QHW, Day 3: Children

1. There is a land where no children are born. In this land, there is a river and every few days, a newborn baby floats down its stream in a woven basket. The midwives catch the baskets and distribute the babies among the villages.

This river emerges from a deep cave in a great cliff, the Birthing Cave. What lies hidden inside?

2. An archmage once tried to resurrect a whole civilization by bringing back their dead. He succeeded, in a way.

The dead are indeed rising, in their old, decrepit bodies but with the blank souls of newborns. Then they start ageing - at normal rate but backwards! The helpless senior citizens are raised and educated by the middle aged. The twenty-something hold all the high positions, already experienced and physically in their prime. The ruling class is made up of the respected and wise teenagers, while those who keep their faculties into the baby years are often world-renown sages in their field.

3. Human babies are delivered by a stork. That is a fact. Humans are born from eggs in a stork nest. Where do young storks come from, then?

You see, when a human dies and is buried, a tree sprouts from their corpse. In time, this tree bears fruit, and many a woodland animal comes to feast on these sweet, fragrant fruits. Once sated, the animals are overcome by a strong compulsion to gather in one place and huddle tightly together. They then vomit up a strange bluish substance that hardens over their bodies, forming a chrysalis. After a few days, a small mustering of storks will hatch from this chrysalis.

And the cycle is complete.