A Deal of Death

My father was a heavy gambler, and he seemed to have luck on his side for the longest time before one day, he began to lose again and again. Mom pleaded with him to stop, but he ignored her and continued to spiral down that rabbit hole. Eventually, she filed for a divorce, and he was barred from seeing us.

Dad once told me that his late mother was a witch, and that she had a grimoire that he would use from time to time. He said it granted him luck. I wondered if whatever spell he used had backfired at some point, or if it simply had run its course.

As I grew older and reconnected with Dad, I learned that he had indeed stopped using the grimoire around the same time his winning streak ended. He said the spell he used consumed a portion of his soul at a time, shortening his lifespan. He didn’t want to continue that spell, but he couldn’t let go of gambling either. I pitied him.

I asked Dad if I could borrow Grandma’s grimoire to boost my research. Dad agreed, but he warned me not to make any deals with demons. He said such a deal would yield fast results, but it would come at the cost of a shortened lifespan. He said Grandma only got twenty years when she made a deal to earn a better living while raising him on her own.

I took his advice and used minor spells for my research, but as time passed, the mountain of stress I was under grew larger, and I felt like I was running in circles without any sense of direction. Years of hard work had amounted to nothing, and I was on the verge of losing my funding, so I made a desperate call: I summoned a demon.

I asked the demon to grant me the insight to succeed in my research. The demon agreed, but it wanted my soul in twenty years. Seeing no other option before me, I agreed to its terms. Within weeks, my research bore results that I couldn’t even dream of, and just a decade later, I had made leaps in the field of biology that no other individual could’ve ever achieved.

My most substantial breakthrough was ten years after I had made the deal with the demon, and it was something that could turn the tide even on that deal. While running tests on myself in secret, I accidentally made my body resistant to aging and death.

That same night, the demon appeared in my house, and on its face was a grim expression. The demon said I had breached the terms of our contract, and that drastic measures needed to be taken. I said I stumbled upon immortality by accident and was not attempting to escape our deal. The demon acknowledged that there was no treachery on my part, but it also said that it could not reap my soul since I was immortal. It said I owed it a mortal soul every year for the remainder of our contract.

For the next ten years, I made deals with countless humans, seeking one desperate individual after another until I could make a contract with them; and each year, I reaped a soul and delivered it to the demon. A decade passed, and our contract ended, but now I had an eternity to battle the guilt that weighed on my conscience for the lives I had gambled with.