People say that no matter how painful it is to wait in line at the gates of Hell, what comes after it is worse. He was never sure whether to believe it; it's not as if people are commonly resurrected, and even when they are their memories are often blurry.

He's sure, now, that they were right.

He's assigned, eventually, to work under a litigator in Pharasma's courts. He's a quick learner, as quick as anyone could be under the circumstances. He's not quick enough to avoid being disciplined. 

On good days, they just light him on fire. Usually they get more creative than that; devils are surprisingly resilient. It stops being surprising, after enough times bathing in acid or drinking poison or having individual scales removed from his arm or--

It's not safe to have opinions about which forms of discipline you think are worst. He tries to stop. They discipline him for that too.

There are people who believe that once you've been molded into a devil, you stop being in pain all the time. This is false. Once you're in a devil, you stop being tortured all the time, because they don't need to torture you all the time for you to be in pain. Not that it can't get worse; it can always get worse. 

He doesn't know how long it's been since he arrived.

Eventually they decide he's ready to argue cases before Pharasma's court. He's very, very good at it. In most afterlives with a more competent legal bureaucracy than the Abyss, they assign new advocates to cases that are nearly a sure thing, souls that are almost guaranteed to your afterlife. In Hell they also assign new advocates to cases that are nearly unwinnable, and punish them when they fail.

When he manages to win the soul of a mostly-unremarkable woman who ran an orphanage in Andoran, they stop assigning him to cases that are a sure thing.

(He tells himself it's a good thing. If she weren't Evil he couldn't have won the case, and since she is evil it's a good thing she's here. 

He takes an acid bath, for needing to tell himself that at all.)

He works every moment he can, even on the rare occasions when no one is forcing him to. If someone else goes in his place, and they're worse than him, and they lose the trial, and it's his fault-- Well. He simply won't let that happen.

They punish him, when they catch him making mistakes, even if they aren't mistakes that lose a trial. He punishes himself, when they don't catch him.

He can't remember his name. Most devils can't. Probably it wasn't important anyway.

No matter what happens, he never forgets the tiny flash of memory he retained from his trial.