Onc Stories

For Centuries Grim has been collecting souls. It's what he does, it's his purpose. One day, while collecting a soul in the park, he comes across a lost puppy. For reasons he can't explain, the urge to return the small dog to his owner is overwhelming. He soon finds the animal's owner, a woman in her mid-twenties named Maria. He is struck down by her beauty and realizes that he had once claimed the soul of someone she loved. He becomes even more conflicted when he realizes he has just one year to claim her soul.

The Open Novella Contest is back for 2026! Join fellow storytellers and plant the seed of a tale that will blossom into a 20,000+ word novella within 12 weeks! Your epic quest begins February 1st, 2026, so mark your calendars with this date!

Prompt 78 - You begin to realize nothing is quite what it seems.

𝑯𝒆 𝒕𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑰 𝒍𝒐𝒗𝒆 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒎𝒆. 𝑺𝒐 𝑰'𝒍𝒍 𝒕𝒂𝒌𝒆 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒉𝒊𝒎. 𝑴𝒂𝒚 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒓𝒆𝒆𝒕𝒔 𝒓𝒖𝒏 𝒓𝒆𝒅 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒃𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒉𝒊𝒎 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒐𝒍𝒅𝒔 𝒅𝒆𝒂𝒓. ~•~★~•~ Avyxia Kleymor's peaceful life was shattered when an elvin assassin murdered her parents before her very eyes. Kneeling in a pool of her mother's blood, Avyxia vowed to find the person who took everything from her. Rage and sorrow consumed her young heart as her life gained a new and horrible purpose: vengeance at any cost. ~•~ 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙢𝙥𝙩: 𝙆𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙝𝙤𝙣𝙤𝙧, 𝙨𝙤𝙡𝙙𝙞𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙮, 𝙥𝙤𝙚𝙩𝙨 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙄 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙧𝙖𝙜𝙚. ★OPEN NOVELLA CONTEST 2026 ★Cover art not by me ★Thanks for reading! «Tales Of Yvenia» ~•~★~•~

She came back to fix what was broken. He never knew she was already his fate. Elara Vaelor had everything - until a conspiracy shattered her world in four days. Her fencing career. Her family. Her truth. But when an ancient sword, a glowing diary, and a mirror from six thousand years ago find their way to her - she realizes this is not just her story. It never was. Thrown back into the kingdom of Solvarya, into the life of ClaryaVaelor Prime, Elara must uncover a conspiracy that has haunted her bloodline for millennia. Inside the palace walls, secrets are buried deep. And the King - cold, sharp, and dangerously observant - is watching her every move. She knows who he is. He doesn't know who she is. Yet. Some fates are written six thousand years ago. Some loves take that long to find their way back.

Evelyn Stone lives inside a life that looks complete from the outside-married, settled, raising a healthy son in a house filled with routine and expectations. But beneath the checked boxes and Sunday smiles, her marriage has become a place where love is measured in logistics rather than attention, and worth is defined by usefulness instead of connection. Lucas is not unkind; he is simply finished-content with a version of Evie that no longer includes her dreams, her hunger, or her becoming. As Evie navigates motherhood in a body marked by survival and a spirit quietly starving to be seen, she begins to question what it means to matter in a life that has already decided she should be satisfied.

ONC Prompt 5 My cat likes leaving the house every morning at the same time. When this little habit of his causes me to burn my breakfast, I use his tracking collar to follow him on a whim, while searching for a decent cafe. My mind and body start to warp, as I find him and some other neighborhood cats at the back of an alley, in a small patch of grass, meowing in symphony. When I wake up from what I thought was a massive hangover, I find I am actually in what turns out to be my cats secret home world. Filled with magic instead of milk bowls. Lances instead of litterboxes. Monsters rather than meow-mix. What I thought would be another day at work, turns out to be a fight against evil that our cat friends have secretly been waging for centuries. (This is a bit of a tribute story to my cat who went out one day and never came home)

When a cautious Formula One engineer crosses paths with a damaged comeback driver, she discovers that the most dangerous variable she should assess in the sport isn't speed-but attachment. ✦✦✦ Adriana Santos has always known her place on a championship-winning Formula One team is contingent. Excellence, she learned early, is not the same as security. She works in a role the paddock barely understands-simulating failures before they happen, answering 'what ifs' before they become 'what went wrong', and treating the car like a living thing whose future rests in her hands. Her work is quiet, precise, and easily erased the moment she becomes inconvenient. She is careful because she has to be. She knows Joshua Thomas long before she meets him: the driver who changed his name to fit in, the anomaly on a rival team forever tipped for titles. To Adriana, he's a reaction curve that never quite returned to baseline after last season's crash. His comeback is framed as resilience. Many are simply waiting to see him fail. They meet by accident, in a moment stripped of his usual extravagance and pretence. Adriana notices what she always notices-the face behind the mask, the way he laughs through failure like it doesn't frighten him. Adriana doesn't forget him, though. She keeps her distance but Joshua doesn't, and their reluctant friendship begins to bend into something riskier. And they both know exactly what it could cost them. ✦✦✦ ✦ Open Novella Contest 2026 | Prompts 24, 29, 30, 44 ᴄᴏᴘʏʀɪɢʜᴛ © 2026 ʙʏ ᴀᴜᴅʀᴇʏ ᴀʟʟ ʀɪɢʜᴛꜱ ʀᴇꜱᴇʀᴠᴇᴅ.

The quiet kid has spent years sitting next to the school's biggest troublemaker and bully, wishing he could just disappear.When a desperate wish flips their lives in the strangest way possible, both must navigate the other's worlds and understand each other's problems

Santiago thought visiting Greece for his 30th birthday would be harmless. A little sun, a little flirting, maybe a date with a beautiful man named Apollo. The date doesn't go as planned. All Santiago wants afterward is something sweet before heading back to his hostel-except the apple he takes was never meant for human guests. At The Lily Spa, a luxury retreat catering to gods who desperately need rest, one accidental bite turns Santiago into a problem. An immortal one. Ganymede, the spa's unshakable manager, and his staff have very little time to hide their human guest before the other residents notice. And the gods staying there are already difficult enough: Hera and Zeus hover on the edge of disaster, Dionysus treats the pool like a permanent party, and no one reacts well to surprises involving eternity. As tempers rise and old rules begin to crack, Santiago learns the truth about the spa, its staff, and the quiet systems keeping gods from tearing the world apart. Some mistakes change everything. Some places exist to contain them. And some encounters happen exactly where they shouldn't- above the ocean, below the sky.

When her office burns down an editor must work together with the most infuriating man alive or risk the promotion she's been working her entire career for. **** Chielozonam 'Elo' Williams is doing great. All things considered. It doesn't matter that the job she loves as editor at PerfectRomance, the publishing imprint she's been working at for the past five years has started to feel more like a chore these days. It doesn't matter that her judgemental father might be right about her wasting her life away by not using her full potential. What really matters is getting her dream promotion and enjoying the prime years of her youth. That is until the unthinkable happens. After Elo's office building burns down overnight she's forced to share an office with the one person that makes her blood boil: Connor Price. Archenemies since their days at college Connor makes getting under her skin an art form. He's brash and rude and irritates her like nobody else can with his scathing looks and contemptible behavior. It's not long before they're locked in a battle of wits, neither willing to back down or give up. When they have to work together to acquire a potentially lucrative manuscript, they are forced to put aside their long-standing animosity for an adventure that will blur the line between hate and desire until neither of them can tell where the fighting ends and the falling begins. PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION meets ANYONE BUT YOU meets THE HATING GAME in this contemporary rom-com about resilience, self-discovery and two sworn enemies who can't tell the difference between wanting to kiss or kill each other. An ONC 2026 story inspired by prompt 40. THIS NOVEL IS ONLY AVAILABLE ON WATTPAD AND INKITT. IF YOU ARE READING THIS ANYWHERE ELSE, PLEASE INFORM THE AUTHOR VIA WATTPAD, AS YOU MAY BE READING FROM A MIRROR SITE WHERE IT HAS BEEN PLAGIARIZED AND YOUR DEVICE MAY BE SUBJECTED TO A MALWARE ATTACK.

In 1897, Charlotte Moreau has been in an abusive marriage for years and the only solace she has is in the quiet moments when her husband and children are asleep. She often spends time by the lake and usually finds it a place of solace until one day when she receives a message in a bottle from her former best friend Marie who passed away. She encounters a friend of her acquaintance, Julien Deroche, a man she despises. She begins to argue with him, telling him to leave her alone. She begins to argue with him, telling him vicious things and to turn the other way when they cross paths. When she goes to the woods to find a new place to escape from her daily hell, she encounters Julien and must come to terms with what happened to Marie because Julien knows the truth. And because of their connection to Marie, she begins to soften toward him until she begins seeing him every day in this isolated place. But then Charlotte realizes that she has fallen desperately in love with him. And her husband begins to suspect something when she has dirt on her dress nearly every day. She must choose between her heart and her duty to her husband and children.

An ambitious and atmospheric novella, Blood of Shomon is a hybrid of ancient-myth thriller, dark academia, and cosmic fantasy with a strong sense of hidden history and supernatural consequences. For readers who love The Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo and Neil Gaiman's American Gods, this character driven - fast paced story will delight. While researching the myths of a lost civilization, college senior Obidiah accepts an invitation to join an excavation in Iraq-thinking he's chasing adventure, extra credit, and the girl he loves. But beneath the sands of ancient Eridu lies a forgotten god, a shifting astral labyrinth, and a blood‑oath war that never truly ended. As myth bleeds into reality and love collides with destiny, Obidiah must confront what it truly means to save someone-especially when survival may be the cruelest fate of all.

🏆 ONC 2026 Rounds 1 & 2 Qualifier 🏆 ONC 2026 Round 2 Winner 🏆 🏆 ONC 2026 Round 2 Ambassadors Pick 🏆 Where magic intersects with life, Ren is an unwilling planter whose magnificent garden is full of his failures. When his attempt at confessing to his crush leads to the sight of an unexpected guest hidden in the flowers he was going to give, Ren is tugged along on a fantastical quest to an odd little village that only exists on rainy days to not just break the curse of the finger-sized prince who's deemed Ren his friend, but to also break free from Ren's own wretched connection to mistakes. Along the way, he may just come to realize the power of not just unbridled love, but also love for oneself and just how beautifully it can blossom into something worth saving. Amidst secrets, ticking time, tall tales with hints of truth, and a forest worth dying in, perhaps this time around, Ren won't add to his flowers of failures. Not if he can help it. Love can bloom, too, after all, right?

The creator of a 26th century matchmaker is anti-romantic, but when an analyst challenges her views, she relives painful memories, exposing her technology's flaws and threatening her identity. ｡ ✴︎ ⋆⚛ 🤖 ⚛⋆ ✴︎ ｡ Kayla Lacson believes that love is a biological equation that can be solved. She is the brilliant mind behind Dorothea, the most advanced AI dating application of the 26th-century, designed to calculate compatibility with extraordinary precision. Kayla's world is crafted in data, logic, and predictable outcomes. That is, until Mathew Matel, a Behavioral Analyst whose brilliance matches hers, joins her team and challenges her views. When Dorothea's latest revision loses public trust and corporate pressure mounts, he becomes the catalyst that forces Kayla to confront buried trauma, uncovering the flaws of her creation and fracturing her carefully structured reality. Despite Dorothea's calculation of their incompatibility, Kayla finds herself drawn to Mathew. Flashes of his face begin to haunt her as she tries to unravel his unexplainable familiarity. And when her very identity is threatened by tangled feelings, she must decide whether love is something to manipulate or something to surrender to. ｡ ✴︎ ⋆⚛ 🤖 ⚛⋆ ✴︎ ｡ ONC 2026 Round 1 Winner and Ambassador Pick Round 2 Winner and Ambassador Pick ｡ ✴︎ ⋆⚛ 🤖 ⚛⋆ ✴︎ ｡ Genres: Romance SciFi Speculative Fiction Unconventional SciFi Hard SciFi Slow Burn Romance

‎ ‎Paris finds herself in a strange shop after learning of her sister's illness, and she makes a hasty purchase due to uncontrollable circumstances. ‎ ‎Once she leaves the shop, she gets ambushed by a mysterious figure. ‎ ‎When she learns the object in her hand is more important than she'd thought and she might have just landed in the middle of a battle of forces she never knew existed, she has no choice but to return the object back to its rightful place herself... And she has less than two days. ‎ ‎But what happens when she learns that her purchase could be the one thing that saves her sister? ‎ ‎ ‎ONC 2026 ‎Prompt 41 - You never thought an impulse purchase from a magic shop would catapult you into the middle of an intergalactic war.

Every year on your birthday, a library will show up in your bedroom closet. You spend several years thinking that it was a hallucination or some whimsical childhood thing. The library is filled with books specifically about your life story and refuses to disappear, even after you grow up.

Maya Nidhi always thinks after she acts. When she hears that Avinash, the love of her life, is getting married to someone who isn't her, she does the sensible thing: crashes his wedding to rescue her prince charming. Will she run away with her prince to her fairytale land and get her happily ever after? Or is it a bad idea she can't undo? A book which was initially starte for ONC competition.

Als monsters mensen nodig hebben, maar mensen monsters niet... welke soort is dan werkelijk krachtig? En wat gebeurt er als de mensheid dat eindelijk realiseert? De strateeg Hugo ontmoet Merille. Zij is niet menselijk, dus staan ze recht tegenover elkaar. Maar Merille is anders dan elk monster dat hij kent. Zij heeft zijn soort niet nodig. Het antwoord is controle. Maar hoe kan hij dat krijgen, terwijl de regels zijn veranderd? Het is tijd om het systeem te controleren, voordat hij wordt gecontroleerd. * Volgens prompt 80. Monsters leven niet onder onze bedden. Ze leven in de krochten van onze gedachten.

Roman Kerr thought he knew everything about the woman he married. He was wrong. - An entry for Open Novella Contest | Prompt: 28 & 29.