Chapter 1

Where Breath First Stank

The Morning Curse: A Tribe's Worst Fear

It began in the primordial gloom, when the concept of personal hygiene was as foreign as diplomacy and the mere act of inhaling could render a man unconscious. Morning breath, a violent exhalation of rot and decay, crept into existence like some foul-mouthed demon clawing its way up from the abyss. Gorg, the unwitting inventor of oral filth, stirred from his grimy pile of furs, unaware that his mouth was a harbinger of doom.

Groona, his beleaguered mate, huddled at the edge of the cave, staring at the bleak dawn as if it held answers. The wind outside blew dust and animal dung in a chaotic swirl, but nothing could rival the malicious fog of Gorg’s morning exhale. She considered fleeing—just running until the mountains swallowed her—but hunger and the vague hope that today might not be as tragic kept her rooted.

Gorg opened his mouth to yawn, and reality itself seemed to warp. The bats in the cave rafters shrieked and fled, tiny leathery bodies tumbling through the air in desperate escape. Groona gagged, her stomach doing somersaults, and for a fleeting moment she imagined sinking her club into Gorg’s skull. The thought was almost comforting.

The brute grinned at her, yellowed teeth glinting in the dim light, and slapped his stomach like a proud bear. “Gorg feel good today,” he bellowed, blissfully unaware that his breath had already traumatized half the local wildlife. Groona forced a smile, exhaling sharply through her nose to keep from vomiting.

In the ancient hierarchy of stink, Gorg was king. His breath could wither flowers and send predators skulking back to their dens. Other men in the tribe envied him—not for his breath itself, but for the power it conferred. Power and stink were one and the same in this barbaric world. If you smelled worse than your rival, you won. It was the law of nature.

Caveman Cuisine: A Recipe for Disaster

The fundamental problem with prehistoric diets was that they didn’t care about human anatomy. Survival was a game of shoving random plants, raw meat, and unidentifiable glop into one’s face and hoping the gods didn’t decide to kill you for it. Gorg, in his primitive wisdom, preferred anything that smelled vaguely like death. Fresh meat was for cowards and children. Real men ate the aged, pungent slabs of mammoth hide left to ripen in the sun until maggots fled the scene in horror.

On particularly festive evenings, the tribe would boil bones and entrails into a murky stew that smelled like regret and failure. The effect on breath was nothing short of cataclysmic. The concoction adhered to teeth like tar, seeping into the gums and fermenting for weeks. By morning, every grunt from the tribe reeked of ancient murder.

And yet, despite the brutality of it all, the tribe felt pride in their stink. To smell was to survive. To smell worse than the next man was to thrive. Rituals developed to celebrate the most putrid mouths, warriors gathering around fires to swap tales of their rankest moments. Gorg, the perennial champion, would recount the day he killed a wild boar with a single exhale, its snout shriveling like a dried fig. Whether the story was true didn’t matter. It was legend now.

Stink-Based Social Hierarchies

Power wasn’t about strength, wit, or cunning—it was about the ability to sear nostrils from twenty paces. In a world without written laws, oral supremacy was the ultimate currency. Gorg, with his malevolent breath and unwavering commitment to rot-based meals, ruled by default. Brut, the nominal leader, could only maintain his status by keeping a safe distance and pretending not to smell like mint leaves and weakness.

Challenges for leadership were infrequent and often fatal. A warrior named Tog once thought he could best Gorg by eating a rotting fish found along the riverbank. His screams as the parasite infested his gut haunted the tribe for days. Brut declared that eating fish was cowardly and imposed a strict diet of fermented mammoth guts to ensure the tribe stayed strong.

Gorg, victorious without ever raising a hand, took his place atop the sacred rock. He opened his mouth, breathing his foul gospel to the assembled masses. Groona, watching from the shadows, couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or disgusted. Maybe both.

Mortimer Graves’ Commentary:

There’s a twisted sort of poetry in watching ancient humans worship stink like it was the lifeblood of civilization. Power through putridity. Authority through oral decay. Humanity’s obsession with the sensory extremes never really went away—it just got a rebrand. Breath mints, mouthwash, and floss are the modern equivalent of fighting to keep the breath demons at bay.

They didn’t know it back then, but Gorg and his tribe were the trailblazers of oral warfare. Their battle for dominance via stink was just the first chapter in humanity’s endless struggle to figure out how to smell less like death. One has to wonder—did they even want to smell better? Or was being the worst-smelling brute the greatest honor of all?

Survival & Stink: Rituals of Stink Suppression

Desperation makes fools of us all. Cavemen were no different—constantly battling the mouth rot that threatened to reduce the tribe to little more than a gagging, half-dead heap on the cave floor. They didn’t know it then, but they were engaging in the world’s first futile attempt at dental hygiene. Every morning, they gathered around a communal fire, inhaling the smoke with the solemnity of priests seeking divine intervention. The idea was that smoke might purify their mouths, or at the very least, kill the demons squatting on their tongues.

Gorg would lead the procession, exhaling his personal brand of death into the fire and watching as the embers sizzled and shrank back. Groona would grind bitter roots into a paste and smear it on her teeth, hoping that bitterness might be the antidote to rotting flesh. Other tribe members tried chewing on animal bones or dunking their heads into the freezing river, convinced that the shock would somehow cleanse the rot from their gums.

None of it worked. The smell persisted, burrowing into the fibers of their furs and embedding itself into the dirt floor of the cave. Sometimes they’d just sit in silence, accepting the stink as an inevitable truth, like the weather or the taste of spoiled meat.

The Breath-Off: A Clash of Stench

When leadership disputes arose, they didn’t settle things with fists or clubs. No, they fought the only way that made sense to them—by standing face-to-face and exhaling until one man fell to his knees, incapacitated by the sheer foulness of his opponent’s breath. The Breath-Off was sacred. It was primal. It was downright horrifying.

The contenders would eat the foulest concoctions they could find—rotting fish mixed with fermented roots, mashed into a thick paste and washed down with spoiled berry juice. Then, they’d square off, leaning in close and letting loose a slow, deliberate breath aimed directly at each other’s faces. The tribe would gather around, betting chunks of meat or scavenged trinkets on who would drop first.

Brut, the chief, held the record for most victories—eight consecutive wins—until Gorg challenged him. That day, the sun hung low and red in the sky, as if warning them to reconsider their barbaric ways. Gorg inhaled deeply, his chest swelling, and unleashed a breath so toxic that Brut’s legs buckled immediately. The chief’s eyes watered, and his stomach convulsed, but he stood his ground out of sheer stubborn pride.

Then, Gorg leaned in closer and let loose a second, shorter burst. Brut dropped to his knees, gasping like a dying animal. The tribe roared their approval, dragging Brut to the river to cleanse his disgraced mouth. Gorg was declared the new chief, his reign marked by the unchallenged dominance of his unparalleled stink.

Breath as a Weapon

With Gorg now in charge, the tribe discovered the strategic advantage of weaponizing breath. When rival tribes threatened their territory, Gorg would stand at the entrance, bellowing his foulness into the wind. Scouts reported that enemies collapsed before even reaching the cave, clutching their chests and gagging uncontrollably. News of the tribe’s deadly breath spread, and for a time, they were left in peace.

The real turning point came when they learned to weaponize breath offensively. Gorg trained his warriors to synchronize their exhalations during combat, creating a wave of putridity that would send opponents staggering backward. They’d been transformed from mere hunters to an unholy force of nature—men who could kill with nothing more than a sigh.

But with power came pride. Gorg grew careless, believing his breath invincible. One fateful evening, he decided to lead an expedition into the neighboring valley. There, the rival tribe had taken to burning vast amounts of wild mint, creating a mint fog that dulled their senses. Gorg and his warriors collapsed in the middle of the enemy camp, overwhelmed by the foreign freshness.

From that day forward, Gorg became obsessed with finding a countermeasure—an anti-mint elixir that would neutralize the power of freshness. Experiments involved chewing bitter roots, vomiting, and sometimes just giving up and gnawing on dried dung out of sheer frustration. Groona, ever pragmatic, tried telling him that maybe, just maybe, they didn’t need to dominate the valley with breath alone. Gorg wouldn’t hear it.

The tribe began to fracture under his paranoid leadership, some questioning the obsession with breath warfare. One night, a group of dissenters fled to start their own tribe in the northern caves, where they embraced neutral breath and peaceful coexistence. Gorg denounced them as traitors to the way of stink, but secretly wondered if they might have had a point.

Mortimer Graves’ Commentary:

There’s a peculiar tragedy in humanity’s obsession with weaponizing their most basic flaws. Cavemen weren’t content with bad breath being an inconvenience—they turned it into power, status, and war strategy. We’ve come a long way since then, but the mentality hasn’t changed much. We still insist on turning our weaknesses into strengths—delusionally at times—thinking we can outsmart nature by doubling down on our worst instincts.

If you find yourself obsessing over your flaws, just remember: once upon a time, your ancestors were using their own decay as a weapon and calling it progress.

Lessons from the Past: The Rise of Breath Rituals

If there was one thing cavemen understood better than most modern people, it was that once you embraced your flaws, you could weaponize them. Breath rituals became the lifeblood of tribal unity. Every morning, the tribe gathered at the mouth of the cave, forming a semicircle around a central fire while Gorg took his place at the helm. His breath was not just a curse but an offering to the spirits, a proof that they were still alive despite the rot in their bones.

The ritual was simple: Gorg would exhale a long, deep breath into the fire, causing the flames to hiss and crackle as though recoiling from the stench. The rest of the tribe would follow suit, each adding their own personal flavor of olfactory offense. The mingling of scents became a kind of olfactory mosaic, a grotesque celebration of survival against all odds.

Groona, ever pragmatic, decided that if they were going to stink anyway, they might as well make it purposeful. She concocted a paste from mashed herbs and bone marrow that left the breath only marginally less horrifying but added a bitter, medicinal edge. The tribe accepted it as a sacred preparation, a sort of stink consecration before greeting the dawn.

As time went on, other tribes began adopting similar rituals. There was something primal about collective stink—a reminder that life was a messy, foul business and that facing it together was better than doing so alone. Some even believed that their combined breath could ward off evil spirits, as if halitosis itself was a guardian force. It didn’t matter that it didn’t work—the ritual was tradition, and tradition didn’t need to make sense.

The Divine Breath Prophecy

As stories of Gorg’s legendary stink spread across the region, word reached distant tribes, drawing curious wanderers who wanted to see if the legends were true. Some brought gifts—odd trinkets, bones from exotic animals, fermented berries that were rumored to purify breath. Gorg dismissed them all, waving his hand like an emperor too proud to acknowledge the peasants.

One night, an elder from a neighboring tribe hobbled into the camp, his beard tangled with leaves and his eyes wild with prophecy. He claimed to have seen a vision of Gorg in a smoke-induced trance—leading not just his tribe, but all tribes, through the power of his divine breath. According to the elder, the spirits whispered that Gorg’s breath would cleanse the world of its impurities.

Gorg liked the sound of that. Groona, less convinced, asked the elder what they were supposed to do with such divine knowledge. The man grinned, revealing teeth blackened from years of chewing bitter roots, and said, “Breathe together. Form a wall of stink. Unite the tribes under one breath.”

And so, the first Stink Convergence Ceremony was born. Once a month, tribes would gather at the sacred rock, standing shoulder to shoulder and exhaling into the wind. The combined stench was so potent that birds dropped mid-flight and predators circled but never dared approach. The tribes believed they were crafting a protective barrier—a breath wall that kept the world at bay. In a way, it worked. Enemies didn’t attack, mostly because they didn’t want to venture near the Death Cloud that lingered for days.

Gorg, now revered as both leader and prophet, declared that stink was no longer a curse but a holy mandate. The stink had to be nurtured, respected, and celebrated. Breath was not just survival; it was purpose. Groona just wished someone would come up with a way to make it a little less vomit-inducing.

Mortimer Graves’ Commentary

People love to turn suffering into tradition. They’ll take the worst parts of themselves and wrap them in ritual, convincing themselves it’s the only way to survive. Gorg’s tribe didn’t just accept bad breath—they made it sacred, a divine gift to be nurtured and revered.

Think about that next time you’re choking down some green sludge to “cleanse your system” or chewing on a mystery mint that tastes like menthol and despair. Ritual doesn’t care if it makes sense—it just needs to feel important. Humans have been doing this for millennia, painting their dysfunctions as destiny.

What’s amazing isn’t just that they survived—it’s that they thrived in their own ridiculous way. They took a liability and made it a weapon, a religion, a point of pride. The lesson here? Own your worst traits like they’re the best damn thing about you. Sometimes it’s all you’ve got.