Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #71 - Mercy Killing

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Mercy Killing

Many cultures both past and present have carried out mercy killings. The Spartans exposed babies thought to be frail or deformed at the foot of Mount Taygetos. Throughout history, the seriously wounded have been killed on the battlefield to save them a slower painful death or trying to live as a cripple. Even nowadays, the terminally ill are in some cases medicated to "help" the process along. It's always a difficult and controversial subject.

Write me a story about mercy killings in your setting ! Is it a public and honourable thing, or carried out in secret or by stealth ? Who does it, why, when and how ? Do those being put out of their misery get any choices in the matter ? Does the society doing it consider it part of the natural order of things. or an abomination with those who do it deserving punishment ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.