The old man never bothered explaining his rules. That was the first thing I learned. If you explain a rule, people try to negotiate it. If you write it down, they'll find a way to contest it. If you say it out loud, they'll pretend they didn't understand. His rules only ever showed up in the consequences of breaking them.
I was nine years old when he first tried to kill me. Not personally—that would've been the easy way out. Instead, he dumped me in the northern ravine at sunset with a broken canteen, a single knife, and a look that said I was either about to learn something or die trying.
"Survive," he said, and then he just walked away.
The wind through those rocks sounded like something screaming. Predators were moving in the shadows, but I didn't cry or scream. I'd already realized something vital: if he actually wanted me dead, I'd be dead already.
His name was Marduk. I'd found it on a dusty wax seal in his library. He wasn't some kind heart or a mentor from a storybook; he was a force of nature, as cold and indifferent as a glacier. Every time he looked at me, I felt the weight of a man who had zero time left to waste on anyone mediocre.
That night, I didn't try to fight the local wildlife. I just watched them. By midnight, I knew that ravine better than the things hunting me. I used sound, scent, and timing to stay invisible. When the sun came up, Marduk was waiting. He looked at my knife—it was still spotless.
"Hm. You didn't use it."
"I didn't have to," I told him.
He hit me hard enough to send me eating dirt. "Don't ever confuse being clever with being safe," he snapped. "Thinking keeps you alive. Arrogance gets you eaten." That was the day my childhood officially ended.
As the years crawled by, I learned how to read his silences. He'd work me until I collapsed just to find my baseline. He'd starve me just to see how I'd handle it. The next big lesson came a year later at the edge of a flooded river during a Krensha migration. Marduk just pointed and said, "Cross."
I didn't jump in. I sat there for days, watching how the silt moved and where the current broke. I used logs as levers to shift the flow upstream, then waited for the herd to bunch up. I used the mass of the animals like a temporary dam, giving myself a seven-minute window to walk across on dry land.
"You think like a coward," he told me while I stood on the other side, shivering. He went quiet for a long time, then added, "Good. Cowards live longer."
That night, it clicked: control is everything. Marduk wasn't teaching me how to win a fight; he was teaching me how to make sure the fight never even happened.
"Tomorrow," he said as we sat by the fire, "we start alchemy. We aren't making gold. We're going to study decay. Everything that lives can be broken down—a body, a contract, or even a kingdom."
The next morning, the cabin smelled like sulfur and dried mint. Marduk set a blackened vial in front of me.
"Alchemy, Raymond, isn't for people who are in a hurry. It's about realizing that nothing is ever truly permanent. The poison is the cure, and the cure is the poison. It's all about the balance."
I spun the vial between my fingers, thinking about all the years I'd spent manipulating people and markets. A little information can steady a situation; too much burns it to the ground. I told him that turning things into gold felt like a total lack of imagination. Marduk just grunted, then gave me the foundation of his entire world:
"Listen. Nothing is lost, nothing is created. Everything is just... transformed."
Those words stuck with me. Lavoisier said the same thing in another life, and he was right. If everything transforms, then my death would just be another stage. If nothing is lost, then the man I used to be back in D.C. was still there, hiding under this boy's skin. Alchemy became my new language—a way to turn chaos into something useful.
One rainy night, Marduk pulled out a vial and something wrapped in silk.
"This is yours. I took it from your mother the day I found the two of you."
It was a silver pendant, cold to the touch. To my love, Medina, it read. Inside was a blurry photo of her and a man. My mother. Marduk told me then that she had swum for hours through a storm, carrying me on her back, only to die the second she knew I was safe on the sand.
The next day, I climbed the southern cliff to her grave. I sat by the pile of stones with the wind in my hair.
"Thank you," I whispered. "I've never really been one for selfless sacrifice. But you saved a monster, Medina. You fought the ocean so I could fight the world. I promise you, this life you saved... I'm going to turn it into an empire."
On the way back down, I ran into Marduk.
"Why did you never let me call you 'Father'?"
He looked almost nostalgic for a second.
"Because I don't deserve the title. Besides, stop calling me Marduk. Call me 'Old Man'."
"Understood," I said.
"Are you done with your goodbyes?" he asked.
"You never really say goodbye to a blood debt, Old Man. You just live in a way that pays it back."
He nodded—a rare sign of approval. "Good. Get back to your jars. Decay doesn't study itself."
I smiled. The road ahead was going to be painful, but I had my brain, my alchemy, and the memory of a woman who beat the ocean. I wasn't the prey anymore. I was Raymond Reddington, and I was becoming the most dangerous man in two different worlds.