Fortress Of Solitude And Krypto

At the very top of the world, where the ice goes on forever and the sky turns shades of green and violet at night, there is a place that almost no one will ever find.

The Fortress of Solitude.

Can you picture it? Rising from the ice like a cathedral made of crystal — towers and arches of clear, pale blue Kryptonian crystal, catching the Arctic light and holding it, turning it into something that glows from within. The entrance is a great door that only Superman can open, made from a material so strong that nothing short of the most extraordinary force in the universe could move it. When Superman places his key and the door swings wide, it makes a sound like the softest, highest note a choir has ever sung.

Inside, the air is warm.

The first room you would enter is the Hall of Krypton — walls lined with records and artifacts and holographic projections that shimmer in the cool air. The history of a whole world, preserved here because Superman chose to save it. At the center of the hall, two holographic figures stand in gentle, constant motion: Jor-El in his scholar's robes, Lara beside him in her silver gown. They are not real, exactly — they are memories encoded in crystal — but when Superman speaks to them, their voices answer. They know the things that Jor-El and Lara knew. They teach. They listen. They love him, in the way that memory loves.

In the next room, on a dais of Kryptonian crystal, rests the Bottled City of Kandor — tiny but alive, its little lights blinking in their slow and patient rhythm. Superman added soft heating elements around the dais and measured the temperature three times a day when he first brought Kandor home. He brings botanists' notes on how to keep things growing in miniature conditions. He is nothing if not thorough.

And in the wide, bright room at the back — the room with the reinforced titanium walls, because this is where play happens — there is the sound of a dog.

Not any dog. The greatest dog in the universe.

Krypto.

Before Krypton was lost, Jor-El had sent one test vessel ahead of Kal-El's spacecraft — a small capsule, just the right size for a white puppy with bright eyes and a wagging tail. The test vessel took a different route through space and arrived later — much later — but under Earth's yellow sun, the puppy who had been sleeping safely in the stars woke up with the same gifts as Superman.

Super-strength. Super-speed. Heat vision. The ability to fly — which Krypto does constantly, with the boundless enthusiasm of a dog who has just discovered that the sky has no walls and no fences and no end.

He patrols the Arctic ice flats when he is not inside, soaring in great white loops that leave contrails of cold air. He fetches titanium-reinforced balls that Superman throws miles across the tundra. He once stopped a glacier from calving by simply planting himself in front of it and pushing, his little paws set firm, his tongue hanging out, until the ice stopped moving. He is very proud of this.

When Superman arrives at the Fortress after a long mission — tired, sometimes, in the deep way that comes from caring very much about very difficult things — Krypto launches himself through the crystal corridors like a white comet and hits Superman square in the chest. Superman catches him. He holds that warm, wriggling, joyful dog and stands in his home that is also a museum that is also a laboratory that is also a place of memory, and something in him settles.

Here, he does not have to be only Superman. He can be Kal-El. The boy from Krypton who never knew his first home but built a second one, piece by piece, crystal by crystal, memory by memory, in the cold bright silence of the Arctic.

He talks to the holograms of Jor-El and Lara about the things he is learning. He studies the Kandor dome and makes notes. He reads the Kryptonian records and teaches himself the history of a world he never lived in. And when he is finished, he throws a titanium ball for Krypto — as far as he can, which is very, very far — and listens to the distant joyful BARK echoing across the ice.

The Fortress of Solitude has two meanings, you know.

The first is that it is a place where Superman can be alone, away from the noise and need of the world, where he can breathe.

The second is that it is where he is never — not even for a moment — alone.