In the heart of a sprawling metropolis, where steel and glass giants kissed the sky and the air was a thick stew of exhaust and ambition, there lived a man named Marcus. He was a creature of the shadows, a silent sentinel of the forgotten. His eyes, a dull gray that mirrored the concrete jungle around him, searched the streets with a practiced intensity. Marcus had a gift, or perhaps a curse: he could see the unseen, the whispers of a world that lay just beyond the veil of the ordinary. By day, he donned the guise of a street artist, his paintbrushes and spray cans his wand and incantations. He painted images that seemed to breathe with life, though their subjects remained elusive to the mundane eye. At night, he transformed into a guardian of the lost and the lonely, patrolling the alleyways and rooftops like a modern-day gargoyle. His canvas was the city itself, and his art was the salvation of souls adrift in a sea of indifference. Marcus had not always been this way. Once, he had