Under The Veil Chapter 1: Chapter-1 :- Beginning of a Mistake

Read chapter 1 of Under The Veil by Phoenixfly_steller on NovelPedia.

Chapter-1 :- Beginning of a Mistake The cobblestone street lay abandoned, a forgotten artery in the heart of a sleeping city. On this empty stretch of road, a lone figure walked. His footsteps fell with a measured, rhythmic precision, though there was no one left to hear them. He wore a heavy black coat draped over a white shirt, but the fabric was no longer entirely white. It was stained in dark, uneven patches. The blood had soaked through the cotton and begun to stiffen in the frigid night air. Black trousers followed the same muted, lightless tone. It blended him so seamlessly into the surrounding dark that he seemed to belong to the shadows themselves. His hair was black and unremarkable, plastered slightly to his forehead by a damp chill, yet his eyes were sharp, brown, and relentlessly unwavering. That carried a quiet, immense weight. It wasn’t the ordinary exhaustion of a body pushed to its physical limits, nor the adrenaline crash following a brutal fight. It was something far deeper. It was a profound, spiritual weariness that had settled within his marrow long before this night had even begun. Blood marked his clothes in a morbid testament to the evening's work. The stains at his collar were still fresh enough to glisten faintly whenever he passed beneath the dim ambient light, catching the weak illumination in wet, crimson reflections. But the patches near his ribs and cuffs were old enough to cling stubbornly to the threads. They were already drying into rust-colored flakes that refused to wash away. The road remained suffocatingly silent. No stray dogs were scavenging in the alleys, no distant engines humming from the highway miles away, and no wind whispering through the eaves of the dilapidated tenements. The city felt less like a metropolis and more like a tomb. Above him, a solitary street lamp stood like a lonely sentinel. It cast a weak, jaundiced yellow glow over the wet asphalt, a light that felt strangely insufficient. It seemed to illuminate far less than it ought to, leaving the edges of the world blurred, shadowy, and entirely unreachable. Then, without warning, the bulb flickered. It flashed once, plunging the street into absolute blackness for a fraction of a second. Then twice. Finally, it fell into a frantic, irregular rhythm, buzzing with a low electrical whine as though something unseen and ravenous was feeding on the current. The shadows cast by the lamp shifted violently with the pulse, but they were out of sync. They moved a fraction too slow, a fraction too late. The darkness stretched and retracted, no longer bound to the physical laws of the objects that cast it. From his hanging left hand, blood gathered at his fingertips. It pooled slowly, fighting gravity until it could hold on no longer, before falling—one heavy drop at a time—onto the cold, scratched metal of the revolver he held loosely in his right. The cylinder was completely empty. He already knew that; he had counted the shots as they left the chamber. The heavy weight of the steel in his palm offered no promise of protection and possessed no remaining threat. It was merely a useless anchor to a violent world, offering nothing but the cold, grim comfort of familiarity. Drip. Drip. Drip. The sound of the blood striking the barrel lingered unnaturally in the air. The tiny acoustic echoes stretched into the silence for seconds before finally fading into the heavy atmosphere. He did not look down at the gun or his stained hands. His gaze remained fixed dead ahead. The air around him suddenly felt terribly wrong. It was not a drop in temperature, but an increase in density. The atmosphere grew thick, heavy with the sharp, metallic tang of ozone and the underlying, nauseating scent of copper. At first, the visual disturbance was nothing more than a slight, shimmering distortion, like the heat mirage rising from sun-baked asphalt in the dead of summer. It was subtle enough to ignore, ordinary enough for the human brain to dism