The Cypher’s Kiss: A Choice Based Short Story

GET BACK TOGETHER

The next morning breaks with sun and warm weather, and you take the end of Icetide as a sign that love can conquer winter. Together you spend the day in your flat eating sweets and laughing. It’s like no time has passed at all. Pain is forgotten. Being together is easy.

However, the problem of a Freelancer and a cypher being in love has not changed. Ammien begs you to continue your affair in secret. You take Ammien's face gently in your hands. "If we’re found out, I’ll lose you — I couldn't bear that, to lose you again."

Ammien smiles and kisses you.

You talk for hours and the next day you go with them while they resign as cypher and take a job in the library with Madame Chronicler. You will continue as a Freelancer. For the first time, you sit in the courtyard together and hold hands.

Over the next few years, you build a home together. You adopt a trio of children left orphaned by a Scar ambush. You think back to the days when you had given up on love and can't believe how happy you are.

And then one afternoon, you come home to find the curtains drawn and Ammien lying on the floor in the darkness, crying softly. For weeks after, they're silent, not speaking to you or the children. Sometimes they cry; sometimes they laugh quietly to themselves. "Are you sick, Ammien? Tell me what I can do, my love. I beg you."

Days later, it turns to anger. Fierce unpredictable anger. Raging, tears, throwing things and blame. Your love, no longer new, can't defeat the regret of Ammien's disappointments, of dreams cast aside and a life unlived.

Your heart breaks the day that you come home and find Ammien gone.

You make dinner for the children. 

You never see Ammien again — but maybe that's because you don't try.

THE END
Return to the “Prelude" to choose a different path..

Special thanks to Jay Watamaniuk, Ryan Cormier, Jeffrey Campbell, Mary Kirby, Amanda Kelsko, and Karin Weekes.