Somewhere in the Shadows, 2057
I sit here now, an old wolf with teeth worn dull and a body mapped in scars, staring into the flickering hearth of a forgotten dacha. The Neva still whispers outside, but its secrets are mine now—buried deep in the bones of empires I built and broke. They call me Grim Volkov, Pakhan of legends, but legends are lies we tell to outrun the truth. As the end creeps close, like a thief in the fog, I spill it all: the blood, the betrayals, the women who warmed the nights but couldn't thaw the ice. It started not with glory, but with a gasp in the cold—my gasp, in that cursed tenement where pain was the first lesson and survival the only prayer. Listen close, for this ain't just my tale; it's the manual I clawed from the abyss. And it begins with him—the bastard who forged me in fire and fists.
St. Petersburg, Winter 1989
The Neva River clawed at the city's bones like a lover gone mad, its surface a cracked mirror of gray ice that held the weight of a thousand unspoken sins. Snow fell in fat, indifferent flakes, blanketing the narrow streets of Petrogradsky District where the tenements leaned into each other like drunks at last call. Inside one such husk, Number 47, my mother Irina labored in the dim flicker of a single bulb, her breaths ragged as Siberian winds. My father, Alexei, paced the room like a caged bear, reeking of cheap vodka and rage—his poet's dreams curdled into excuses for the bottle and the belt.
I entered the world not with a cry, but with a gasp—tiny fists clenched against the cold that seeped through the walls like an uninvited ghost. The midwife, a chain-smoking babushka named Olga with hands rough as sandpaper, swaddled me in a threadbare blanket stained with the ghosts of previous births. "A fighter," she muttered, tying off the cord with a practiced flick. "Eyes like storm clouds. He'll chew through the world or it'll chew him." But Alexei just snarled, slamming a fist on the table. "Another mouth to feed? Useless whelp." His words were the first scar, invisible but deep.
Irina, pale as the snow outside, cradled me against her breast, the factory calluses on her fingers tracing the soft curve of my cheek. Alexei had once been a poet, ink-stained verses smuggled in the night, but the Party's grip turned his fire to fury. He beat her for the rations that vanished too quick, for the cold that bit harder each winter, for the dreams that died in his gut. One night, months before my birth, he'd come home from the docks, fists flying like accusations—her bruises hidden under shawls, his apologies drowned in more samogon. By my first breath, the black Volga hadn't come for him yet, but his shadow loomed larger than the state's.
Now, with me in her arms, Irina whispered old folk tales—stories of Baba Yaga's hut on chicken legs, of Ivan the Fool outwitting tsars—to drown the thunder of his snores. But my first lullaby was the crack of his hand across her face when the soup burned, the metallic tang of the Neva mingling with the sour reek of cabbage boiled too long and blood on the floor. Survival was the only gospel here: queue for bread at dawn, mend uniforms by gaslight, dodge the militiamen's wandering hands—and his. The Soviet dream had curdled into ration cards and rumors of collapse, the walls of the Union cracking like the ice on the river, and our home cracking under his rage.
Lesson of the Forge: In the crucible of want, a man learns his first truth—hunger does not negotiate. It carves you, as the fists carved my mother's spirit and mine. Viktor Frankl, who stared into Auschwitz's maw and emerged with Man's Search for Meaning, taught that between stimulus and response lies our power to choose. My father chose the bottle as weapon; the state would choose chains. But chains break, and fists falter. When the world—and the ones meant to protect you—strip you bare, ask: What will I forge from the shards? Rage into resolve, or let it consume you?
By my fifth winter, I knew the shape of hunger—and fear—the way it gnawed at the ribs like a rat in the walls, or coiled in the gut when his boots thumped the stairs. He vanished one stormy night, dragged off for "subversive writings," whispers of samizdat verses that mocked the Party more than his family. The gulag swallowed him whole, leaving bruises that faded but echoes that lingered. I shadowed the fartsovshchiki—black market hustlers in threadbare coats—who traded Western jeans for bootleg Beatles tapes under the bridges. At eight, I lifted my first wallet from a drunk stumbling out of the kvass stand, the leather slick with sweat and regret. The mark never noticed, too lost in his vodka haze, but I felt the thrill—a spark in the void, the first taste of power over chaos, sweeter than dodging his swings.
School was a farce, a gray box where teachers droned Marx like a dirge and boys like me sharpened pencils into shivs. I learned faster from the streets: how to spot a musor—cop—in plainclothes by the bulge of his holster, how to melt into alley shadows when the patrols—or worse, his ghost in my nightmares—prowled. My mother stitched on, her eyes hollowing with each passing year, but she clung to me like a talisman. "Be clever, malysh," she'd say, pressing a crust of black bread into my palm. "The world eats the slow—and the broken."
Wisdom of the Street: Power is not given; it is seized in the flicker of a moment. As Marcus Aurelius etched in his Meditations, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." My theft was no sin, but a sacrament—a boy's first step into agency, born from dodging fists that taught me weakness kills. In grim times, when the queue stretches endless and the strong—like fathers turned tyrants—devour the frail, remember: the pocket you pick might be your own fate. Choose the mark wisely; choose yourself first, before the bruises define you.
The scar came at sixteen, under a blood-orange moon that hung low over the shipyards. The vor v zakone, old Viktor the Blade, ran the docks—a spider of a man with tattoos blooming like faded roses across his knuckles. I ran malyava—messages etched on cigarette paper—for him, dodging between crates of contraband caviar and crates of smuggled Stolichnaya. That night, a rival crew from the Narva slums muscled in on a protection racket, cornering Viktor's collector in a fog-shrouded alley.
I arrived late, brass knuckles borrowed from a dockhand heavy in my pocket. The collector lay crumpled, ribs stove in, but the leader—a bull-necked boy named Sasha with a switchblade grin—turned on me. "Fresh meat," Sasha sneered, lunging. The blade caught me across the left eye, a hot line of fire that split skin and soul. Blood flooded my vision, warm and coppery, but rage bloomed blacker than the pain—rage honed by years of Alexei's "lessons."
I swung wild, knuckles cracking bone, then drove my elbow into Sasha's throat. The boy gurgled, dropped the knife. I picked it up, the hilt sticky, and plunged it home—once, twice—until the alley floor drank the red. When Viktor found me, slumped against a crate, the old vor laughed, a sound like breaking ice. "Grim, eh? Like death's own face. You've got the look, boy. The ponyatki—our code—it's in your blood."
Grim. The name stuck like tar, a map etched in flesh. My mother cleaned the wound with vodka-soaked rags, her hands trembling—echoes of cleaning her own after his rages. "No more," she begged. But the mirror showed a new truth: the boy was gone, replaced by something feral, eyes mismatched—one storm-gray, the other a milky scar. The world didn't reward the weak; it devoured them, spat out the bones—just as he had tried to devour us. And in that devouring, I heard the call—not from gods or fates, but from the abyss itself.
Cost of the Blade: Becoming a man demands blood, yours or another's. Jordan Peterson, drawing from the chaos of the psyche in 12 Rules for Life, warns that voluntary confrontation with the dragon of the unknown slays the beast and claims its gold. But the scar remains, a toll paid in innocence—mine paid early under a father's fury. Grim's eye was the price of his first kill; yours may be a shattered trust or a buried dream, forged in the home that should shelter but strikes instead. In the aftermath, do not flinch. Clean the wound. Stare into the mirror. The man who stares back is yours to command—or to fear. And in youth's fire, the charm that wins hearts is just a blade's edge—sharp, fleeting, until the call demands more, and the abuser's shadow fuels the wolf's howl.
A destiny of wolves, howling in the endless Russian night. The ordinary world? A lie for the dead. My journey had only just bled into being—and oh, the rivers it would carve.