Origins
Amsterdam - October 1507
The story doesn’t actually start with Santa Claus or Dondavar. It begins much earlier—and here, on Earth. Specifically, in the year 318 A.D., a Christian priest named Nicholas was ordained as bishop of the Greek town of Myra. Nicholas was a good man—humble, kind, and deeply compassionate—and he made it his quiet mission to care for the poor. He gave away food, coins, and warm garments to those who had none, often leaving them in secret to preserve the dignity of the recipients.
Over time, his reputation grew, and so did the stories—of mysterious coins appearing in shoes, of children saved from hardship by gifts that came without explanation. These stories spread far beyond Myra, long after Nicholas passed from the world. Eventually, the Church made him a Saint. And while the legends grew fanciful, the truth beneath them endured.
What few people remember is that Saint Nicholas lived before the Church forbade its priests and bishops to marry. Nicholas did marry, and though history did not preserve the names of his family, it is known that he had children. And those children had children. Generations passed. While most of his descendants faded into the mists of history, a quiet few carried on the tradition of secret gift-giving. None ever became quite as famous as Saint Nicholas.
At least, not at first.
His descendants did not remain in Myra. As the centuries passed, they scattered across Europe and beyond, carried by time and tide, war and wanderlust. And that brings us to the year 1507.
In the bustling harbor city of Amsterdam lived a young Dutch lad named Neik Klass. He was the son of a fisherman and, although he didn’t know it, he was one of Saint Nicholas’s distant descendants. The bloodline was thin by now—threaded through many generations—but it still carried a spark of the original kindness.
Neik’s family was poor, but the boy’s heart was rich with joy and generosity. While other boys bartered or brawled, Neik spent hours carving small toys from scraps of driftwood and fallen branches. He’d hand them out to the smaller children in his neighborhood—no charge, no fanfare. Just a shy smile and a toy shaped like a duck, or a man with a floppy hat, or sometimes even a crude sleigh with wobbly runners.
The neighbors loved him, though they often shook their heads. “He’ll never be rich,” they’d mutter fondly. “Gives everything away.” But Neik didn’t care about wealth. He cared about wonder. He loved stories, especially the old ones—of sea monsters and flying creatures, of stars that whispered and islands that vanished at dawn.
Even in his quiet moments, Neik imagined worlds no one had yet seen. He carved dragons with wide wingspans, ships with billowing sails, and animals that glowed in moonlight. The whittling knife had become an extension of his fingers, and wonder poured out in every curl of wood.
Still, Neik was a realist. He knew his future would not be carved in toys. His father, Jan Klass, had salt in his blood and wanted Neik to follow the family trade. But Neik dreamed not of catching fish, but of following the horizon. Though Amsterdam’s empire was still in its infancy, ships were beginning to travel farther—north to Denmark, west to England, even to the icy ports of Iceland. Neik watched them come and go, their sails fat with wind, their hulls filled with spices, amber, and strange stories.
At sixteen, with his father’s cautious blessing and his mother’s tearful goodbye, Neik signed on as a deckhand aboard a merchant vessel named Bruynvisch—“brown fish,” in the old tongue. It wasn’t much to look at—just a sturdy, double-masted cog built for rough weather—but to Neik, it was freedom wrapped in canvas and rope.
His job was hard: hauling sails, scrubbing decks, and learning knots faster than his calluses could heal. But he loved it. Loved the cry of gulls in the morning, the snap of canvas overhead, and the endless, endless blue. He even started keeping a journal—just a few lines a day when the waves were calm. He wrote about sunsets, cloud shapes, and the strange names of the stars.
But fate does not always smile on those who sail.
On their third voyage northward, in early summer, a storm swept down from the Arctic with a fury the crew had never seen. Winds howled like wolves. Waves rose like mountains. The Bruynvisch groaned, its timbers protesting each blow. Sails tore. Masts cracked. And at last, the hull split apart with a terrible scream of wood and water.
Some of the crew clung to floating debris. Most were swallowed by the sea.
Neik, by sheer luck and timing, managed to pull himself onto a large sea chest—one of the heavier trade trunks lashed on deck before the storm. As the waves tossed it free, it floated with surprising steadiness. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was better than the water.
Time passed. Neik had no idea how long. The cold was numbing. The sky was grey. The wind had quieted, but the sea remained a slow, rolling beast beneath him.
He lifted his head and looked around. Half an hour ago, he had watched Lars—the first mate—lose his grip on a broken plank and sink beneath the waves. The others were gone. Just him now. Him and the sea.
The oilskin coat he wore helped repel the worst of the spray, and the chest kept him mostly out of the water. But he was growing cold. And hungry. And tired.
Still, Neik didn’t give up.
He hugged the chest with numb arms and whispered through chattering teeth, “I’m not done yet. Something… something’s going to save me.”
There was no magic in his voice. Just stubbornness. But somewhere, deep inside, a spark of belief flared. A refusal to surrender. A silent, shining certainty that something—anything—would happen.
And because this is that kind of story… something did.
Now, remember what I said in the Prologue? About the Fairy world? About how it lies just next to ours—always near, yet just out of reach?
At the poles, the barrier between Earth and the realm of Dondavar is thinner. Fragile, even. And the Bruynvisch had drifted very far north. So far, in fact, that the great ice and salt currents had unknowingly carried Neik and his chest into the liminal veil—the shimmering in-between where belief has power.
You see, crossing over is not just about magic. It’s about faith. About deep, childlike belief that the impossible might be possible.
Neik didn’t know about other worlds. He didn’t pray to enter one. But he believed—fiercely, blindly—that something would rescue him. He believed with his whole heart.
And that was enough.
The sea changed. The wind shifted. The sun—hidden for days—broke through the clouds in a sudden blaze of golden warmth.
And as he blinked up at that light, his makeshift raft drifted through a seam in the world. One moment he was in the Arctic Ocean. The next… he was somewhere else.
The water was calmer. The sky a deeper blue. Strange gulls circled overhead—larger than any he had seen before, with silver-feathered wings that shimmered like mica.
A distant cry echoed across the open sky—part songbird, part flute—and the air smelled faintly of mint and snow.
Unaware of the passage he had just made, Neik simply whispered, “Thank you…” and drifted into sleep.
He had arrived in Dondavar. The world of wonder. The land where belief makes things possible. The place where legends begin.
And his story… was only just starting.