Welcome to the final week of the Spring Writing Challenge!
It’s the final week! This has been such a fun challenge. You’ve all done so well with your stories. There are so many interesting and unique ways you have taken the prompt. It’s now time for the final week, so let’s do this one last time! We can’t wait to see what you come up with.
So, without further ado, here’s your final prompt!
Week Six Prompt – The Character Prompt
Write a story about a character that experiences a rebirth
Wait…what’s a character prompt?
A character prompt is a prompt that’s about a specific character. It doesn’t matter where your story takes place or what’s said. What matters is that your story must be about a character who experiences a rebirth.
Before you start writing, we have some important rules for you to follow.
Writing Rules
1. Please keep the content of the stories you post to a PG rating. Please avoid real curse words. Violence/fighting should be limited and purposeful. Please do not include any spice.
2. Your story must be 1,000 words or less, and must contain the prompt to be counted for the challenge. You’re not required to post it in order to “win” the challenge, but if you want it to count for your team, your story must be posted by Sunday at 11:59 PM ET, and you must include your team name.
Remember to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and post your story as an “answer” to this question, not a “comment”. 🙂 You’re all doing such a great job! I’m so proud of all the stories you’ve posted.
Happy Writing!
We’re so glad that you participated Juli! 🙂
Team#1
The Thirsting Hour by Ada Flannery
Mara died in a basement.
Not her own. She didn’t have one of those. Just a boarded-up squat beneath the butcher’s district where the plague rats grew fat and the walls wept mold. The fever had taken her voice two days ago, her hope the day before that.
When the footsteps came—slow, deliberate, echoing like the drip of old blood—she didn’t bother to look up.
“You’re fading,” a man said.
His voice was smoke. Velvet. Cruel. She forced her head to lift.
He was beautiful in a way that felt wrong. Too still. Too perfect. Like something carved to be worshipped, or feared. A single silver ring flashed on his black-gloved finger.
“I can give you life,” he said.
Mara blinked. Her mouth opened, closed. A wheeze escaped—nothing more.
“But it won’t be yours.”
He bit his wrist without ceremony. Thick, dark blood welled up. He pressed it to her lips. She tried to turn away, but she was too weak.
The taste was iron and night and ancient things she didn’t understand. Her last breath left her lungs as something colder took root.
She woke in a crypt that was slick with condensation. The air stank of rot and stone. Her body no longer ached. Her skin was cold and tight, like it belonged to someone else. There was no heartbeat in her ears.
Only silence.
She stood. The hunger hit her like a scream inside her skull.
A woman waited in the shadows. Pale, tall, dressed in mourning black.
“Another fledgling,” she said. Her voice held no welcome. “You died yesterday. And now you live. But only just.”
“I’m… alive?” Mara asked, but the word tasted wrong.
“No. You’ve been stolen from the grave.”
Mara’s stomach twisted. Or it would have—if it still worked.
“What happens now?”
The woman walked forward, her eyes redder than garnets. “Now you feed. Or you go mad.”
Mara became scared of the women so she ran. Mara fled into the city, throat blazing, teeth aching, lungs still trying to breathe out of habit.
She watched the butcher’s son walking alone down an alley. Heard the pulse in his neck like music.
She stepped out of the shadows.
He turned—and saw something in her face.
Not a girl. Not a ghost.
A predator.
But Mara stopped. Her hands shook. She remembered her mother’s cough. Her brother’s cold hand in hers. She had liked this boy and didn’t want to hurt him.
Don’t become what he made you.
She ran.
Back at the crypt she sat rocking herself trying to make her heart beat, the woman shook her head. “You’ll starve yourself into madness.”
“Then let me go mad.”
“You think that’s noble?”
Mara’s lips curled into a quiet snarl. “No. I think it’s mine. My choice.”
In the days that followed, she fed—but only on the dead. Fresh bodies. Warm enough. Still enough memory in the blood to whisper their names, she had known most of them, and if she could have she would have cried.
She became a rumor in Blackgate. The Bone Bride. The girl with empty eyes who haunted alleys and kissed corpses.
But she never killed.
Not once.
And each night, as the hunger clawed deeper, so did something else: the memory of her death, and the choice not to become the thing that ended her.
She was not a girl anymore.
Not a monster either.
She was a revenant.
A hunger with a conscience.
A death that remembered love.
And in the bloodless silence of dawn, when the others slept in their catacomb
s, she walked the rooftops alone and whispered her own name—so she wouldn’t forget it.
I’m not usually a fan of horror/gothic/paranormal, but I liked this story. Well done! In such a short amount of space, you made the character someone whose emotions we could feel, and you set up a nice haunting story that has potential to linger.
Excellent story here! Haunting, sad, and beautiful–well done!
I really liked this. There were a few spots that were a little jarring, but overall you did a fantastic job for this week’s prompt. I think you should consider expanding on it! It could be a great short story.
I love how you wove a challenge into this story in how she chose to do good to those who had turned her into the mess she was in.
Ooh, creepy, but also beautiful. I love how you described his face as too still, like an idol made to be worshipped!
Interesting story! I like how she chose not to follow the expected path and retained what she could of her humanity.
This was a fascinating read. I wasn’t expecting to like this, I hate horror, but this was different. I like what you did with this. If you wrote this as a longer story, I would read this. This was heartbreaking and haunting, original and extremely well done.
When the new prompt arrive, my first thought is, Oh no! What am I going to write to make that work? But the Holy Spirit ALWAYS shows up and I get an idea every time. It amazes me. Thanks for a thought provoking six weeks.