Oh god, why do I do this to myself, I have zero prompt ideas, so I'm recycling an old favourite ... with a twist. Well not a twist, my hips don't fuckin torque like they used to mate.

Short fiction is hard, there is very little room for error. Literary realist short fiction thrives at least in part because it doesn't need to explain anything and can just get right to the heart of things. Fantasy and sci-fi are genres built for the novel, because a core part of the experience is going somewhere new and exploring it, and that's sorta hard to do when you've only got a small space to capture them. Which is why that's exactly what you're doing. But also, I've done this prompt before, and I am tired and old, my bones ache, god is tottering in his throne of skulls, and also I'm sick of all these impossibly precocious teenage heroes, I want some gnarly old fucks and I'm gonna get real nasty with it.

So

1) You are writing secondary-world fantasy
2) When you sign up, I will assign you a grizzled older person who must be your protagonist

What's a secondary world?

Middle Earth, Westeros, Earthsea, you get it. A place you made up.

Are the old people real?

No, you are creating worlds, I am creating grizzled old people who must inhabit them.