During an experiment with textures and surfaces I accidentally made the print which revealed the amazing story of the creation of the Rift of Regrettable Decisions. I fine-lined it, so that everyone could see what I was seeing, and turned it into a wonderful A3 scroll publication, with the poster of the Battle on the one side and the story on the other! More prints and stories will follow soon and will also be available to buy.
Before you read the story, look at the wonderful animation made by the multi-talented Jon Miller (who wrote the music for "
Ways In and Ways Out").
The Final Clash
The battle of the Mighty Giraffe and the Witch of Bubbles took place in the In-Between Universe, at the extreme upper left corner of the Trentulon Galaxy and didn't come as a shock to the denizens of all the twelve kingdoms of the eight known dimensions. It didn't shock them, as they had been expecting it for some time, but it did shake their planets, that were hit by unprecedented earthquakes that lasted a millennium.
Before this catastrophic and monumental battle, for which songs were sang and tomes were written, the Mighty Giraffe and the Witch of Bubbles used to be best friends. No one knew who started the fight or even what the fight was about, but of course everyone had their theories. The two of them had stopped talking either to each other or in fact to anyone, consumed as they were by their mutual hatred. There were 6128 different rumors and 404 legends circulating in the 256 planets from which perhaps only the testimony of the United Archivists of the Twelfth Kingdom carried some credibility: They maintained that the quarrel began over qwertubraes, a board game of unprecedented complexity, involving six hundred dice, three gravitational anomalies, and a rulebook written in a language that actively changed its grammar every seven minutes. According to them, the argument had escalated when the Witch tried to summon a bubble to stabilize Space-Time Column G, and the Giraffe accused her of cheating. Unfortunately, even this account was considered unreliable, as everyone knew how fond the Archivists were of qwertubraes and how they tried to promote it with every chance.
But everyone agreed on one thing: over time the hostility had become so intense that stars dimmed when the two passed each other in the sky, and entire planets pretended not to be home when they approached. And while this feud continued in this passive-aggressive state for centuries, it was during one chance meeting — or was it fate? Not even the Wise Ones can distinguish between the two — that a slant look brought momentum (and in such cases momentum historically never ends well).
So came the Final Clash, which is how the battle of Mighty Giraffe and the Witch of Bubbles would come to be known. The Final Clash folded reality and hiccuped time, and led to the creation of the Rift of Regrettable Decisions, a shimmering fold in the sky pulsing faintly like a bruise in the fabric of the In-Between Universe along dimensions Four to Seven — a fold still visible from all twelve kingdoms.
There is some debate as to whether the Rift was caused by the Witch’s Wrath — a bubble so immense it held the mass of a small moon — or by the Giraffe’s legendary Neck-Whip, a fierce kick taught only to the tallest creatures of the Far-Away Realms.
And although such events were not unknown to the Universes and they had caused numerous dents and cracks in the space-time continuum, the severity of the Final Clash and the slow evolution of civilization dictated the maxim stated then by the High Consulate of the Endless Sub-realities: "Letting emotionally volatile super-beings with cosmic-scale powers have a grudge-match is perhaps not ideal for universe stability". For the purpose of preventing such unfortunate events in all subjective futures, the Department of Interdimensional Conflict Prevention was established through a lottery stretching across three galaxies and twelve sub-realities, although the ZFs constellation in the notorious Mor(i)on Galaxy refused to participate. Later this became the casus belli for the Great Epos that nearly wiped-out the Mor(i)ons, who to everyone's surprise proved far more resilient than expected.
The Department’s first decree was carved onto the Pillar of Absolute Rules, which all elementary school students of the Intragalactic School Foundation visit on the fifth grade, as they take their first steps in calling and managing their powers:
Rule 1: No beings taller than 30 meters may engage in interpersonal drama without a referee.
Rule 2: No bubble-based spellcasting within five light years of a board game.
Rule 3: Under no circumstances may qwertubraes be played during retrograde gravitational shifts.
Naturally, these rules have been debated, explained and expanded in length in the Never-Ending Codici and have solved exactly nothing but are merely a piece of history.
An audio version! :)
And a .pdf link.
.jpeg "Click to enlarge image WhatsApp Image 2025-12-02 at 15.10.23(2).jpeg")
.jpeg "Click to enlarge image WhatsApp Image 2025-12-02 at 20.29.07(2).jpeg")
.jpeg "Click to enlarge image WhatsApp Image 2025-12-02 at 20.29.07(4).jpeg")
.jpeg "Click to enlarge image WhatsApp Image 2025-12-02 at 20.29.07(5).jpeg")
