Chapter 9 — North Pole, Prime Gate
The world was wrong-side up.
That’s the first thing I wrote before my quill froze mid-sentence.
Snow spun around the Prime Gate like a living storm, dragging our footprints into memory. Beyond its half-open arch stood the North Pole—not the one painted on greeting cards, but a fortress of glass and frost, lit by belief burning down to its last wick.
We crossed the threshold in the kind of silence people reserve for graves.
Inside, everything glittered. Every icicle carried a name. Every wall pulsed with runes written in the languages of hope and debt. The air hummed softly, like the whole place was holding its breath, afraid forgiveness might be contagious.
Dax’s bare feet cracked the frost beneath him. “You really did it,” he murmured, cigar smoke curling from his grin.
Chuck adjusted the red coat, its hem whispering across the stone. “I didn’t do this,” he said. “I just started the lie.”
“Which became religion,” I said. “Then nostalgia. Then franchise.”
“Progress,” he muttered.
We walked deeper. Benches lined the hall, each cluttered with half-finished toys—wooden horses without riders, dolls with hollow eyes, sleigh bells that had forgotten how to sing. At the far end, a circular chamber glowed faint red.
“Central hub,” I whispered. “Reservoir for the Pact’s power. It’s feeding off ambient belief. You’re looking at an ecosystem built on obligation.”
“Yuck. Sounds like marriage,” Dax said, puffing out another cloud.
Chuck didn’t smile. He moved straight for the doors at the room’s center—massive slabs of iron carved with runes that crawled across their surface like patient fireflies.
“This is it,” he said. “The Gate’s heart.”
Dax frowned. “Why’s it shakin’?”
The doors trembled, frost shedding from their seams. Beyond them came laughter—small, human, the kind that should’ve been beautiful but wasn’t.
I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. “That’s not—”
“Children,” Chuck said quietly. “Believers.”
He reached for the latch.
A voice cracked through the corridor like a bell splitting the air.
“Don’t!”
We turned.
Nick stood in the doorway, breath coming hard, eyes wild. His coat was brighter than Chuck’s, whole where the other’s was frayed. The beard was longer, streaked with frost, the kind of white that wasn’t age so much as consequence.
“Don’t open that door,” he said. “You don’t understand what you’ll break. You don’t understand what you created, Charles.”
Chuck gave a laugh that hurt just hearing it. “Funny. I said the same thing to you once.”
Nick stepped forward, the stone icing under his boots. “Belief cracks like glass, Chuck. You drop it, you lose them.”
“Them?” Chuck gestured at the door. “You mean the ones trapped in your miracle machine? The kids you keep feeding the lie to because you can’t stop giving?”
Nick’s jaw tightened. “Because I can’t stop.”
The echo rolled through the hall like thunder too tired to rise.
“The Pact won’t let me.”
Chuck sighed. “Then maybe it’s time to kill it.”
My quill started scratching on its own, desperate not to miss a single word of history.
Nick’s gaze cut toward me. “You—scribe. Tell him. Tell him what happens when no one believes.”
I swallowed hard. “Collapse,” I said. “This could be about stories, but magic based on shared belief unravels exponentially. The story dies. So does the memory. So do you.”
Nick nodded slowly. “And them.”
He pointed at the door.
Chuck hesitated, his hand on the latch. Frost shimmered beneath his fingers, echoing the Pact’s heartbeat.
“If you open that,” Nick said, “you’ll destroy what’s left of kindness in the world.”
Chuck turned to face him. “Or I’ll stop lying about where it came from. Isn’t this what you wanted me to do? Accept? Forgive? Heal?”
“Chuck,” I warned, “truth doesn’t always heal.”
He gave me a look I’d seen only once before. “Maybe not,” he said. “But it ends the infection.”
He pulled the latch.
The doors opened like judgment.
Inside, dozens of children sat cross-legged in the glow of dying aurora. Broken toys lay scattered around them—bits of doll arms, bent wheels, sleigh bells with no sound. Their faces were young, but their eyes were tired in a way children’s eyes should never be.
One small girl stood, holding a lump of coal cupped in both hands. She walked to Chuck and pressed it into his palm.
“It glows when you tell the truth,” she whispered.
The coal flickered…first dull red, then gold, pulsing with his heartbeat.
Nick closed his eyes, shoulders shaking.
Chuck stared down at the ember, its warmth creeping through the cracks guilt had carved into him. “I never meant to trap you,” he said softly. “Any of you.”
The girl smiled, tiny and knowing. “Then let us go.”
He looked up. “If I do, the stories die.”
“Silly man. They already did,” she said. “You just kept pretending to hear them.”
For a long moment, no one moved. Even the wind outside forgot how to breathe.
Dax finally broke the silence. “Yeah. This isn’t creepy AT all,” he said, puffing once more on his cigar. “Seems to me that the twerp’s right. If kindness needs a cage to survive, it’s already dead.”
Nick’s voice came low, rough with grief. “You’re not listening. Please understand. The world forgets. The lights will go out, and there’s nothing left.”
Chuck’s eyes softened. “Maybe forgetting is mercy.”
He looked back to the coal, and it glowed brighter…steady now, sure of itself.
I wrote the words as they happened because that’s my curse. Entry: the wizard holds fire. The saint holds fear. The children wait to be believed in or released.
Nick’s whisper trembled through the frost. “Only because they don’t know what you’re about to do.”
Chuck closed his hand around the ember. The light leaked through his fingers.
“Then it’s time they found out,” he said.
And outside the fortress, the Prime Gate answered with a groan deep enough to shake the snow from the stars.
