. The last thing that could surprise him was treacherous hope.

"This place must have looked similarly dirty and vile in the past as it looks today," he thought, feeling his own resentment rising along with the stench lingering in the damp alleys. The sidewalk beneath his shoes was cracked and sunken, filled with patches of dirt, as if a testament to all the sins the city had brought forth into the world. The stench of rotten waste and moisture had been getting to him for several minutes, assaulting his nostrils with a merciless reminder that he was in the heart of the ruins of civilization. However, he was not about to relent. He concentrated, holding back irritation and fatigue to assess his position. He moved forward confidently, with determination, as if the steps would bring him closer to an answer he was no longer going to put off.

As he walked a few more meters, quiet, ominous whispers began to reach his ears. Barely audible, like a murmur in the distance, but growing clearer, as if someone was deliberately giving him unintelligible, subcutaneous messages. He felt that these whispers were aware of his presence. His instincts told him, , that he was being watched - followed with a precision that infuriated him enough to make him almost scabrous to fight whatever was behind it.

"Who are you?" he repeated in his mind, fighting the irritation that was cutting off his sanity. With his back pinned against the damp, stinking wall, he scanned the dark streets with his gaze, trying to catch a glimpse of something real, though he could already feel that reality was beginning to lose focus that night. A mixture of moonlight and long, black shadows spilled out like a spider's web, trapping him in a trap from which there was no way out. The dampness of the sewers at this hour was beginning to feel like pain, sticky and poignant, searing him to the bone.

- Show yourself! - he hissed, no longer trying to hide either his irritation or his growing anger. He felt that someone was here, even if he could not prove it - his instincts did not let him alone. There was a feeling that the landscape around him was trembling, as if the real world merely rippled for a moment, only to freeze again in stillness a moment later, like a nightmare caught in a frame. The air became thick, and time in the city froze, as if everything suddenly turned off, waiting for something to happen. Instinctively, he clung tighter to the wall, turning his head in the direction from which someone's whisper seemed to be coming.

- The time has come, Alex... - The whisper seemed barely audible, but in fact it filled his head, insistent and deep, as if it flowed directly from his own thoughts. The man felt dazed, as if for a moment he was hovering in a vacuum between the past and something he could not yet comprehend. It took him several long seconds to realize that the sound coming to him was not just an echo. It was a call from a long-buried past and a dark foreshadowing of events that were soon to come.

The voice quieted suddenly, as if it had held its own breath, listening for his reaction. The silence that followed had the weight of lead, invading his thoughts, sharpening every moment of anticipation. He stood still, his hands clenching tighter and tighter on the weapon's hilt. He had to go to where the whispers were coming from, he had no other choice - at this moment every second was like a sentence. He moved forward in uncertainty, passing the shimmering waters of the lagoons in the distance, glistening from the fading lights of Venice. Their iridescent majesty hid something sultry and gloomy. The city's towers and domes rose from the waters like a pale forest shooting into the sky; slender bridges arched over the canals like veins carrying long-dead memories. The architecture of the place seemed to speak to him, whispering something he understood only subconsciously, but which had nothing to do with legends told to tourists.

He felt that the streets hid answers that would only reveal themselves when he sufficiently explored the city's darkness. The red-yellow glow of the streetlights swirled on the cracked sidewalks, highlighting every hole, every blemish, and the cool, damp air increasingly irritated his lungs, piercing him like a dagger. At the end of the Fondamenta dei Ormesini, he caught a glimpse of a light that slowly revealed something more than a street - it revealed a place full of mystery, darkness and hazy memories. This strange city, though he had known it for years, seemed foreign, as if it was revealing to him its entirely new face, which only darkness could reveal to him.

"This city lives by night," he thought with a resigned smile as the last remnants of daylight drowned in the waters of the lagoon. The glow of the lamps reflected on the surface, creating the illusion that the gondolas were sailing through a sky woven of stars. He knew that twilight carried life not for those who came here with cameras and maps, but for those like him, those whose step steered toward darkness, not in search of beauty, but in pursuit of truth.

He passed by a small chapel, almost invisible from the street, and its majesty surprised him - the entrance guarded access to a courtyard from which the muffled sounds of a bacari pub emanated, like the whispers of some ritual in which he had no entrance. Three twin palazzos loomed amidst the murky contours, above the canals, rising like silent witnesses to the city's former glory. The real Venice was hiding here - this Venice that has survived time, waiting for its chosen guests. Sidewalks, bridges, sleepy canals formed an inseparable act between the past and the present. The city, composed of the bones and blood of past generations, spoke to him like a living being.

Walking hurriedly behind a shadow that seemed to flee from him in the back alleys, he felt that he had found himself in Venice removed from another time, suspended somewhere between reality and dream. The streets running over the canals, the arched bridges and buildings hovering over the waters, seemed to almost mock him, tempting and leading him deeper into the maze. He seemed to be surrounded by the ghosts of the people who had passed this way before him, almost tangible, but stopped in their own world, unreachable to his senses. The city, that night, seemed to draw him closer to its secrets, ready to unveil the darkness whose mystery existed only to be found by the likes of him.

Over the canals, boats battled restless waves, and the wind wheezed ever sharper, bringing with it a pearly mist that shrouded the streets and buildings like a milky veil. The moon seemed to emerge and disappear behind the clouds, as if the city was deliberately playing with him, once illuminating him, once leaving him in darkness. He felt someone - or something - taunting him, as if trying to snatch away the remnants of certainty he still had inside him.

Finally, he reached a wrought-iron fence, behind which stretched a strange, almost unearthly garden. Rare plants grew there, shining in the moonlight with deep garnet and vivid green, their silvery leaves resembling the blades of weapons. The gate stood slightly ajar, as if just waiting for someone to cross it. To him, this was an unmistakable clue - whoever he was pursuing had to enter this way, unless he managed to melt into the air, which seemed unlikely. His analytical mind pushed him forward, and the rusty hinges creaked loudly, betraying his presence there.

A split second later, he spotted a figure in a long coat disappearing down the cobblestone path cutting through the garden. Their gazes crossed - for a moment, but enough for both of them to realize that the same darkness had drawn them into this night game, a game in which they now became opponents. He sensed something primal in the man's eyes, an almost vibrating energy that attracted like a magnetic field. He had never encountered anything like it before in his "career."

"I can't ignore it," he thought, furrowing his brow. "You are an important pawn in this game, maybe even the key. I can't lose sight of you, if only at any cost. "With an efficient motion, he slipped the gun into its holster, then glanced at the watch, an old chronograph he had received from his grandfather. On the pearl dial, the two mechanisms were ticking in perfect synchronization, until the hands suddenly stopped, as if time had suspended its course.

"Intriguing..." - he thought, trying to figure out what the strange halt meant.The disappearing shadow led him to a narrow passage between tenements. At first glance it could be missed, but he knew his job. He climbed the wall and moved quickly, trying to keep his distance and remain unnoticed. As he neared his destination, he recognized the place - it was an old, abandoned stable, a silent witness to the city's dark history, known only to insiders. As quietly as he could, he jumped down to the wet ground, then silently shuffled toward the building.

The facade of the stable, once covered in brick red, now appeared as a ruin, a relic of a long-gone glory, clinging barely to the carved doors and rusted steel window arches. The plaster was falling off in patches, and dampness and darkness spread over the walls like the plague. He concentrated, slowly making his way around the building, like a predator surveying the area before attacking. With each passing second, the tension grew, and he knew there was no room for error in this game.

Finally, through a sizable gap in the ruined wall, he spotted the figure that had eluded him all night. The man stood inside the stable, leaning against an old, time-bitten table that wobbled slightly on the uneven, beaten floor. The pale flame of a lone candle cast a sparse glow on the empty room, where every shadow seemed to be more than just a lack of light.

In a silence broken only by the rustling of turning parchments, the man, bent over a stack of documents, resembled a figure removed from another time, locked in a world of his own. With clenched hands, he gently unrolled the cramped scrolls, from which a fine dust, visible in the flickering light, rose with each movement. His hands stopped on one of the documents - an old map of Venice, full of symbols. The map seemed to live under his touch; the symbols flared and, to Alex's surprise, floated above the parchment, sparkling in the air. It was like an animated vision of secrets hidden beneath the surface of the city. He tried to see something comprehensible in it, but the signs remained alien, impenetrable.

He stepped back a bit, feeling the tension building up - the image increasingly convinced him that the stranger was not here by chance. Perhaps he was tracking something of great importance, something that could affect not only the fate of Venice, but also transcend the boundaries of their world. He realized that what the man was looking for was forbidden knowledge, carefully hidden from the sight of people for hundreds of years. With each passing moment, what he saw became more real, and the dark vision of dangerous - and possibly deadly - knowledge became clearer.

Still focused on the figure, Alex stared, mesmerized. The candlelight played with the features of the mysterious man, highlighting the contours of a face that seemed forged from the past. His expressive features, as if carved in marble, emanated a strange magnetism, as if someone had managed to pour forgotten stories of the city onto him, turning him into a living memory of those who lived here centuries ago.

"The world I know is just a layer," he thought, feeling a disturbing certainty that the boundary between their realities was becoming increasingly blurred. The cold dampness of the night and the darkness imbued with an aura of mystery enveloped him like a thick veil, behind which he knew he had to follow to gain at least a shred of this extraordinary knowledge.

Even standing there in the semi-darkness, he felt that his fate and that of this stranger were irrevocably intertwined, and that their meeting, though accidental, could be the key to mysteries long buried in the city's foundations.

The stranger, bent over scrolls of parchments and thick books, studied the ancient symbols with almost fanatical attention, leafing through the pages slowly, as if each word, each mark revealed to him a new part of the lost puzzle. His whispering grew as he delved into unintelligible languages, archaic sounds that echoed in the silence like prayers to forgotten deities. Vibrating through the air, the rustling of parchments and amplified by the sound of the wind echoed through the forgotten walls until he could almost feel each of those quiet breaths of history resonate with his own anxiety.

The wind increased, pushing forcefully against the old walls and bringing with it something more than the chill of the night - a whiff of secrets, as if wanted to hasten the disclosure of something that had survived centuries only to find its place here and now. He breathed deeply, absorbing the damp scent of the past; not just dust and old stones, but almost the smell of fear and ambition of those who also tread this road centuries ago.

Just then, a figure emerged from behind a dark corner - a slender shape that nimbly blended into the twilight. The woman, covered by a wide hood, moved silently, and her shadow, though barely visible, seemed to creep restlessly behind her on the damp stones. She had something about her that resembled portraits from old Venetian frescoes, as if she had emerged directly from the canvases of 17th century artists. Her long dress moved slightly, and as she entered the stable and threw back her hood, a face with classic, almost marble-like features appeared to Alex, illuminated by the faint glow of a candle. A parchment glistened in her hands, which she lifted toward the man, and their quiet whispers resounded again in the darkness, this time more intense, as if they had sworn something to each other in silent collusion.

He felt his heart beating harder. He knew that what was happening in front of him was not just a quest for knowledge - it was an attempt to uncover dark inscriptions that were not meant to be seen by the human eye. Inwardly torn between fascination and anxiety, he knew he would not be able to look away. Watching the two from hiding, he realized they were like guardians of another time, fragile bridges between past and present. Symbol by symbol, scroll by scroll, their fingers ran over ancient signs, the meaning of which could be the key to the city's past, perhaps even to something greater - to chapters of reality that no one knew about.

He watched mesmerized, drawn into this silent game, as if he himself had become a witness not only to the secret, but also to his own destiny, which step by step opened for him the gates to the secrets hidden deep beneath the stones of Venice.

The woman, to Alex's amazement, gestured vigorously, drawing intricate patterns in the air that, like echoes of ancient rituals, shone with their own restless radiance. Her every movement created an invisible web of energy that seemed to stretch and pulsate around them, wrapping the space with a magic that could be felt even from a distance. The man, hitherto cold and aloof, took out one of the powerful books, and then - almost violently - began to pronounce words resembling incantations, his voice vibrating in the air like an echo causing a resonance in the walls of the stable. In that instant, a thick fog began to fill the room, thick and almost touchable, seeping between them like a translucent veil separating them from reality.

For a moment, it seemed that the two figures - a man and a woman - merged into one, creating an eerie, surreal form that seemed to exist beyond the limits of human comprehension. Their bodies took on vague contours that pulsed to the rhythm of their spells. The man raised his hands in a gesture as if invoking powers that had been sleeping here for centuries, and suddenly the entire building trembled. In one brief moment, the entire stable glowed with a dazzling radiance, and an invisible wave swept through Venice, shaking the air and penetrating the walls, like a pulsating energy breaking down all barriers.

Alex felt the ground beneath his feet tremble, as if he was balancing on the edge of worlds. In that moment, he realized that the door between worlds had been opened - and what was happening in front of him was no longer just a game of shadows. From hiding, he watched in bewilderment as the two silhouettes, now flickering and barely distinct, emerged from the stable, filled with a power that seemed to pulsate through their veins, as if they were only now becoming full of their true nature. In their eyes lurked terror, wisdom and awe for the forces they unleashed, an almost frightening power over which they did not have full control.

When he was left alone, he stepped out of the shadows, his heart rumbling with excitement and fear, and his mouth had a taste of mystery. The scenes he witnessed still vibrated in his mind like forbidden words carved into the stones of Venice. He knew that what he had seen could change the order of this world, and that his presence here was no accident. Somewhere deep inside, his instincts told him that he had not come here just as an observer. What would happen now was up to him - and he would either take the gamble or leave this world to the darkness.

He left the stable and stood in the middle of a narrow street, just a moment ago imbued with magic that was now dissipating like smoke. As the sun rose, the pearly mist that still hovered over the city began to descend, revealing Venice waking up to everyday life. The city was returning to its daily life, and the morning bustle began on the streets. Intrigued, he stopped at Caffe Florian, sipping espresso and observing the daily ritual of passersby, who seemed unaware of what had happened that night. A discerning eye, however, could see that Venice's streets and squares concealed something more - a labyrinth not only of stone alleys, but also of thin layers of time and reality. Such passages led straight to the heart of the city's mysteries, where the past was eternally intertwined with the present.

He looked up at the bell tower hill and the canals, along which gondoliers were lazing with elegance, sending fleeting glances to tourists and promises of something they would never reveal. He smiled slightly under his breath - he was one of those who could see something more in Venice.