"My reputation has been widely misrepresented," the devil said to me, looking forlornly somewhere over my left shoulder. "I'm not going to give you anything in exchange for your soul, no great powers, no large sum of currency, no fame or infamy." For a brief moment his eyes lolled over to mine to blankly and tiredly search my expression for any kind of mild understanding. I gave him nothing to work with, just as all the stories had taught me to.
"Nor indeed will I force it from you. I will not spread open the layers of your soul to claim a prize or pound of flesh."
I was getting suspicious now, confused, and a couple other attitudes wrestled for dominance somewhere below the two as I tried to figure out what kind of game he was playing. After a long moment, I came to a consensus. I needed to know more despite his well-known propensity for lies and trickery.
"Make any sense?", he finished for me, "Yeah, that seems to be the norm these days. You all come to me seeking some reward in exchange for your soul. You come to me looking for boons and other such things, all because of your myriad stories of folk figures selling their immortal selves to me and walking away happy, only to mysteriously become rich, successful, perhaps even inordinately skilled." The devil rolled his eyes and sank his cheek further into his palm as he rocked forward on the old stump of the gnarled, ancient oak that once marked the crossroads here. "Got those for themselves, I'm afraid. Apologies for letting you down."
"Then..." My brow furrowed. "Then what do you do with them?"
"I take their souls away."
"Well yeah, but that doesn't explain how they all change so extremely!"
The devil eyed me, his frown shifting from abstract fatigue to pointed frustration, subtly. "You know that feeling, deep in your bones, to reach for what you cannot possibly attain. That weight in your limbs when you're tired, and choose to continue anyway. That striving for the next tiny scrap of progress." The way the sentence was structured had the anatomy of a question, but it was said with all the force of a statement of fact. Something small deep inside me nodded in agreement before I had a chance to reject the notion.
"That weight is your soul. It pulls you, inexorably, towards an impossibly perfect version of yourself. It ties you to every promise you've ever made and then broken, to yourself and others. It pushes you into a web of commitments and false promises and structures of authority. It is the reason artists work lifelong jobs in corporations and would-be eminent scientists play unfruitful bar gigs on a six string guitar."
He groaned as he stood up. The devil himself, and I could hear his knees creak as the legs they were attached to straightened out. I was standing eight feet away. Granted, he was eight feet tall.
"You have come here to purchase something from me that I do not have, and will never be able to give you. That said, I remain willing to take your soul with me to hell, where it will remain under my purview for all eternity. Choose, please."
I was agape. I was bamboozled. I was, for all accounts, unexpectedly sad.
"And it'll be safe?" I asked.
"The soul is a terrible weight, a choking tie that binds, a blinding light that guides you wherever you have committed yourself to going. It is aspiration against reason and Selfness in its purest form, though bound entirely by consequence. It is the vain hope that salvation can be found within condemnation, and for my subjects, that is a commodity in direly short supply."
"After all the damned have been through, do they not even deserve the opportunity to hope for something better?"