Ever After
Explore the living library

What kind of story does tonight have room for?

Follow a mood, a mystery, or the time you have. Every path below leads to a story that keeps the choices you make.

Search the catalogue

Search the words you remember, even when the title has slipped away.

Tonight's paths

Begin with a feeling, then refine the shelf if you wish.

The catalogue

Refine the shelf

Genre20 options
Genre
Mood9 options
Mood
Theme10 options
Theme
Tag10 options
Tag
Reading time1 option
Reading time
Age rating4 options
Age rating
The shelf answers

9 stories found

Illustrated branching story

The Last Car Home

by D. S. Artden

Nora Ellis has built a workable life from deadlines, motherhood, and carefully managed expectations. After a disastrous blind date and a late ride on a historic San Francisco streetcar, she meets a guarded operator whose sharp humor keeps colliding with her need for honesty. Across work, friendship, parenting, grief, and modern dating, every choice asks what she is willing to call love—and what she refuses to lose to keep it.

  • Romance
  • Drama
  • Contemporary Fiction
Quick look

Nora Ellis has built a workable life from deadlines, motherhood, and carefully managed expectations. After a disastrous blind date and a late ride on a historic San Francisco streetcar, she meets a guarded operator whose sharp humor keeps colliding with her need for honesty. Across work, friendship, parenting, grief, and modern dating, every choice asks what she is willing to call love—and what she refuses to lose to keep it.

Content guidance: Implied consensual sexual intimacy between adults, Strong language, Adult relationship conflict, Grief, childhood cancer, and the death of a child

View full details →
Illustrated branching story

The Space Between Houses

by D. S. Artden

Ten-year-old Owen lives mostly with Mom and visits Dad at a new apartment forty-five minutes away. While both parents concentrate on rebuilding their separate lives, Owen quietly carries missed promises, adult messages, and a frightening suspicion that the divorce was somehow his fault. In a vivid dream world between two distant houses, a lantern-bearing Fox and a nest-building Bird help Owen find the words to tell the truth: a child can love two parents, live in two homes, and still remain entirely whole.

  • children's fiction
  • family
  • interactive fiction
Quick look

Ten-year-old Owen lives mostly with Mom and visits Dad at a new apartment forty-five minutes away. While both parents concentrate on rebuilding their separate lives, Owen quietly carries missed promises, adult messages, and a frightening suspicion that the divorce was somehow his fault. In a vivid dream world between two distant houses, a lantern-bearing Fox and a nest-building Bird help Owen find the words to tell the truth: a child can love two parents, live in two homes, and still remain entirely whole.

Content guidance: Divorce and parental separation, Mild parental conflict, A missed visit and feelings of abandonment, Childhood guilt, anger, and sadness, Mildly unsettling dream imagery

View full details →
Illustrated branching story

Star Trek: The Farline — No Safe Course

by D. S. Artden

Fresh from Starfleet Academy, a young Trill ensign joins a Defiant-class vessel being refitted for frontier rescue work. When neglected settlements and a former Starfleet engineer seize the ship's experimental shield network, every lawful course carries a human cost.

  • young adult
  • science fiction
  • mystery
Quick look

Fresh from Starfleet Academy, a young Trill ensign joins a Defiant-class vessel being refitted for frontier rescue work. When neglected settlements and a former Starfleet engineer seize the ship's experimental shield network, every lawful course carries a human cost.

Content guidance: Non-graphic discussion of drug-facilitated sexual assault, Non-consensual recording and distribution, Institutional victim-blaming and harassment, Death, grief, panic, and moral injury, Space combat and civilian danger

View full details →
Illustrated branching story

The Children Who Dreamed North

by D. S. Artden

Five children in five countries grow up with impossible private experiences. As war, migration, surveillance, and family secrets draw them toward a black lake in upstate New York, they discover a shared face, a shared birth second, and a mystery older than human history.

  • young adult
  • science fiction
  • mystery
Quick look

Five children in five countries grow up with impossible private experiences. As war, migration, surveillance, and family secrets draw them toward a black lake in upstate New York, they discover a shared face, a shared birth second, and a mystery older than human history.

Content guidance: War and occupation context, Child endangerment and gun violence, Death and grief, Religious fear, State surveillance and detention, Ecological harm

View full details →
Illustrated branching story

The Road to Rain City

by D. S. Artden, OpenAI Codex

After a hawk takes the mother who kept them safe, four young kittens leave a ruined Montana mountain town carrying only an old photograph and her stories of Seattle. Their westward journey crosses burned cities, wild rivers, and reawakened forests, testing what they owe one another and what it means to stay brave when the world is both cruel and beautiful.

  • middle grade
  • interactive adventure
Quick look

After a hawk takes the mother who kept them safe, four young kittens leave a ruined Montana mountain town carrying only an old photograph and her stories of Seattle. Their westward journey crosses burned cities, wild rivers, and reawakened forests, testing what they owe one another and what it means to stay brave when the world is both cruel and beautiful.

Content guidance: Sustained animal peril and predation, Parental death and grief, Non-graphic fatal possible ending, Postwar environmental destruction

View full details →
Illustrated branching story

Smoke over Bywater

by D. S. Artden, OpenAI Codex

In the occupied Shire, a young mapmaker named Tobin Bramble discovers a hidden road network while struggling to be understood by neighbors who value his gifts more readily than his differences. His choices through resistance, recovery, friendship, and public heartbreak determine what kind of adventurer crosses the final threshold.

  • fantasy
  • interactive fiction
Quick look

In the occupied Shire, a young mapmaker named Tobin Bramble discovers a hidden road network while struggling to be understood by neighbors who value his gifts more readily than his differences. His choices through resistance, recovery, friendship, and public heartbreak determine what kind of adventurer crosses the final threshold.

Content guidance: Non-graphic fantasy violence and death, Occupation, imprisonment, and food deprivation, Grief, anxiety, bullying, and public humiliation

View full details →
Illustrated branching story

The Morning We Carried Home

by D. S. Artden, OpenAI Codex

After ninety-three sunless mornings, Bellwether Valley is running out of warmth. You climb toward an abandoned dawn beacon with a retired engineer, a determined child, and a rain-soaked dog—only to discover that the old machine was never meant to be kept by one pair of hands. Seven choices shape what you carry through the storm and where you choose to begin again.

  • interactive fiction
  • contemporary fable
  • grounded magical realism
Quick look

After ninety-three sunless mornings, Bellwether Valley is running out of warmth. You climb toward an abandoned dawn beacon with a retired engineer, a determined child, and a rain-soaked dog—only to discover that the old machine was never meant to be kept by one pair of hands. Seven choices shape what you carry through the storm and where you choose to begin again.

Content guidance: Brief emotional distress, Non-graphic storm and height danger

View full details →
Illustrated branching story

The Upside-Down Parade

by D. S. Artden, OpenAI Codex

Ten-year-old Mina Bell has drawn the perfect route for Sunnyglass’s Parade of Good Ideas. Then one turned arrow sends every float, musician, baker, kite, and feather-hatted corgi into a pear orchard. Across seven cheerful choices, help Mina discover that changing a plan can create kinds of happiness no map could predict—and choose where the parade’s three possible finales will lead.

  • interactive fiction
  • family adventure
  • comic fantasy
Quick look

Ten-year-old Mina Bell has drawn the perfect route for Sunnyglass’s Parade of Good Ideas. Then one turned arrow sends every float, musician, baker, kite, and feather-hatted corgi into a pear orchard. Across seven cheerful choices, help Mina discover that changing a plan can create kinds of happiness no map could predict—and choose where the parade’s three possible finales will lead.

Content guidance: Mild worry about making a mistake, Safe and playful problem-solving

View full details →
Illustrated branching story

The Keeper of Small Lights

by Ever After Demo Press

On a calm evening at a working harbour, a new helper joins the lamplighter to light eleven small lanterns along the pier — and decides what to do about the last one.

  • gentle fiction
  • slice of life
Quick look

On a calm evening at a working harbour, a new helper joins the lamplighter to light eleven small lanterns along the pier — and decides what to do about the last one.

Content guidance: No frightening content, No peril

View full details →
The writing desk

A story of your own belongs here.

Bring a finished Ever After story to the library.Upload its package, read every finding in full, and follow its review from your private creator desk.

Begin as a creator