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When all this universe was but a mad, black, rumbling chaos, before the coming of the stars and the earth, the planets or the sun; when no harmony or reason, no cosmos or order prevailed, I, Pain, was already in creation. My powers then were at their fullest, for I was all of that dolorous sorrow and confusion. It is impossible to say just when I came into being and yet I know I was not always here. It seems as though I probably entered upon my perennial existence simultaneously with the earliest thing that existed; came with, and was’ part of, the first matter or vapor; that aboriginal, incoherent mist or furious steam that was the beginning of all. This first particle, this primary, original thing was not life, to be certain, nor, probably, was it fire, nor matter, and attended certainly by no light or uniformity. But perhaps floating along aimlessly and coming from apparently nowhere—out of endless, infinite space—it might have been a little wisp of vapor, a bit of moisture or thin, diffused, transparent substance, barely more apparent and tangible than all the rest of that empty, staring, meaningless void, stretching out beyond infinite regions, terrible in their great infinity, to vast and never—ending places.
However, the first inception of this beginning was coeval with the birth of my woeful life. I accompanied this “something” out of “nothing” into “place”; I was a part of it, perhaps nearly all, for in discordant and jumbled confusion lies my greatest being and potency. However, this is my earliest recollection and no doubt I was, then, in but a nascent embryo, incipient but with a will to be and perform that to which I was assigned by Him.
Then, some vast, interminable period seems to have passed; though not very long in a life the length of mine; perhaps a few thousand centuries reckoned in time of man; a lapse of time of which my memory is almost a void. I can only dimly recall that I was living as in a state of coma, semi—conscious, and time was passing.