DOLPH

 

 

He was named Rudolph when he was born, but like so many born different, he eventually shed the name he was given. And if it hadn’t been for a foggy night and a hard decision, the rest of us freaks would still probably be tucked out of sight, waiting to be useful in some way, and in the meanwhile, to hell with us…

But wait, I’m telling it out of order.

It doesn’t actually start with Dolph. It doesn’t start with Klaus, either, though it involves him.

If it’s not about Dolph and it’s not about Klaus, then where does the story really start, you wonder. Well, it starts with a woman. A woman both powerful and visionary, which is probably not the way you’ve heard it told before. Most of the time, in most of the stories, she doesn’t even get a name when she appears, but I promise you, she has one. And I promise you, she’s the one who matters the most in this story, even if we usually only hear about the others.

Every one knows about Klaus and his gift, though we’ll get to the truth of that in a second, but not very many know about her. It’s important to know where she came from, though. See, this woman, she was the one and only daughter of Father Time.

And, like most of the people in this story, she was gifted.

So when people talk about Klaus and his wife—and that’s always her role, isn’t it?—they never seem to mention how she’s one of a kind. And she truly was, for damned sure. And it’s her gift of holding time at bay that makes everything possible. She saved Klaus’s life, and she helped him find a purpose when he was ready to walk out into the snows and take a nap.

The thing about the big guy that no one really gets is he’s up there in the frozen nowhere because it’s where a guy like him needed to be to stay sane. To my mind, that’s just more proof of how special she is. I don’t think I could run away from the world to be with someone that broken for a lifetime, let alone a forever.

Yeah, you heard me. The big guy? He was broken. Understand, Klaus is a man with a curse. He takes one look at people, and he knows. He knows the colour of a human soul. That takes a toll on a man, and so… snow. There’s no dark stain anywhere to be had on the endless snow. He’d always been a builder—keeping his hands busy helped keep his eyes from knowing too much about the people around him—and together they built a home.

And then he started making toys.

You ask me? I think the toys were her idea. The big guy, he has great hands for that kind of thing, and with her gifts, all the time in the world. Together, they made for a happier couple than most I know. But I also know he was done with children. He’d seen too many of them start out so good and end up not. She, on the other hand, loved children. She can’t have any, of course—no baby will grow in a body that lives outside of time—so I always figured she does the next best thing she can: she tries to do good by all the kids of the world.

Now, if you’re noticing most of the magic is in her, and only a little to do with him, and thinking that ain’t much like the story you’ve always been told, well, welcome to a world where some stories get retold more than others, and some truths aren’t found to be worth retelling.

Holding on to moments is one thing, but using them proper is another. In her endless time in an endless home, Klaus surpassed apprentices and tradesmen both, and soon he was an expert craftsman of nearly every kind. And though he’d been an older man when they’d met, he grew no older, and in between her ongoing forevers, the light in his eyes came back.

They were happy. And when he was happy, she asked that they might take all those beautiful crafts he’d made and give them to the world. To children. And because he was happy again, and it had been so long since he’d seen a bad soul, he agreed.

Given enough time, any living creature can learn. And it was not too much for her to spread her reach a little wider and snare a dozen reindeer. Klaus never worried about animals—his gift only ever worked with people—and the longer those reindeer existed out of time, the more they learned. Eventually, they were as smart as you or me. Inside her reach, they kept their antlers, they earned names for themselves, and, in time, they even learned simple words they could send to Klaus’s mind or hers or each other.

They could see the other reindeer outside her reach, and sometimes they even wanted to go back, to grow older, and to pass on from this world. And though it made her sad, she let them go. As the daughter of Father Time, she was well aware that for all things that breathe there will come a time of breathlessness, though she herself might hold it off for as long as forever for some.

Klaus made bells and harnesses and a beautiful sleigh, and she wrapped timelessness in the ringing of the bells, so powerful that the air itself would hold still around their sound, and the reindeer could walk right up into the sky, their hoofs on the edge of air as solid as stone. And so it was she and Klaus would visit the world, all between an infant’s blink, and leave behind wonderful treasures inside all those homes, for all the children. When the world was asleep, and time didn’t pass, Klaus didn’t have to look at any man, woman, or child if he didn’t desire to.

He only looked at the children, and only the good.

That’s how it was for a forever for them, centuries for the rest of the world. Sure, the reindeer would sometimes ask to be released, and though she mourned, she always allowed them to go and live out the rest of their lives with others of their kind, though they might not have the speech or understanding of Klaus’s former team.

And that’s how Rudolph came. Always a little different, a little more courageous at some things, but shy about others. Klaus watched him grow, and he swore he caught something of a light from him. Not like seeing a soul—Klaus had never been able to read the souls of animals, only his fellow humankind—but something else. Something palpable. Something visible to all.

The light was soft at first, but it became brighter as Rudolph grew to adulthood. From the window of his home inside timelessness, Klaus watched Rudolph’s light grow stronger. It seemed to happen in a blink, not long enough for Klaus to know how difficult a time Rudolph had. But when he saw the creature use his light to scare a wolf pack away from a stray youth, Klaus decided. Even though he had the dozen reindeer he’d always maintained, he brought the lightbringer into their fold.

If neither Klaus nor his wife saw how these proud and ageless reindeer also treated Rudolph, it is perhaps not their fault. For the reindeer speech was mind-to-mind, and what the others said to Rudolph they would never dare to say to Klaus, nor especially to the woman who had made them what were.

Rudolph, in the way of the different, believed their claims that he could be cast out at any time for his differences, and thus never spoke of his fears.

The other reindeer tormented him. Lied to him of how others like Rudolph had come and gone through the forevers, and how every time, Klaus took pity on the different one and tried to teach it not to be different but eventually gave up in disgust, banishing them back to the world where they would lose their speech and their thought—and, of course, their light.

In response to this harshness, Rudolph tried to learn the limits of his light in order to have better control over it, and to learn how, someday, to leave that light behind. But the light had other ideas. It started to show him things and cast shadows from elsewhere. Rudolph saw how others—especially others like him—were treated. Kittens born without tails, or puppies missing an ear or an eye; little human girls who cared nothing for dresses or frills or babies; even wolves, who Rudolph struggled to like, chasing off their own when their own were all black or all white; or little human boys who knew from the start they they were different and that different meant wrong.

Mostly, though, Rudolph saw people. People pushed others to the side so often. Children who were not what their parents desired were as tormented as he was, and they didn’t have his Klaus or the woman who made time stand still. Some of those people ran. Some were silenced. All were alone.

Rudolph watched, and Rudolph learned.

Then came the fog.

To Klaus, the fog seemed born of the castoffs of dark souls: a mist made of all the hurt and bad people had been doing to each other. To the daughter of Father Time, it seemed the stain of too many horrible yesterdays, memories of bad times trying to force a way into their home. To the reindeer, it cast a blur over the eyes, and a wail in the mind, drowning their kindnesses to each other, and making them all the crueler to Rudolph. But it was opaque to all of them. The lady rang one of the bells, and though the fog froze, there was no seeing through it. It gathered around their home, and she looked at all the gifts that her husband had made, and for the first time in her piece of forever, she grieved.

Her sadness brought a bravery to Rudolph, who had an instinct this stain was not immune to everything. And so, despite the merciless threats of the others year after year, Rudolph brought forth his light, as bright as he could make it, and as he’d somehow known, they could see into and through the fog.

Klaus asked Rudolph, mind-to-mind, if he would lead the rest of the team with his light to pierce the fog and guide the way, walking on air held apart from time.

And oh, the things those other reindeer said to Rudolph to frighten him, but Rudolph agreed. There was steel to the lightbringer’s thoughts. And the lady? She was happy, then, knowing the gifts would find homes, and she thanked him.

Rudolph did not meet her gaze.

Klaus made him a harness and bells. She brought time to heel and bound it in the ringing. Rudolph tried on the harness, shook the bells, and learned to walk into the sky, casting his light before him to lead his way to, and from, their home in the snow and ice surrounded by the fog.

But the night they were to go, when she pulled on the thread of the year to draw a whole world into one moment of a single night, Rudolph was gone. His bells, his harness, and—the biggest betrayal of all—many of the gifts had all vanished with him. In the passing of a breath or two, Rudolph had acted and returned, showing no sign of shame. In fact, Rudolph’s head remained high right until he saw her, and only then did he kneel before her in apology, though he still didn’t speak of what he’d done or why.

He did not reply when Klaus demanded to know where the gifts were. The others tried to incite him the only way they knew how, but Rudolph was stronger than their games. Only when the lady asked him kindly and patiently what he had done, did Rudolph find himself unable to hold his quiet.

Rudolph had visited only those his light had shown him, the cast-offs, the broken, the unwanted, and the unloved. Those who woke each morning knowing they were wrong, and prayed each night they would not wake up so the next day. Those who fit in the roles of others, or who missed fitting at all. Those who hurt. Those who cried. Those who had forgotten how to do either.

She listened to him and asked him why. She was a woman aware of infinities, and knew the power of a ‘why.’

Rudolph admitted he could not break his light, and knew it was only a matter of time before, as the other reindeer had explained to him, she and Klaus would send him away for being so different. And he had wanted, just once, to make a difference for others like himself, so he left each of them a little of his light.

He would not do more. He would not help them deliver the rest of the gifts to those he knew had allowed so many to be left aside. He would not help the other reindeer. And he would not apologize for what he had done.

Rudolph waited to be punished, knowing it must come.

But it didn’t. Both Klaus and his wife agreed on that much, though Klaus wanted to send the other reindeer away. The lady, though, prevailed upon him to wait until they showed no ability to change, or at least until there were others capable of taking their place.

But the night would have to stand as Rudolph had left it. The thread of time, pulled so taut, would have to be released, and even she did not know what it might mean. And with the fog and Rudolph refusing to lead the others, she had no reason to hold on any longer. She let go, and the night resumed until morning came.

Those who woke to Rudolph’s presents were the ones most affected. It didn’t matter the gift itself, the presence—and the light Rudolph had left—was the thing. To be singled out, and celebrated, and rewarded, and seen, and heard… And to see others, others like themselves with the same gifts, was to many the first time ever knowing they were not alone. The light Rudolph had given them drew them to each other. They gathered, and they spoke, and they found in each other something they had never had before: a family.

But the world around them saw no joy in this, only anger.

That the broken and strange and weak and different were rewarded when the strong and the normal and the common and the celebrated were not? An outrage. And a particularly dark confusion. None could deny how the gifts had been bestowed, and yet the world refused to see the reasons why these people held a light of their own. More, that same light revealed some who the world had always believed belonged among their own. Such revelations tore more than one apart.

In the fog, the lady and Klaus and the other reindeer could not see these things happening, but Rudolph could, and the pain of it—of his own making, his own actions—left him so broken, he went to Klaus and the lady and begged for their aid.

He called his light and showed the lady and Klaus and the reindeer all the shadows of the people he had helped, and those who he had angered. There were joys, yes, but the hatreds were there, too. Klaus looked away first. He knew where these things were likely to go, having seen dark souls enough during his life where time passed.

As what Rudolph’s shadows revealed grew worse, the lady couldn’t help herself. She reached out and snared another thread, calling it all to stop before another fist could fall.

Holding forever in her hand, she asked for help. The reindeer, knowing now they’d had no small part in making this happen, agreed. Klaus, wanting to make her smile again more than anything, agreed. And Rudolph, poor Rudolph, seeing that the other reindeer were terrified of what might come of them and knowing those he’d helped had only been singled out for violence, agreed.

She was not her father. Holding time still, standing between moments, making a second count more than years, those were her gifts. And so, when she wound the thread backwards, she knew it was done imperfectly. Some things would have to be allowed to remain, lest the whole thing unravel, but she chose them carefully.

Rudolph led Klaus’s sleigh of gifts out into the fog, bolstered by the knowledge that his difference was welcomed by the lady and Klaus, and that he need not fear what the other reindeer had told him. They broke the fog away into nothingness as they rode the time-hardened air, circling a world in which the same night replayed again, differently, but also the same.

The second morning of that same night, some woke knowing the day had happened before. The ones Rudolph had visited opened their gifts knowing what would be inside, and knowing that the real present had nothing to do with what was in their hands, but in a kind of light they could see in others. They left the places they slept, whether they were homes or shelters or the streets, and they saw that light reflected inside other people they had already met on another version of this same day. They knew each other again, for the first time.

And this time, the presents given to all, each home visited, and everything delivered as it might originally have been, the world around them didn’t notice.

At least, not at first.

The broken, and the strange, and the weak, and the different, and those who fit the wrong role, or missed fitting at all had found each other, and in each other a strength. They brought their own light, and found they were not alone.

The world around them would notice, of course. And now and then, they’d even have a moment that almost felt like a memory: an almost-dream they’d seen these people before, and had faced them in numbers, and had done them wrong. The memory would be uncomfortable and unreal enough to ignore, and easily forgotten. But it would return. It did return. Often enough, sometimes, to make them think a little differently.

Though sometimes not.

Now, Klaus and his wife and his animals all live outside of time. Dolph—he calls himself Dolph now—shows Klaus and his wife shadows of those who might need an extra special gift, and Klaus and his wife are more careful now about a lot of things. But she and Klaus and Dolph, they’ll remember both nights forever.

The rest of the world? Well, they’re still growing old. Fewer and fewer of us are still here from the night that never was, the night that happened twice, the night a light guided us through a darkness to each other, and the story—like all stories—is fading in the retelling. We try to find those born like us in the new generations, but sometimes we miss some, and with so many of us having our own memories of that night, the details change.

After all, ask three people for the truth and you’ll get three stories.

Sure, it makes for a happier tale when everything rhymes and the only villain is a bit of bad weather, but I see these other folk like me getting shoved aside. I even see those of us who are different stepping down hard on those who are more different than us. I see fewer folk happy to welcome them in. Fewer folk happy to see any difference for what it is: a gift.

As for me? Well. I still see the light in my people. I keep telling this story. But I look around, and I see the way the world is treating the different, and I can’t help but think another fog is rolling in.

I just hope Dolph is willing to shine his light again.