https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aEPQkd2BzkY
The Intergalactic Church of Molten Rift was already vibrating when Aelik Baldwynne arrived, cape billowing with unnecessary drama, hips swaying like a man who knew seven galaxies were watching. The temple’s obsidian walls pulsed with geothermal lust, lit by the fumes of holy dung burning in censers so ornate they looked like they were forged by deranged opera singers.
Priestess Opraxa greeted him with a voice too loud for any mortal throat:
“AELIK, YOU SMOLDERING PEACOCK OF THE VOID!
HAVE YOU COME TO FACE YOUR FATE OR FLIRT WITH IT?”
Aelik flicked his wrist — a gesture flamboyant enough to crack nearby stalactites.
“Darling, please. I am fate. I merely let others borrow it.”
Behind them, the dung-smoke thickened, swirling into hallucinatory shapes of cosmic butts and tectonic fissures. The congregation inhaled deeply, reverently, wheezing with religious devotion. Dung fumes were their sacrament, their fuel, their connection to the Rift-Prophets who once rode molten geysers through the stars.
But even through the haze came the sound — the tremor, the pressure, the ancient Fart Struggle building in the depths of the world-vein below. The Church felt it. The floor rippled like a gassy leviathan turning in bed.
Opraxa raised her ceremonial plunger-staff.
“THE MOLTEN RIFT SWELLS! THE BURDEN MUST BE RELEASED!”
Aelik sighed. “Must everything be a bowel prophecy with you people?”
Suddenly the magma altar erupted in a gout of sulfurous brilliance and there, rising from the steaming fissure like a damp phoenix, came Whorbama Burtains, the Drip-Child of Infinite Drapery, swaddled in reality-warping curtains that hissed and fluttered with obscene power.
He spoke with grandiose, unnecessary vibrato:
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