At eighteen years old, I sold my soul to a crossroads demon for immortality.
And honestly?
At the time, it felt like the greatest decision anyone had ever made.
I was drunk.
Heartbroken.
Terrified of death.
The usual ingredients for catastrophic choices.
The ritual itself happened at an abandoned intersection outside my hometown just after midnight.
Candles.
Blood.
Latin phrases copied badly from a stolen occult book.
I didn’t even fully believe it would work.
Then the air changed.
Temperature dropped instantly.
And suddenly someone stood across from me in the dark.
Tall.
Thin.
Perfect black suit.
The demon smiled like we were old friends meeting for drinks.
“You’re very young for this,” he said casually.
I tried acting fearless.
“I know what I want.”
“Immortality?”
“Yes.”
The demon laughed softly at that.
Not mockingly.
Almost… amused.
Like he’d just heard a child confidently asking for something dangerous without understanding the price.
Then he pulled out a contract already bearing my name somehow.
One signature.
One drop of blood.
Done.
Before vanishing, the demon looked at me one last time and said:
“You’ll regret asking for forever long before forever ends.”
At eighteen, that sounded dramatic.
At ninety-eight…
I finally understand.
Because the contract worked.
Perfectly.
I stopped aging immediately.
Not slowly.
Immediately.
Eighteen forever.
At first it felt unbelievable.
I became reckless almost instantly.
What’s fear to someone who cannot die?
I jumped from airplanes without parachutes.
Walked through burning buildings.
Played Russian roulette for laughs.
Once I stood directly in front of a speeding train simply because I could.
Every time…
darkness came briefly.
Then I woke up completely unharmed.
Bones repaired instantly.
Skin flawless.
No scars remaining.
People called me miracle survivor.
Then cursed.
Then monster.
So I kept moving.
New cities.
New identities.
New lives every decade.
Because eventually people notice when you don’t age.
The hardest part wasn’t surviving.
It was watching everyone else disappear.
Friends.
Lovers.
Children.
All temporary.
Meanwhile I stayed eighteen forever.
Beautiful.
Untouched.
Alone.
Still…
I never regretted the deal.
Not really.
Because no matter how lonely immortality became, death still seemed worse.
And over time, I grew arrogant.
I genuinely believed I had beaten Hell somehow.
Eighty years passed.
Empires rose and collapsed around me.
Technology transformed completely.
The world changed beyond recognition.
And through all of it…
I remained untouched.
Until this morning.
I woke up in my apartment feeling strange immediately.
Heavy.
Weak.
Then I noticed something impossible resting against my pillow.
A gray hair.
My breath stopped instantly.
No.
No no no.
Hands shaking violently, I rushed to the bathroom mirror.
For the first time in eighty years…
I looked older.
Barely.
Tiny lines near my eyes.
Faint discoloration beneath my skin.
But enough.
Enough to terrify me completely.
Then pain exploded through my chest suddenly.
Sharp.
Crushing.
I collapsed against the sink gasping.
Because for the first time since 1946…
I felt mortal.
Panic consumed me instantly.
I ran downstairs to the secure server room hidden beneath my apartment building.
Over decades, I digitized every scrap of information connected to my contract:
photographs,
ritual notes,
translated texts.
Most importantly…
the scanned copy of the original agreement.
I needed seeing it.
Needed understanding what changed.
But when I opened the encrypted folder…
the contract was gone.
Deleted.
In its place sat a single video file uploaded only minutes earlier.
My blood turned ice cold.
I clicked play immediately.
The demon appeared onscreen.
Except…
he looked terrified.
Bruised face.
Split lip.
Black blood staining his collar.
And behind him, alarms blared faintly somewhere distant.
He kept glancing nervously over his shoulder while speaking rapidly.
“If you’re seeing this, then it found you.”
I physically stopped breathing.
The demon swallowed hard visibly shaking.
“Listen carefully… I never actually took your soul.”
The room around me seemed to tilt sideways.
“What?”
My own voice sounded tiny and broken.
The demon leaned closer to the camera desperately.
“I sold it.”
Every light behind him flickered violently.
“To something much worse.”
Then suddenly the recording distorted.
And behind the demon’s chair…
something moved.
Not a person.
Too large.
The shadows themselves bent strangely around it like reality struggled containing its shape properly.
The demon saw it too.
His face drained completely.
“Oh God,” he whispered.
Then he looked directly into the camera.
“You think immortality means you can’t die.”
Heavy footsteps echoed behind him slowly.
“You never asked what happens instead.”
The room lights behind him went dark one by one.
Click.
Click.
Click.
Until only the computer screen illuminated his terrified face.
Then he finally said the sentence that shattered my entire understanding of existence.
“It doesn’t preserve you.”
The footsteps stopped.
The demon’s breathing became frantic.
“It ripens you.”
Every hair on my body stood upright instantly.
Because suddenly…
after eighty years…
I understood.
I wasn’t protected from death.
I was being kept fresh.
Preserved.
Aging had finally started because whatever owned my soul now had decided I was ready.
Then the thing behind him stepped partially into view.
God.
Even now I can barely describe it.
Not because it lacked form.
Because my mind physically rejected processing it.
Too many limbs.
Too many eyes.
A shape that seemed wrong from every angle simultaneously.
The demon started crying.
Actual terrified sobbing.
“You have to run before it fully—”
Something enormous grabbed him backward suddenly.
The scream that followed didn’t sound human anymore halfway through.
The camera crashed sideways.
Static exploded across the screen.
And for one impossible second before the feed died…
I saw thousands of faces moving beneath the creature’s skin.
All young.
All terrified.
All eighteen years old.
Then blackness.
Silence filled the server room.
My chest pain worsened instantly afterward.
Like a countdown finally beginning.
Then my computer speakers crackled softly.
A new voice whispered through them.
Ancient.
Massive.
Hungry.
“Eighty years…”
A pause.
“…nicely aged.”
My apartment lights shut off simultaneously.
And somewhere in the darkness behind me…
something breathed.
