Chapter 5 — The Apprentice Who Ran Away
The sleigh hit the tundra like a confession—messy, loud, and impossible to take back.
Snow burst outward in a glittering wave, scattering across the bones of what had once been holy ground. The Prime Gate loomed ahead, tilted and cracked, half-buried in frost and memory. Its runes still pulsed, faintly—belief gasping for breath.
Chuck stayed at the reins, shoulders bowed beneath the red coat’s silence. His breath steamed into a world that had forgotten warmth.
“Good landing,” I said from under a pile of scrolls and bruised optimism. “If the goal was survival, not grace.”
Dax clawed his way out of a drift, shaking snow from his hair. “Define good.”
“Alive,” I said. “Mostly. We can negotiate symmetry later.”
Chuck didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on the Gate’s shadow cutting through the aurora. Every line of that ancient structure whispered something he didn’t want to hear.
“Prime Gate,” I murmured, opening my ledger with fingers that didn’t quite stop shaking. “Old magic. Wrong magic.” I jotted a note that probably wouldn’t flatter him. “Tell me you didn’t build that.”
“I helped.”
He swung down from the sleigh. The snow under his boots didn’t crunch; it accused.
“Nick and I,” he said. “We wrote the lattice together.”
“Nick?” Dax asked.
“Saint Nicholas,” I supplied. “Patron of gifts, ale, and psychological warfare against children.”
“Used to be,” Chuck said. “Now he’s a prisoner of obligation. Mine.”
We followed him toward the Gate. The runes flickered like embers that hadn’t decided if the night was worth one more breath.
“What happened to the other apprentice?” I asked. “The one you mentioned before. Stacey.”
Chuck placed a hand on the lowest rune. It pulsed once under his palm, weak as an old heart remembering how.
“He left,” he said. “Couldn’t handle what we built.”
“Or couldn’t handle you,” I said before my better judgment could wrestle me quiet.
His head snapped toward me, eyes bright and sharp. “He ran. I kept the work alive.”
“Perhaps that’s the problem,” I murmured, writing down what I’d probably regret later.
Wind screamed through the broken towers, circling like it wanted to form words but kept changing its mind.
Dax studied the cracks in the Gate’s side. “You think he’s here?”
“He never left,” Chuck said. “The Pact keeps him bound. He can’t move beyond the northern circle. I made sure of it.”
“Binding your mistakes to eternity,” I said. “A timeless strategy.”
“Worked for gods.”
“Until it didn’t.”
Chuck moved deeper into the ruins. The remains of a workshop crouched nearby—walls collapsed, benches frozen mid-collapse, gears half-buried like artifacts of shame. A forge sat dead center, cold and cracked, the last fire still etched in soot.
He stopped at the doorway. “This is where Gwen said she’d meet me.”
“She was here?” I asked.
“Was,” he said.
The coat shifted against him, a restless tug at the shoulders. It wanted to keep walking. He didn’t.
Somewhere inside the ruin, a single bell rang.
A sleigh bell.
Unpowered. Still. Yet it rang again.
Dax raised his hands to fists and took a defensive stance in front of Chuck. I snapped my ledger shut, tucking it under one arm.
The third note stretched thin, breaking apart in the cold.
Then a voice spoke from the shadows, warm and wrecked with time.
“Took you long enough.”
Chuck froze.
Snow fell from the rafters, silver dust catching the light of the aurora.
The voice laughed—a quiet sound, kind and exhausted.
Nick.
And somewhere inside that laugh, Chuck’s heart made the sound of a door opening and slamming shut at the same time.
