Short Story: Suffering

In ages long past, there existed a God of Suffering. Their domain was pain in all its myriad forms, and for this they were shunned by their fellow Gods. Where the God of Fire could sear art into the land, or awe their fellow Gods with a blazing lightshow of creative skyfire, the God of Suffering could send a fellow God to their knees in agony. Where the God of Time could produce mind-bending puzzlers that even the God of Mind struggled to understand, the God of Suffering induced nausea if a God focused too intently upon them. Where the Gods of Ice, Woods, and Sound had once worked together to produce a vast crystalline forest of glorious music, the God of Suffering could not even have a conversation without their fellow God fleeing in revulsion.

The Gods played their games. Suffering watched from a distance, lonely and wanting to participate, but knowing it would never happen.

Eventually the Gods of Life, Mind, and Change had an interesting idea for a new game: they would make tiny little people, like Gods but smaller and weaker and without domains of their own, and they would place them upon a world of their own, and they would see what these little beings would choose to do. If the game held the attention of Gods, they would try variations: what would happen if these itty-bitty people were placed on a world overrun with volcanoes? What would happen if the little people were made a bit stronger? They even had this creative idea for a concept they called ‘gender’ the other Gods didn’t really understand but were interested in seeing in action.

The problem was their tiny little people died.

This was, in the broadest of terms, expected, intended. The tiny little people had been made to die, because that was different from Gods. It opened new dimensions to the game. However, they died too quickly, accomplishing little, and no matter how many things the Gods of Life and Mind and Change tried to make it stop, it made little difference. Tiny little people who could walk through a blaze unharmed wouldn’t burn to death, but they still broke limbs and fell down wells and ate foods -an old invention of Life’s- only some of the foods would kill them and no matter how much the God of Mind did to make them cannier it didn’t stop the deaths.

This had been intended to be a big event, a new game that would be ever-changing. It had been imagined it would hold all the Gods’ attention for a long time to come, and instead many of them were growing bored and wandering away to other, better projects. The Gods of Life, Mind, and Change grew fairly desperate: they’d staked a rather large chunk of reputation on this project, and they didn’t want to become laughingstocks, or worse, ignored like Suffering was.

So when Suffering came along and said they had an idea, the trio of Gods only spent a very short period of time sneering and refusing before they decided the God of Suffering couldn’t really make things worse. So long as nobody else found out they’d turned to the God of Suffering, anyway, which seemed unlikely given how profoundly disinterested even the usually-patient God of Stone was in their game.

The God of Suffering reached in and poked and prodded as Gods do, and when they set the tiny little people back into the game, at first nothing seemed different. The trio of Gods couldn’t even find it in themselves to be disappointed: this was the God of Suffering. It was only expected that they wouldn’t make things better. They began, in fact, to count themselves lucky that things hadn’t somehow gotten worse, and began to plot out their next idea for how to fix the tiny little people.

And then the God of Change became distracted for a moment and noticed that the tiny little people were spreading across the land. No longer did they die so rapidly the Gods had to step in and manually add more in. They would take a bite of a poisonous food, make an offended expression, and spit it out. They would stop just short of where they’d always broken bones. They no longer bled from a thousand tiny cuts, now flinching away from the tear of barbed thorns before worse could happen.

The God of Mind looked in, wondering what had held the God of Change’s attention for so long, and observed that the tiny little people would hurt once and then stay away in future. They looked into the thoughts of these beings and saw-

-pain.

This was quite strange to the Gods, who could not imagine an unpleasant feeling somehow making things better, but it was quite evident it worked. The trio became a group of four, the God of Suffering a full partner in all future versions of this game, and as these now-interesting games drew a crowd of appreciative onlookers the God of Suffering found itself unexpectedly invited to other projects. They were no longer shunned… even if no one wanted to shake hands with them.

It was a pleasant feeling.