C1Coming of Age4 parts5 min
What the Deep Keeps 1: Four Minutes Under
Everyone in Skarðsvík has lost someone to the sea. So why, on the night sixteen-year-old Kári finally falls into that black water, does the sea decline to collect?
C1 Spanish stories
C1 (Advanced) is the fifth of the six CEFR levels. A reader at C1 can read long, complex texts, recognise implicit meaning and appreciate differences in style. Every story below is written for C1 readers, so you understand most of what you read and pick up new words from context. Tap any word for its translation as you go.
C1Cerebral6 minThe Syntax Ouroboros
When a mysterious sentence structure begins spreading through Madrid like a contagion—hijacking speakers' brains and trapping them in an endless loop—a linguist and a virologist race to build an antidote before the city loses its voice entirely.
C1Mystery6 minThirty-Two Characters
Thirty-two characters laser-etched on a diamond's edge. Too short to be a serial number. Too precise to be decorative. A gemologist transcribes them into her notebook, and within a week, a man she's never seen comes to collect the stone without asking a single question about it.
PROC1Dystopian5 minWhat the Algorithm Couldn't See
In a city where adjectives are illegal, a single forbidden word keeps appearing on scraps of paper tucked inside matchboxes, scratched into park benches, whispered over fresh bread. The surveillance system can't flag it. That's exactly the point.
C1r/AITJ6 minAITJ for deliberately sabotaging my colleague's presentation by asking technical questions I knew he couldn't answer, because he took credit for my algorithm?
OP spent three months developing an optimization algorithm, only for her colleague Emiliano to present it as his own work to upper management. When he was invited to present the project at a company-wide demo, OP decided to attend and ask very specific questions she knew only the real creator could answer.
C1Coming of Age3 parts7 minThe Light That Answers 1: Fifty Years of Static
An unplugged radio has no business receiving anything — least of all a distress call from a trawler that went down with all hands in 1975. Franco should report it. Instead, he reaches for the brass key and answers.
C1Adventure8 minThe Warp and the Weft
Reynaldo Casares has built a career selling what doesn't belong to him. Tonight, an eighth-century Persian rug decides to return the favor.
PROC1r/AITJ5 minAITJ for declining to be the godmother of my best friend's child because I refused to lie during the baptismal vows?
OP's best friend of 15 years asked her to be godmother to her newborn daughter, but OP—a committed atheist—couldn't bring herself to promise before a church that she'd raise the child in a faith she doesn't believe in. Now the friendship is hanging by a thread.
C1Fantasy3 parts5 minThe Book That Writes Her Ending 1: Dancing Against Midnight
In the Archive's forbidden wing, a blank tome has begun narrating the head librarian's every movement one second before she makes it, and each page ends with the same elegant sentence: she dies when the tide bell rings at midnight. Her only defense is to become someone the book cannot predict.
C1Coming of Age9 minThe Girl Who Would Not Die
Inés has one job: taste the king's food and, if necessary, die for him. The night she fails to die, the real trouble begins.
C1Fantasy8 minWhat Snow Was Like
A memory of snow is worth three months of medicine in the nostalgia bazaar. It's also worth the last proof winter ever existed — but nobody mentions that part until after the sale.
PROC1Dystopian4 minThe Most Expensive Woman in Bogotá
In a city that charges by the minute for the crime of being seen, the central plaza has been empty for years. Then a woman brings a folding chair.
PROC1Adventure5 minThe Asset in the Pines
A veteran tracker accepts a seemingly humanitarian mission in the Canadian wilderness: find a child lost years ago. But the wolves guarding the child know something she doesn't—and the people who hired her aren't who they claim to be.
PROC1r/AITJ7 minAITJ for secretly automating my entire data entry job and spending my work hours writing a screenplay?
OP automated their soul-crushing data entry job six months ago and has been quietly writing a screenplay on company time ever since—until a coworker noticed the script was getting a little too polished for someone supposedly buried in spreadsheets.
C1Drama7 minThe Recital of the Untalented
When three estranged siblings gather to sell their late mother's priceless Steinway, a man from her past appears with a contract—and an impossible demand that forces them to confront everything their famous mother never taught them.
PROC1Daily Life7 minThe Man Who Measured Shafts
Matías inspects elevators for a living despite his claustrophobia—a secret he guards fiercely. When a routine job traps him between floors with a stranger who won't stop talking about vertical hierarchy, his carefully constructed walls begin to crack.
PROC1Coming of Age7 minBlank Score
Cristóbal and Sol have been piano rivals since they were fourteen. Their plan to sabotage Vienna's most prestigious competition is flawless. Their reasons for doing it couldn't be more different.
PROC1Dystopian8 minThe City That Learned to Drown
When the moon begins to crack apart, a tidal predictor realizes the only way to save her city isn't to climb higher—it's to sink into the very waters everyone fears.
PROC1Horror8 minThe Circle Was Always There
A noise band records a chaotic session inside an abandoned asylum near Córdoba—but when they reverse the track, the static peels apart to reveal a voice calmly dictating ritual instructions. And it tells them they've already begun.
PROC1Cerebral6 minEnd of Dataset
A computational historian spends seven years feeding every known human event into a supercomputer searching for cyclical patterns—until the machine stops projecting the future and outputs a single date, fourteen months away, labeled 'End of Dataset.'
PROC1Cerebral8 minWhat Breathes Beneath
A marine biologist tracking plastic waste in the South Pacific discovers the debris is defying ocean currents, organizing itself into something that responds to stimuli—and she must decide whether revealing the truth will save it or destroy it.
C1Comedy6 minThe Egg Whisperer
Fourteen million dollars in Fabergé eggs. A fortified playroom. A two-and-a-half-year-old with zero intention of surrendering.
PROC1r/AITJ7 minAITJ for wearing a neon orange tuxedo to my brother's black-tie wedding to mock their monochrome obsession?
OP's brother and his fiancée demanded every wedding guest dress exclusively in black, white, gray, or silver—going so far as to exclude a cousin's girlfriend for having red hair. OP decided the only reasonable response was a neon orange tuxedo.
PROC1Comedy7 minThe Fondue of Picos de Europa
A struggling Asturian dairy farmer lets his nephew install a cryptocurrency mining rig in his cheese-aging barn. When the machines' heat melts 300 wheels of artisan cheese into one massive golden lake, disaster takes an unexpectedly delicious turn.