• Chapter 1
    THE BEGINNING



    A man walks down a dark street in the backwaters of New York City. His long black trench coat sways in the breeze caused by his movement, his hands, covered in black leather gloves, swinging loosely at his side. The collar of his trench coat is flipped up, casting a shadow from the lights behind him as he passes street lamps, and the downward tilt of his head blocks the lights from hitting him in the front. His long hair is also jet black and tied back behind him in a pony tail that reaches to just below his shoulders. His loose black pants over dark black shoes extend from beneath his trench coat, starting halfway below his knees. At a casual glance, he is no more than a moving shadow in the night.
    Beside his tail of hair, the hilt of a katana shaped like a dragon’s head juts up from beneath his trench coat. The mouth points towards the bottom of the hilt, causing the eyes to stare in to the sky. The cross guard is a disk with two dragons intertwined around the blade inside of it, and just below the cross guard a single white gem is set into the hilt; the gem almost seems to glow with its own inner light. The eyes of the dragon are red stones, both gleaming like blood on fire, making the dragon almost seem alive.
    The neighborhood the man walks through had long ago run down, one of the many slums in and around New York City that fell to the “progress” of man. Most of the buildings were once apartment buildings, housing families and friends, laborers who toiled each day to feed their wives and children, or in the memories of lost husbands. But that was back in the early days of New York, when most women were simply housewives, and the days here were brighter. Now, a majority of the buildings that are still safe serve as crack houses, a couple have turned into hostels or homes for the homeless, a hollow show of support from the city’s government to its people. But most of the buildings are too run down to be lived in, and those have turned into homes for the squatters, the homeless who either could not or would not go into the government funded Homes.
    Many of the doors in the buildings are missing, or boarded over. Some doorways and stoops still sport bloodstains and barely discernable chalk outlines, some fresher than others. Other doorways have police tape struggling to hold on to at least one side of the door as the light breeze kicks them up. Few doors are partially intact, hanging loosely by one hinge, or barely by two. Still rarer are the doors still fully intact. Almost all of the windows are boarded up, most for secrecy, though a few have homemade curtains billowing out from between loosely attached boards. The whole neighborhood holds the air of a place forgotten by time, only remembered by those poor wretches who are forced to live here, and by those unfortunate tourists who wander into it on accident, and manage to survive long enough to escape.
    Most of the street lamps are out, some from electrical failures, most with shattered glass beneath them either shot in one of the gang wars or knocked out with a stone by someone who wanted to keep away prying eyes. Those few lamps that are left tend to flicker in and out more often than not. A few had been replaced by those city workers who are still courageous enough to venture down this way; new bulbs with no casings or protection, struggling to survive in this harsh environment. Just like everything else in this God forgotten hood.
    The man stops beneath one broken street lamp, bathed in darkness, hidden in the night. He reaches one hand into a pocket of his trench coat and comes out with a wrinkled and well used pack of cigarettes. He angles the pack so that one slides down to the small opening in the top, and then he taps it out into his waiting palm before replacing the pack in a different pocket. He grips the cigarette lightly between his lips as he draws a pure silver lighter from yet another pocket. He snaps it open with a flip of his wrist, lighting it in the same instant with his other hand. The pale orange light barely illuminates his face for a moment as he brings it up to the end of the cigarette, inhaling just enough to light it. The light reflects off a pair of sunglasses dark enough to hide his eyes and a shadow of hair as if he had not shaved in a while before he snaps the lighter closed again, quickly extinguishing the revealing light. His eyes dart back and forth beneath the shades, searching for a response in the returned darkness: human or otherwise. Satisfied at what he sees, a couple of bums, a hooker, and a few wandering tourists who are out a little too late, he replaces the lighter and continues to walk.