The scent of road dust and cigars rose through the early evening air, mingling with the long shadows cast from the setting sun.

In a room above a Gunsmith's shop, sat two figures facing each other across a worn oak table. One, a sharply dressed man with well-polished boots, sat far back into the room, his features shrouded in the half-light. He may have been handsome, but it was difficult to tell.

Across the table from him sat a tense figure hunched in on itself. Unlike the man, draped in darkness, the room's other occupant was sitting with their back to the open window, and it was the light, creating a halo around their head, that obfuscated their features.

Neither of them spoke, the silence broken only by the rhythmic tapping of the sharply dressed mans fingers on the surface of the table.

For all their outward differences, the two shared one small, nearly unnoticeable trait. To say they were both bereft of a soul would be a lie, as the man in the shadows was, in actuality, in possession of a great many souls, just none of them his own. To say they had both once made bad deals would be closer to the truth, if not the precise entirety of it.

The man pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket and checked the time. They had sat here before, these two. At this exact table, in this exact room, with this exact soul on offer between them. Only this time, it was he who had come to bargain. He closed the timepiece and returned it to its place.

He was called many things, the man. Devil, demon, Prince of Darkness. He preferred, though, to think of himself as a something of a collector. A conveyor of wishes.

The man leaned forward in his chair, his fingers gripping the wood hard enough to raise wispy curls of smoke. The fires of hell were never far enough behind him.

"I have something of yours," he said, "and I will return it, but first I need a favour."