Borborygmus

The smell arrives before he does. It seeps beneath doors and settles into the low corners of a room, warm and damp and faintly organic, and by the time anyone thinks to name it the silence has already done its work. Somewhere in that silence, in the wet dark where the small and graceless gods are said to gather, Borborygmus stirs and is pleased.

He is the god of flatulence, which is not a sentence most pantheons would tolerate, and that is rather the point of him. Future mythology, the speculative faith that imagines what people might one day deify, hands him the dominion no older religion wanted: foul odors, the slow chemistry of decay, the noises the body makes without asking. He does not rule the sky or the sea or the harvest. He rules the moment in a quiet room when something escapes and everyone present decides, in unison, to pretend it did not.

To look at him is to lose your appetite. He is bloated past the point of shape, his skin hanging in heavy glistening folds that slide against one another like wet meat left too long in the sun. His face is a clumsy forgery of a human one, the eyes small and sunk deep beneath a swollen red nose that weeps a thin secretion down toward a mouth that never fully closes. The teeth behind it are black and soft with rot. He keeps the mouth open on purpose, because the belches and eruptions that climb out of him are, to Borborygmus, a kind of music, and he would not dream of muffling the performance.

His realm matches him. The stories set it underground or half underground, a run of fetid damp halls where the air is thick enough to chew and the walls sweat a slow film that never dries. Heat hangs in it, the close clammy heat of a room with no windows and too many bodies. Sound carries strangely there, every rumble returning off the stone a beat late, so that the god seems forever to be answering himself.

No one made him. That is the strange thing about his origin, and the tales return to it again and again. He was not carved by a creator or born of two older gods in some divine bed. He accumulated. Every stifled laugh, every burning cheek, every person who coughed loudly to cover a sound and stared hard at the wall added one more grain to him across the long centuries, until the sheer collected weight of human embarrassment took on flesh and learned to grin. He is what people built by trying very hard to build nothing at all.

The best known tale about him is a contest, and like most contests with a god it ends badly for the mortal. A man, proud and loud and certain of his own composure, declared that he could stand in the god’s presence and endure his worst without so much as wrinkling his nose. Borborygmus accepted with delight. What followed was not quick. The stench thickened until it seemed to have weight, the noise rolled on past anything a body should be able to produce, and the man held his ground far longer than dignity should have allowed before he broke and fled retching into the open air. The god laughed after him, and the laughing alone is said to have shaken loose more of the same. The lesson the story leaves is plain enough: discomfort is one opponent you cannot out-stubborn, and pride only lengthens the ordeal.

For all that, he is not cruel. He brings no plague and curses no crops. On the rare days he is remembered, it is gently and with a smirk, in a muttered joke at a tense gathering, a prank passed between friends, some small private ritual of acknowledgment when life turns sour. People reach for him the way they laugh at a thing too grim to face straight on. To name Borborygmus is to admit that the body is ridiculous and that it is going to fail, and to choose, for one breath, to find this funny rather than unbearable.

His powers are exactly what his domain promises and not one thing more. With a thought he can summon a smell strong enough to empty a hall, or a sound that arrives like distant thunder rolling beneath the floor. A noxious fog trails him wherever he moves, clinging to cloth and hair and the back of the throat, a haze that does not so much spread as soak. Inside the narrow borders of the unpleasant he is genuinely formidable. He simply has no interest in anything beyond them.

His weakness is woven from the same thread that made him. He was assembled out of shame, and shame only feeds him while it is taken seriously. The instant a person laughs at him openly, without flinching, the collected weight that holds him together begins to thin. Mockery starves him. A god born from people desperate to ignore their own bodies cannot survive being met head on with a grin, which makes the surest defense against the god of flatulence the simple refusal to be embarrassed by him. He thrives on the held breath and the averted eye, and loses a little of himself with every honest laugh.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Borborygmus the god of?

Borborygmus is the god of flatulence, foul odors, and decay in future mythology. He presides over involuntary bodily noises and the unglamorous processes of the body, ruling the small uncomfortable moments that other gods ignore.

Where does Borborygmus come from?

Borborygmus has no creator and was born of no other gods. According to the stories he accumulated over centuries out of collective human embarrassment, with every stifled laugh and burning cheek adding to him until the weight of all that discomfort took on flesh.

How do you defeat or weaken Borborygmus?

You weaken Borborygmus by laughing at him openly and refusing to be embarrassed. Because he is made of shame and only feeds while taken seriously, honest mockery thins the weight that holds him together, so the surest defense is simply to find him funny rather than humiliating.

Is Borborygmus evil?

Borborygmus is not malevolent. He brings no plague and curses no crops, instead serving as a reminder of the body’s absurdity and the inevitability of decay, and people most often invoke him through jokes, pranks, and lighthearted rituals.

What does Borborygmus look like?

Borborygmus is a bloated, repulsive figure whose skin hangs in heavy glistening folds. He has small sunken eyes, a swollen red nose that drips a thin secretion, and a mouth he keeps open to display blackened, rotting teeth.

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