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.

QHW, Day 2: Beggars

Ah, the beggar-dead. Those unmourned souls and unburied skeletons.

They are immortal. They are ever-present. They are so feeble that even a child could beat them up.

They hide in the shadows and back alleys. They swarm the gates of graveyards and temples.

They want your mourning, your sorrow, your tears.

"Please sir, I died alone and nobody cared."

"Just a tear, ma'am, please! My children never loved me."

"I beg you, milord, show mercy! I was murdered by my wife and left in a ditch. Please, help me move on."

Don't. You help one and a thousand more will swarm you. You could cry yourself dry and they would still keep coming.

Just ignore them or notify the Busters' Guild.

QHW, Day 1: Weapons

All weapons are magic.

Anything used as a weapon is imbued with magic by that very act. The more violence and death a weapon brings, the more powerful it grows. Once it grows powerful enough, it develops a consciousness.

It is said that a weapon that was only ever wielded in a righteous fight will gain a righteous soul, one that was used by a sellsword will gain a greedy, merciless soul, but one that squandered an innocent life in vain will have a ravenous, diabolical soul.

Do not ever fight unarmed, for then you are the weapon. True, angels might be a proof that one can keep fighting the good fight, but there are so many more monsters and demons who were once all men.

Challenge: Quarter-Hour of Writing

Over at Weird & Wonderful Worlds, a five minute creative challenge was issued some three years ago, where you have just five minutes to jot down ideas as they come into your head. I like that. Sometimes it's nice to just write something down, post it and move on, rather than to keep rethinking and rewriting the perfect post.

However, I don't do so good with a completely free-form "Have an idea, now!", so I'd rather have a prompt to start the associations somewhere. And I will give myself 15 minutes, because I want to end up with something intelligible and publishable, and I write way too slow to sort my thoughts out in only 5 minutes. Yeah, that's not really the same challenge, is it?

Anyway, if someone would be interested in such a challenge, here are the rough rules:

1. Make yourself a nice cup of tea to get the brain juices flowing. This step is mandatory.
2. Use the generator below to get your prompt. You don't have to stick to it, it's here just for inspiration. Get more than one and combine them, if you'd like.
   
3. Have a sip of your tea. Think.
   
4. Start the timer and write for 15 minutes. It doesn't matter what you write - A monster stat block? Bullet points of concepts? A micro story or a poem? A stream of consciousness? - but stop when the timer runs out (or as soon as you can, stopping in the middle of a sentence would drive me crazy).
5. Post the result! The very point of this challenge is to have a post ready in one short sitting.
   

I will try to go for thirty prompts in thirty days and you are more than welcome to join me. If you decide to do this challenge, please let me know. I would love to read your creations.

Any new prompts or improvements to the challenge are also very much welcome.