🏆 ONC 2026 Honorable Mention 🏆 ''Nothing is what it seems in dreams.'' In the depths of a dark and twisted forest, Aris, crown prince of Lancaster, is tormented by recurring nightmares of the Tainted--monstrous creations of the black fae, a corrupting force that seeps into all who live within its woods. Relentlessly hunted in the dreams, he finds unexpected aid from a mysterious girl named Elara, and with her help he is able to elude the creatures each time, breaking free from the nightmare's clutches. But when Aris is wounded by one of the Tainted, the line between dream and reality begins to blur. When a weapon deadly to the black fae appears in his grasp from the dream, Aris and his sisters--Tamryn, Maeve, Maeril, and Aine--must race against time and his failing health to uncover the ancient truth behind the forest's curse, or face the imminent threat of the black fae and its vengeful master, the guardian of the dark forest, Erebus Nocturne. ✧☽ ✧ ☼ ✧ ☽ ✧ Cover design by Aravis Brightspell ✧☽ ✧ ☼ ✧ ☽ ✧ If you are reading this story on any platform other than Wattpad, you are very likely to be at risk of a malware attack and reading a plagiarized copy of my work. If you wish to read this story in its original, safe form, please go to https://www.wattpad.com/user/Aravis-Brightspell.

|ONC2026 Honorable Mention| She is sent to kill the dragon. Instead, she might become his only salvation. *** In a world swallowed by the Ever-Dark, Iva Vernigora is nothing more than a lowly servant in the house of the cruel Voivode Yakub Ivanov, Duke of Highroot. But when Voivode blackmails her with the lives of her parents, Iva is forced to pretend she's his daughter, as she infiltrates the royal academy of magic - Kolegium. Voivode Yakub's order is absolute: poison the Prince Konstantin Veliki. Prince Konstantin is the heir to the throne, the last of the line of Dragons - a Zmey warrior of light, who was blessed with a dragon-shifting gift. At a first glance, he is nothing but a smug, pompous royal, and everything Iva is supposed to hate. Yet every touch, and every shared lesson at Kolegium blurs the line between the enemy she must kill and the man she is beginning to crave. While Iva stalks her prey as a knife in the dark, waiting for the chance to extinguish Konstantin's light, she discovers that the dragon everyone fears is the only thing standing between humanity and the void. As the Ever-Dark Shades rise, Iva must make an impossible choice. Will she carry out her sinister orders and secure her parents' freedom, or will she stand by the Dragon in the battle for the world's last light? *** The Shades are coming. The Dragons are falling. And the Eternal Spark is waiting for its host. © 2026 EvelynHail Exclusively on Wattpad Based on prompts: 97. "When the world slips into endless darkness, something begins to move in the shadows and you must find a way to survive in a night that never ends." 4. "You discover that the dragon everyone fears is in danger, and you are the only one who can save it from the knight sworn to slay it ."

When a strange message popped up on Iris's phone, she didn't expect a link to a game that would change her life forever. Trapped in a neon-lit world with no exit button, she finds herself surrounded by other players, people she has never met before, all of whom seem just as lonely and lost as she is. But this game isn't like any other she's played before. There is no score, and there are no winners. Instead, the system gives them quiet, deeply personal quests that force them to talk, trust, and confront the things they've been running from. The more they open up, the closer they get to logging out, because the game's true purpose was never for entertainment, but to save them. The only problem was that Iris had already made up her mind about being alive. Prompt: 60. You download a new app that promises to cure your boredom, and it delivers far more than you ever expected.

Celia Jones can talk to the dead, but getting on with them is a different story. She always has at least three spirits following her around, complaining about their relatives, or the inadequacy of their funeral arrangements. The latest is a murdered actress, Maude Domby, but she's less interested in denouncing her killer than in accusing the understudy of stealing her favourite pearls. When the charming but utterly fraudulent medium Stanley Winter holds a séance to contact Maude, Maude insists she and Celia should attend, to see people mourning her 'properly'. But the séance ends up implicating an innocent woman, and now Stanley Winter is banging on Celia's door, begging her to help him find Maude's real killer. Unfortunately, helping Stanley Winter could lead Celia to confront her other power - the one that's both lighter and infinitely darker than talking to the dead. ONC Prompt: 72. A real necromancer sits in on a fake séance.