Death and a Demon Lord

I did not get done in by a truck.

No, I was alone in my apartment when the lights went out. They flickered once, twice, then everything stopped. The apartment went the kind of silent you rarely heard in the modern world. The AC shut off, the fridge’s constant hum died, and the air purifiers ceased operation. It was late evening, and the sky was a dark purple, so even the quiet clack-clack of my solar-powered ornament was absent.

Outages like this happened often in my apartment, and I had a routine. It began with stepping outside my front door to see if the outage affected just me or the whole building.

Normally, this went one of two ways: either I opened the door and saw a normal, brightly lit, if overwhelmingly beige, hallway, or I opened the door and saw the eerie, bluish green of our emergency lighting. This time, however, I encountered a problem. The deadbolt wouldn’t turn.

Let me be clear: I'd used that lock only an hour ago when I took my daughter back to her dad's house. It'd been fine. Now, my entirely non-electronic deadbolt wouldn't turn. I peered through the peephole, hearing voices, but I couldn't see anyone through it. The hallway outside my door was so dark, it may as well not have existed.

"You're dead," a voice said from behind me.

I spun around. There stood a too-tall, too-thin figure. They were vaguely human-shaped, but shadows writhed under their skin, and everything from their nose up was an oily black that bubbled like hot tar. "Who're you?" I asked, ignoring the 'dead' thing for the time being. I was breathing, and my heart was trying to bang its way out of my chest, so clearly I wasn't dead.

"Fyth, demon lord, at your service," the figure said with a sweeping bow. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Lena."

I shuddered. Something about the way they said my name felt like my whole body had been doused in grease. "What're you doing here?"

"I'm here to make you an offer," Fyth said. Their head moved from side to side before they turned and strode into my living room to sit on my couch. It looked comical - my couch was small by normal standards, and Fyth was at least two heads taller than your average person. Their knees jutted out absurdly, and their whole body curled in on itself to avoid being eaten by the cushions. Even so, they merely crossed their legs and leaned forward, smiling genially. "You've just died. Ordinarily, you'd move on to whatever form of purgatory you belong in, but I've come to make you an offer. In exchange for your soul, I will grant you a wish."

"I'm not dead."

"Look down," they said. When I did, there was a streak of darkness, like I'd blinked with just part of my eyes, and then their hand was buried in my chest. I staggered back, crying out in anticipation of the blinding pain that was sure to accompany the injury... but it never came. Fyth withdrew their hand, and my body looked the same as ever. "You're losing your ability to interact with this world with every passing minute. Make your decision before you fade too much."

That was convincing enough for me. I was absurdly disappointed to learn that there was some manner of afterlife. I'd lived my entire life with the thought that at least it would end, and the revelation that it apparently did not do so was far more devastating than the discovery that I'd managed to die without noticing. "What happened to me?" I asked because it'd suck to be at a meeting of dead people and have to say I didn't even know how I'd gotten there.

Fyth shrugged their bony shoulders. "Blood clot in your brain. You went quickly."

Well, if I had to have died, that was the way to do it, I supposed. I sighed. "Can you make sure my daughter doesn't find me?" I had no friends, no job, and no family other than my thirteen-year-old daughter. Her father and I communicated through short, terse texts that, often as not, received no reply. No one was going to notice that I was missing, so the most likely person to discover my body would be my daughter when she got back from her dad's house at the end of the weekend. That seemed intolerable.

Fyth cocked their head to the side. "You're willing to sell your soul to me in return for that?"

"Sure, why not?" I'd been hoping souls didn't exist in the first place. I didn't have anything I particularly wanted to do with mine, so if I could use it to protect my daughter one last time, it seemed like a fair trade to me.

“You don’t want to think about it? You’re fading, but not that quickly.”

I was busy poking at the wound that should be - but wasn’t - in my chest. “I’m good. Kind of thought death would be more like, just, the end, so I didn’t have any grand plans for it.”

Looking bemused, Fyth rose to their feet and paced about my apartment. ”It’s not really equivalent,” they commented. They stared up at my shelves of light novels, games, and anime figures, stroking their chin thoughtfully with long, spindly fingers. “Don’t you want to get your soul’s full value out of the exchange?”

I’d given up on my prodding and now followed him in looking at my books. My attention shifted down to my phone, which lay on the floor in front of my computer, a thousand more books stored within. I’d never be able to read them again, I supposed. I didn’t know what Fyth wanted from me. Most wishes I could think of were predicated on the assumption that one was alive. I, however, was dead, and asking for resurrection would be a waste of my soul. “My daughter’s happiness is worth far more than my soul to me,” I told them honestly.

Fyth’s bloodless lips curled down into a sneer. “Fine, I’ll think of something then.” They snapped their fingers, and the apartment disappeared, leaving us in darkness. There was a strange tug from somewhere around my gut. Were souls stored in the intestines? "Done," they said. "Now... your job is to be my agent in another world. I'll give you some time to acclimate, and then you'll perform tasks for me as needed. Understood?"

"Uh, no? What kind of world is this other world? How much time is 'some time?' What kinds of tasks will I be doing?"

Fyth groaned. "And here I thought you weren’t the curious type…” they muttered to themself. Then they shrugged it off. “Just figure it out there when you get there. Use the status screen if you have to." They snapped their fingers again, and the last thing I heard from them was a faint 'don't disappoint me!'