[Above image (do you guys hate my art style yet?) is a brief summery of the story thus far. This entire book in one image. From left to right: Michael, Mannie, and Alexander. I love this image.]

"The fuck does that mean?"

"What?"

"What then happened, I mean, to everyone?" Blake said. The elevator had arrived a few minutes ago, and we were standing in the damp space where it let out. "You told the story, but what about everything... else. There's no structure to it. I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to get out of your childhood."

"You wanted to know."

"I'd like to know more."

"Look, I guess there is some stuff left to cover. And I'll tell you it sometime," I said, "but we're here now."

"What's the point of checking out this empty Earth though? What are we going to do, go on a nature walk?"

"You know, in theory, everything on the cycling loop has a copy here. You could find someone's skeleton and show it to them. Or steal some art and suddenly have a perfect copy."

"Interesting, but I don't have time for that."

Blake followed me out though, up a small mossy incline that was coated in soil and bugs. There was a perfectly square hole above us, and a rusty step stool was in the corner to help ease the climb out.

The air was rich, damp, and green. I couldn't help but feel healthy somehow. Two hundred years with only a few thousands humans left, and they barely left their little cult.

Oh, hey.

"Do you want to check out Heaven?"

"What? Is that up here? I'm pretty certain I don't, thanks. The last two angels I've met haven't been too friendly."

"Pepper's nice."

"I... yeah." Up on top of the Hellmouth, Blake looked around. "So this is, I guess obviously, the place from your story. Does Hell have just one entrance?"

"Is that so odd?"

"Not really. It just feels like it should be more international."

"Souls are reaped from all over, but they all end up here. It's all fairly local, though there is some effort to encourage diversity."

"You'd think, with all your silly magic, Hell could have branches all over the world."

"Hell was built by humans. Not in the dramatic metaphorical way, just, you know... that's a real city down there. Someone put it there, though God knows it's before my time."

"Weird."

Blake followed me as I started to make my way to the highway, even as it started to drizzle. This trip was supposed to be my last chance for bonding time with Blake, and he seemed mostly over his anger with me, but I found myself unsure of what to say. I could finish my story, but then he'd leave me.

"Hey, what did you sell your soul for anyways?" Blake asked, pulling his hoodie up over his hair. "I know you hate personal questions and stuff, but I am pretty curious. You know my whole sob story."

"Oh, it was a boring request. Not even worth your time."

"You know better than to say that around me." He looked up and caught my eye with a smile, and I guess the asphalt and the forest were making him as happy as they were making me, because it was the first time he had smiled at me in a long while.

"It's part of my other story. Another thing that happened a long time ago."

The rain was starting to pick up. Now I was remembering how much of a pain rain really was when it was coming down on you, ruining clothes and running down your face. The highway was covered in cracks and grass, and the signs were rusted to abstract concepts.

Fog was now starting to roll in, upping the weather from dreary to miserable, and the ghostly shapes of buildings could be seen in the white expanse.

"I'm not a big fan of getting soaked out here. Can we turn around?"

"I don't really want to."

"I promise I won't leave you."

Pause.

"Please."

"Okay."

That was it. We hurried back to the Hellmouth and called the elevator back while wringing out our jackets. When it came, we both settled on the floor, and the expectation was clear: the rest.

Yeah, okay.

It was this:

"I sold my soul when I was twenty-two. I found an incubus and demanded he take the damn thing.

When I first got to Hell, it was through the main entrance. That concrete structure. This was before I sold my soul, and even later when I did, I was never collected. Nowadays it's too late for that: the cubi who held my contract is long dead.

After Phin and the brothers left, I was alone. Nothing changed about my life or my habits. The orphanage was closed- it had never really been open, honestly. The kids had just come. Now they were gone. Alright.

Mid-april of the next year, and I decided to pay the brothers a visit. His birthday was in a few weeks, and I prepared a bouquet of his favorite flowers for a present.

He had neglected twice so far to tell me where he had gone, but I tracked him down regardless to a large college and a good size house where he and his brothers were living.

I don't know how he got into college. I don't know how he got a house. He told me it was all from the government, but somehow that sounded very doubtful.

The second oldest, the always frank Gabriel, explained they had had their parent's fortune tucked away, waiting until Michael was old enough to access it.

That really didn't explain the college though. Michael promised his superior social skills and exciting life story made admission a breeze. Gabriel told me he wasn't even in college, just hung around the campus and occasionally snuck into classes.

The younger brothers were the most pleased to see me.

Michael didn't recognize me anymore.

I didn't try to explain myself to him. I talked to him a lot, and he told me his life story for the second time. He grew attached to me quickly, and showed me his favorite movies. He was happy to see I had guessed how much he liked white lilies.

The second youngest- Raphael- tried the hardest to make his brother remember me. But he gave up eventually, and even his efforts were marked with a sort of tried acceptance. Not once did any of us ever sit Michael down and explain who I was and who he was. We all knew it was going to be pointless.

Michael introduced me to his new friends, as well as a large group of people he referred to as 'his following'.

He had started, what no matter what he said, some sort of cult centering on himself and his brothers. It made me uncomfortable. It made his brothers uncomfortable. And yet, it kept growing. Hundreds of people from all over were in this cult.

It didn't quite make sense to me, at first- sure, he was surprisingly charismatic. He was friendly enough, too, with a well-practiced skill for keeping himself at the center of attention. He knew how to manipulate with kindness, to isolate and control, and had a number of crazed ideas tumbling around his head.

So yeah, the more I thought about it, the more sense it made that he had stumbled into a second life as a cult leader.

He tried explaining the philosophy of it, how he and his brothers were actually Earth-bound deities or something, but I wasn't paying attention. Later, Gabriel sat me down and tried, best as he could, to make sense of why they were all going along with this thing. Why they'd pretend to believe him, and take new names, and feed into this-

The answer was that they weren't, really- he just wouldn't listen. All three of them told him they didn't want to claim new identities, new names, but Michael had made up his mind. They said the cult was a bad idea, and the oldest just said they'd have to tolerate it.

'Technically, it's harmless,' Gabriel had said, 'and you know, it's an interesting way to meet new people.'

He bought me flowers on his birthday. White lilies, a returned favor. Then he was hit by a car.

I left after that.

When we were all together, we used to play in the woods. We'd pretend to be royalty. Or cats. Or some sort of strange mix of the two. Either ways, we could waste a summer day on nothing more than a house made of sticks and ferns, and by dusk we would all cram in and feel very proud of ourselves.

Once, a little ways into the woods at a place where the brook ran along two great boulders, Raphael found a young bird. He crouched over it and called us over.

Phin and Michael always had the most energy for this sort of thing. Michael in particular had a certain obsession with birds, as he owned an encyclopedia with lots of pictures of them. Sometimes he'd ask me to read the names for him. He kept asking me even into his teenage years.

One of the brothers pointed out it was a sparrow, and Michael said he recognized it from his book. He picked it up, and rather rudely examined it. It was very young, and didn't seem too injured, but it was making a lot of noise. He stretched out one of its wings.

The rest of us all wanted to hold the poor thing as well. Raphael asserted his right as the discoverer to hold it. Phin said as the oldest, it was his right. The youngest brother said something similar.

Michael's sister had the most empathy for the actual bird. She pointed up to the tree, where a nest sat among the branches.

If there's one thing kids love more than animals, it's having a quest. Michael was the best at climbing trees, and it became his job to put it back. He cradled the bird firmly and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

We all urged him on from the ground. Michael had too many talents, and one of them was climbing trees. He just about flew up there, and once he had reached out to the nest, he flashed a thumbs up.

We left the woods that evening as heroes. But Michael in particular was excited. It was only when we reached the house and were going to bed that I learned why: he had kept the bird in his pocket. I was going to comment on how quiet it had been, but then he reached in to show it to me and found it dead.

He didn't want to throw it out though. He kept it under his bed in a shoebox, and lined it was grass and soil. He only let me see it when he was tending to it in the evenings, working on sketches.

It was all pretty morbid, but children can be like that. I finally convinced him a memento would have to do, and he spent a night peeling off as many feathers as he could from the corpse.

We took the mangled body outside, and under the stars, burned it. He played a nice little song on his violin as we did so, and I read an eulogy.

After the Michael's death, I said my goodbyes to his brothers and went back to my hometown. After dealing with him, I figured it was about time to check in with Phin.

So I went to Hell. You know the place.

It was a different city, run by a single dictator named Naomi Sato. She was a nice old lady though, and the city seemed to be flourishing. This was before The Few existed, and before the angels.

Phin had found a job as a scientist. The term scientist is perhaps the broadest term to ever exist, covering so many different jobs and fields that the word practically shouldn't even bother existing. He wondered about stuff, and sometimes talked about the things he wished he could know.

He, unlike Michael, was very happy to see me. He asked if I had sold my soul, and I told him I had just walked in. He laughed and said the same was true for him.

He was studying the soul trade. Why is existed, how it worked, and what limits- if any- existed. Even in these olden days, there were strict rules on soul selling, on what you could do and couldn't- because, as far as anyone knew, you could do anything and it'd work. Grant vast knowledge, change someone's entire appearance, make someone a millionaire- it'd all happened before, and then never allowed to happen again. Cubi had to lie about their limits, for the sake of not ruining the world.

Phin never learned a thing, but he seemed happy to try, and it was immediately clear I no longer had a place in his world.

I stayed with him for five years. His biggest achievement, he said, was some strange elixir he'd found while crawling around the old parts of Hell.

'The fuck were you doing there?' I'd asked.

'Crawling around looking for shit,' Phin had answered.

There were vials of it in an old lab he'd found behind a rusted door. It's gone now, boarded up and probably only accessible if you were to crawl through the maintenance tunnels past Lust.

Anyway, the first year and the four after were all about this strange serum. It killed everyone we put it into, at first. Spread through their veins with a dark grey hue, making people screech with pain, rolling over and clutching their gut until death. Phin was really into it though, once we found some people it worked on.

A couple years in, Naomi Sato's reign crumbled. Phin was happy about this, as a lot of young kids tend to be. Well, he was twenty-four at the time actually. Maybe that made his support all the more legitimate.

That made me twenty-three. Old as fuck, it felt like. A lot more than aimless.

On the day of the big uprising, Phin had told me how he was set to give it his all. This was one thing he wanted, he told me, something he really stood for. And he was ready to fight on the streets for it. Hell didn't have a need for much of a militia at the time, but that also made spare weapons sparse. I knew this was a fight he was going to lose.

I made sure he missed it, turned off his alarm and slept right in. When he woke up, all in a rush, I did everything to make him lag behind. I faked a limp, and made up a few crises in the lab. He knew I was lying, but he was always such a great guy.

Really my favorite.

This was before the big news team was a big part of Hell, so when we got to the center square and saw all the bodies, that was it. Grey streets, white buildings, and bloody bodies. The military was gone. There was barely a crowd.

Phin raced forward, and I turned around. Time to return to Earth.

So what did I sell my soul for? Well, not long after that I tracked down a sales demon by the name of Cecil Callahan made him an offer: my soul for companionship.

I didn't know what I was expecting, but Cecil sat down and said okay. We didn't shake on it. I have my doubts we ever had a deal to begin with.

He lived with me, and he was quiet, with very nice hands.

There were years between happenings, and this was fine with me. I didn't leave my town, but Cecil was here now. So that was good.

One day, there was something wrong about the morning, and by mid afternoon the world had jumped back to May. This was distressing for a number of reasons. We'd jumped back not just months, but over twenty years. I'd lost furniture. My garden was smaller. Technology was upsettingly low functioning again.

Also, I was twenty. A jump back of fifteen years.

Do you get how long that is? It's awful.

Cecil was still around, at least, but he hadn't changed. The world did, however, every nineteen years. The dates- May fifth and October twenty-ninth- weren't lost to me. But I ignored it.

Cecil and I stayed together for the rest of his life, some twenty-five years later without answers, and after his funeral I...

I don't know.

Seven cycles later, and I returned to Hell. That's one hundred and thirty-three years. Don't try to imagine how I spent my time. I don't know myself.

I called in a few favors, worked around a few strings, and had a nice little job in a top tier accounting office in the newly named Greed, working for Hell's most proficient retired killer.

Everyone I once knew is dead, yes, but I've always enjoyed working with numbers. Meeting new people. Seeing the world.

You know.

That sort of thing."