Zhatica worldbuilding: Pain

The storm outside weighs heavily on my mind, and I am not right for making tonight.
But make I will, or I will at least try.

Tonight I make something new for Zhatica. Or rather it has been being made for some time now, and I have now chosen to write it down.
I do not yet have a name for it. I would rather not call it a god, as that is a bit presumptuous, and anyways, they are not gods. They have worshippers, and they have powers, and to an extent, they have immortality.
But they are not gods.
And when have gods ever truly been gods? More that the gods that have existed have all been manifestations of ideas, of mass concepts. War. Love. Darkness. Wisdom. Dreams. Cats. Storms.
I think I will make a thing of cats, and he will be beautiful. He will have long dark hair that shimmers and reflects the colours of jewels when the light strikes it right. His skin will be a golden bronze, his body slim and powerful and delicate.
But I am not writing about him tonight. He has been made, he will be further developed.
Tonight I am forging Pain.
It is Pain that throbs in my right temple, that tucks itself up under the tip of my right shoulder blade and gnaws at my muscles(which is an aching) that crawls into the spaces between the bones of my spine and stiffens and bemoans my back. It is Pain that visits me every day in some form or another. It is with Pain I am very familiar. In others I have known as well as me.
Pain is also male. He is white, all over, though not naturally. He has an almost human colour(though there are no humans in Zhatica, for they are dull) but it is never really seen except maybe in his cheeks from the screaming he can't utter. Pain also has white hair, though, though I am not sure why. Perhaps simply because he does, and that is how it is.
Pain in the first days of Zhatica lay in a place you couldn't see but you could hear sometimes and maybe touch it(like madness), on a slab of something like stone, and bound him with things you couldn't see so that he lay utterly still, not even able to breathe. Not that he needed to, but it was yet another form of discomfort.
In those days there was no Pain in the world, because it was all in him on his slab. His slab kept it inside him. It is not known who put him there, or who he was before(if he was anything, or anyone) or how. The Great Spirit did not mean him to be, or he would not have been able to leave.
Pain felt everything of Pain, everything from finger pricks from sewing needles to heart attacks to fingernails getting ripped off(accidentally or on purpose) to a hookjaw's bite to rape to murder to everything. And the people did not feel it. Instead of pain they felt something like tingling, though rape was still a terrible thing, for it is not the physical pain that scars. Perhaps Pain should have only been called Physical Pain, because that was all he was. People got sad and twisted up with hate often enough despite him.
Perhaps Pain was a Wall of some kind. A person that became a barrier, though he couldn't tell you how. I'm sure whoever did it meant all well and good.
Pain would lay on his slab, feeling everything everyone did not have to feel. You'd think that after a time it would all build up into one terrible mass and he'd be able to shut it out somehow. But no. Every fragment of every second was Pain, and he felt it, and thought it, and knew it, and it was all he could feel or think or know. And he could not thrash or scream or wail or vomit or sleep. The stone he lay on forbade it.
He could cry though. He did. For long periods of time, and frequently. Wouldn't you?
There were so many tears, the flow so regular, that as they dried they left behind enough salt to sew his eyes shut, and trickled down his face and began to build little stalactites and stalagmites connecting his head to the stone. He was not aware of this.
And it was in these days that Masochism and Sadism were sired, and I will tell you of them, though not at the moment.
It was at a point much beyond this, after Pain left his slab and was released into the world once again, that a young woman named for a hat, with Sadism coiled inside her(not around her heart, for Sadism is not a thing of the heart, but of the gut and lungs and blood and hands) came from a time much later on, by means that will not be explained, and took him off the slab. Pain himself was incapable of moving, but she bore in her his own power that had been passed on without his knowledge, and with that power twisted in the way it was, and being a new power in its own right that the old magic did not know, it did not break the seals on Pain, but slid through their crevices and slithered round their locks, and so he was taken off his slab, his imprisonment.
Later she would tell it all as a matter of business, for if it had never been done, people would have gone on without pain, and in her business the pain of others was a necessity.
But in truth, as she stood there, and looked on him, and saw that he was beautiful, and tangled and broken and devoured by Pain, in a way that she, carrying Sadism, found beautifully terrible, she felt something like a hunger, and so when she took him off his binding, there was more than business in her heart and mind.
She bit the salt from his eyes herself, her mouth wetting it enough to dissolve(for it was only salt, and if there had been stone as there is in the water that makes true cave-teeth, her teeth would have broken instead) and put her cloak around his shoulders, for he wore only a thin, frail garment of white that was like a dress, and it was crumbling into bits like spider-silk even as she lifted him. She gave him water to drink, which he could not remember, though he fought it--he fought her--at first, afraid of something, though he didn't know what. And finally his lips were wetted, and he drank, and finally slept. He would forever love sleep afterwards, for it was the first taste of it he could remember, and sleep is a wonderful thing to know for the first time ever when you can properly know it, and cherish it. People that have been able to sleep all their lives could never appreciate it the way he did.
When he woke, she held him, as she had held him during all the time he slept, though neither could tell you how long it had been. She gave him food to eat, food from a strange tree from a strange place very long ago, a tree that called itself the Swampfather(though that in itself is another tale.) It was only then that he realized that his muscles had done something called atrophy, where they had withered so that he was a collection of bones and skin and the memories of internal organs, and little else.
When he had eaten he slept again, for his body was hard at work taking the strangeness of the fruit and making it into new organs, and muscles, and energy. And when he woke again, he began to understand at last what had been done for him, and now that he knew it, something more than joy and delight and gratefulness all together overflooded him, so that he laughed and cried and wanted to dance, but didn't know how, so he instead kissed the woman on the mouth, and contentedly nestled himself again in her arms that night as he slept again.
She never did sleep. She had been told of the consequences of a mere like her sleeping in such a place, and had traded one of her eyes for the eye of a cat. Cats do not shut their eyes unless they want to sleep, and they do not sleep unless they want to. She knew tiredness many times over, but she did not sleep.
When he woke again for the third time, she told him it was time to leave.
He was not Pain during this time, nor after. That name was no longer his, for once he had been removed from the slab, the conditions of the bindings had dissolved, and the world knew Pain--not in a sense that it knew it once again, but that it had always known it, for one of the conditions had been that during his binding, the world should /never/ know Pain in any sense. Not in the current, not in the past, not in ancient memory. And now it did, and it always had.
As he was leaving, she told him what he was not anymore, and that he ought to take a new name. He asked her what the name ought be, for he did not know. He didn't really know anything. All he had ever known was Pain, and that was gone from him now.
She told him he should go find it for himself. He asked her for her name, though we will never know whether or not she told him. He did know it later, though, when they met again. There are those that believe they became lovers for a time, but there is no evidence of this--and at any rate, she was not the type to take a lover that did not enjoy her indulgences in the infliction of pain on others as much as she did. And especially to him, such a thing would have been cruel.
His whiteness left him as he left that place, and she left some other way. The Pain had kept him white in agony for all this time, and now he began to have colour again. His hair remained white, however, and his eyes were so pale a blue they might as well have been also. He went out into a world that did not remember him as he had been. He went among mere people, and they knew him as something more than themselves, for whatever he was, he was not mere--he could not have been, to have been what he was. As time passed, people knew him better, and he did eventually tell him who and what he was, and what he had been, though he never told of them of how things had been before. There was never any need.
Some still called him Pain, then, once they knew, though he winced at this. The name he took was Chime, because the first thing he saw when he came out of the place he had been was a forest full of little silver bells tied on tree branches by little red ribbons, and they made a wonderful noise. He asked a flower what the name of the sound was(and he didn't know yet that not everyone could talk to flowers and trees and animals and things) and when it told him, he decided the name was as beautiful as the sound. And so he called himself Chime.
Chime gained power as people came to know him as he was, and became something more than he had been as Pain--for as Pain, he'd had no real power, and had been little more than a dam to a reservoir--so that as time passed, and times passed, he became able to do what he had done before, by choice. When asked, and when he felt he had been asked through the proper ceremonies performed by those with the proper sentiments(though he was a gentle spirit, and good-natured, he did turn out to be a bit of an arrogant creature, as many of those like him often do) he would once again take on the Pain of another, and very rarely more than one person at a time. On some occasions, when the need of those who cried out was great, he would take the pain immediately, without ceremony, without tribute. It is said he even did this for rape, and when such a time occurred, he would lie in the temple built for him, swathed in sheets, and weep blood once more.
He had lovers, for he was beautiful, and beautiful in a way that feminine or masculine women were entranced by him. But his seed was infertile, and he did not give his women children, and Chime did not disapprove of this.
But Pain had had children in his day, which Chime did eventually discover.