And lo, someone appears in the circle. A young woman, barefoot with pants and a backless shirt. Two sets of wings sprout from her back, iridescent and slightly translucent. They shimmer in the light as she flutters them and looks around.

Well. This is already more of a result than he has ever gotten before.

In the light of the candles ringing the room, he paces around the perimeter of the circle, careful not to let any part of his body or clothing cross over the salt line, and inspects the faerie from the corner of his eye.

He waits for it - her? - to speak first, not willing to give her an opening that she might be able to use against him.

"Um. Hi? Bit dark in here, isn't it?"

"Yes, it is," he agrees.

"I thought it appropriate to perform this ritual at midnight."

He is careful not to say anything which might be construed as a request; there are stories of the fey answering the first question asked of them, and no more.

"I'm more of a mornings person, myself."

"And yet," he remarks.

"Here you are, at a time that could not by any reasonable measure be described as 'morning'."

Still not making any requests, until he has determined which of the dozens of formulae for dealing with the Fair Folk will give him the best chance of success.

"Day's not yet half over in Fairyland. What's your excuse?"

"It appears," he replies, "that I may have gained a somewhat inaccurate impression of the natures and preferences of the Fair Folk."

"First time summoning?"

There's...probably no harm in answering questions. In fact, if he answers hers, he may be safe asking one of his own.

"That is correct," he says, weighing each word precisely.

"Is this your first time being...summoned?" And that is an interesting choice of descriptor, but he does not yet feel confident enough to ask for clarification.

"Nah. It's been a while, though. The last mortal I had a regular thing with died, and I guess my name didn't get passed on."

She seems to be volunteering information freely, although he cannot discard the possibility that there is some hidden cost which will make itself obvious later. Still, there is such a thing as excessive paranoia.

"And what is your name?" he enquires, attempting to sound as though he does not particularly care about the answer.

"Evanathe. What's yours?"

"Ezra Howard." 

It is close enough to the truth: Howard is his true surname, and Ezra his middle name. An effective compromise between the sources which agree that one should not give out one's name to the Fair Folk, and those which warn against lying. 

He watches Evanathe carefully, to see whether she will catch the half-truth.

She doesn't appear to.

"Nice to meet you, Ezra."

"Likewise." 

Mostly for the potential utility value, admittedly, but she seems far more personable and friendly than he was anticipating, and does not appear displeased by her confinement to the circle.

He thinks back over the course of their conversation and determines that, if they are trading a question for a question, he is safely entitled to ask another.

"Is there any advice you can give me, for the case that I attempt further summonings in the future?"

"Not really! I don't pay much attention to the circles."

So it is the circle which performs the important function; that is useful information. 

He decides he might as well find out what happens if he asks too many questions, now he knows this trick is possible to repeat. 

"Is there some way that I can be sure of summoning you, in particular, again?" Or to be sure of summoning a different faerie, he thinks but does not say.

"You write that you're summoning me in particular and use my name."

"That is good to know." A compromise, again, between politeness and the warnings against thanking the fey lest they interpret this as the admission of a debt owed.

There does not appear to be any bar on asking more questions than he has answered, and she is making no attempt to redress the balance. Clearly a transactional approach is not in operation; he is free to question Evanathe until she grows irritated with him of her own accord - although, being fey, she may do so at any moment. 

"Perhaps we should turn to business," he suggests. 

"Up to you. Wouldn't have taken the summon if I had something waiting on me back home."

So, she could choose whether to accept the summons? Another useful tidbit which he should not reveal to be new information. 

"I would rather know, at this juncture," he says, "whether or not you can provide what I seek."

It is late, and this conversation is exhausting given the way he is analysing every sentence on multiple levels. He would like to finish this, acquire either immortality or the knowledge that he has failed once more, and rest before beginning the next attempt, if such is required.

"Depends what it is."

Here it is. 

His hands are shaking; he holds them behind his back so that they will not reveal his desperation. Hardly breathing, heart beating so loud he can barely hear his own voice, he answers her. 

"Immortality. I desire immortality."

"Ummm..."

"You were expecting something else?" he asks dryly. 

"I have sought nothing else for the past twenty years, child: tell me now whether you can grant my wish, or no."

"What year is this?"

...

"Why, this is the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and thirty-five." 

It makes some degree of sense, he supposes, that the Fair Folk would pay little attention to mortal ways of reckoning time. But were that the case, such a question would be meaningless to ask.

"Or, if you prefer, it is the eleventh year of the reign of King Charles I, or the year 5,587 since the beginning of the world, by the Vulgate count."

"The last time I met someone who counted anno domini, it was 1106. Do not call me 'child'."

"Many apologies, my lady. It was merely a slip of the tongue, no doubt inspired by your youthful appearance." He bows slightly.

"I shall not make the same mistake again," he assures her with utmost sincerity. "For does not the Lord instruct us, through the prophet Samuel, that we must not place too much stock in outward appearances?"

He suspects his casual displays of scholarship are wasted on the faerie, but it does not do to assume, as he has just discovered.

His hands are still shaking. 

"I wouldn't know."

He finds himself suddenly worried, irrationally now that he has the secret of summoning more of her kind, that he has offended Evanathe to the point that she will refuse to grant his request. 

Nevertheless, he feels compelled to ask.

"Well...can you grant immortality? And, if so, what price must I pay to obtain it?"

Hehehe, okay this opportunity is too good to miss. He's a bit of a dick, anyway. Her wings flutter and she rises a bit off the ground, but she keeps a straight face. Now, how did Ligath say he always played this...?

"I'd want your soul."

"Oh."

A pause, then he says, "May I take some time to think over your offer?"

His voice does not shake. He is rather proud of that. 

"Sure. Not too long, though."

He staggers out of the room and, as soon as he is out of sight, sits abruptly on the floor like a puppet whose strings have been cut. 

So. The faerie has asked for his soul.

To hand his soul over to one of the Fair Folk would presumably mean that it would not be available to Hell in the event of his death, which can be assumed to be positive. However, it might also have other, less desirable, effects, which might even be great enough to outweigh or obviate the benefits of immortality.

He does not have enough information to evaluate the potential utility cost, and cannot trust Evanathe to answer honestly given her vested interest in the outcome of their bargain. Whatever the stories may say about the honesty of the fey, they also warn that the Fair Folk can, if they wish, twist the truth into a tool with which they fool the unwary. His opinion of himself is not high enough to be confident that he could detect such traps. 

One potential solution, now that he has the trick of it, would be to summon a second faerie to confirm or deny the words of the first, or to tell him more about the process and consequences of bargaining away his soul. The timing does not appear to be important, nor the chanting, only the drawn circle. Not knowing which parts might be essential, his best option would be to copy exactly the circle with which he summoned Evanathe. This will take time, which is a limited resource; if he intends to do this, he should start right away. 

He reaches for the chalk in his pocket and begins to draw out a circle. 

The chalk crumbles to dust in his hand.

"Whatcha doin'?"

He whirls around to face her.

"You - what - how?"

"Might want to do a little polishing work on the wording of your bindings. You're lucky I'm friendly."

"Friendly?" he exclaims, sounding almost crazed.

A little more calmly, he continues.

"You express the desire to extort my soul from its rightful resting place, in return for granting an immortality which you already possess yourself. You display abilities which your kind are not recorded to possess, as casually as walking, and use them to prevent me from verifying your claims. Do you truly consider such behaviour friendly?"

"I could have just killed you. Instead, I'm offering exactly what you want."

"Ah, I see," he says, raising one eyebrow. 

"You have low standards for benevolence, and expect me to share them. I do not know if you are aware, but between humans it is rarely a default assumption that one party in a conversation is acting with any unusual virtue in refraining from murdering the other." 

"I don't know if you are aware, but this is not a conversation between two humans."

"I am very much aware of that," he snaps.

Reminded that he is dealing with someone who could, apparently, kill him without effort, he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly before continuing. 

"I simply do not see why I should hold you to any lower a moral standard than I do my fellow mortals. By all means, feel free to persuade me otherwise." 

"I'm pretty sure your fellow mortals can't offer what you want."

"And why should your greater abilities entitle you to greater lenience?" he argues.

"No doubt, with your powers, you could kill me at any moment, but that does not necessarily imply that I should regard you as any more virtuous than a human because you refrain from doing so."

She shrugs. "Maybe not. I'm not really interested in debating it."

Of course she is not. Calling a premature end to the debate is a common tactic among those who are intelligent enough to recognise that they are losing, but not enough to have chosen the winning side in the first place. He does not say this aloud.

Instead, he says, "Then what, may I ask, do you intend to do now?"

"Still waiting for you to give an answer."

"I am, alas, merely a mortal man," Jeremiah points out, "and not blessed with a perfect memory."

He wonders, idly, if a faerie would be capable of providing him with such a gift, and what price they might ask.

"Would you mind repeating the question to which you refer?"

She rolls her eyes. "You said you wanted immortality and asked what I would want in exchange for granting it to you. I said your soul."

"Ah, that question. Since you interrupted my contemplations," he says, a little pointedly, "I have not had sufficient time to consider your offer."

He thinks for a moment, and realises a potential reason for her insistence on haste.

"Would you prefer that I release you for the present, and summon you again once I have reached a decision?"

"If it's going to be that long, I'd like to take the opportunity to look around this world for a while."

He considers it. 

There is a strong possibility that she might get up to various destructive or otherwise inconvenient activities, but she has claimed to be 'friendly' and interested in cooperation. Specifying a desire that she refrain from causing problems would only be taken as insulting, and increase the chance that she might be inclined to such behaviour out of spite. And given the course of their interaction so far, he would be best served by catering to her wishes as far as possible, unless there is a serious personal cost to be incurred. Letting her loose on the unsuspecting population does not qualify.

"Very well. I shall be finished with my contemplation when the clock next strikes twelve; it would be a great convenience to me if you would return at that time." 

In truth, he does not require so long as all that to decide, but since it is now the small hours of the morning, he would like the chance to sleep on his decision.

"Don't do anything silly while I'm out."

...

He probably deserves that. Call it revenge for addressing her as 'child'. He should count himself lucky that she has done no worse - yet. 

She grins at him and goes to find an exit.

Jeremiah remains sitting on the floor, taking a few moments to simply breathe and relax now that he no longer has to spend every second attempting to stay ahead of a faerie trickster. 

One he is calm, he finds another piece of chalk in his cabinet and continues drawing out his second circle. The salt seems to be no protection; he does not bother with it. He does, however, repeat the order of operations, closing the circle only after writing out everything else. After going back and reading the bindings he wrote for Evanathe, he believes he has found the loophole which allowed her to leave the circle, and makes an attempt at redrafting that section which takes him most of an hour.

About an hour after Evanathe left, he is confident in his circle, and is ready to finish it and summon a second faerie. 

There's not really much to see in this sleepy country town, and she can't go far and risk losing her place in the dark. Which means she's back in time to break the section of floor he's working on out, raise it up, spin it over and drop it back down.

"Tsk, tsk. Didn't I say not to do anything silly?"

"I consider it eminently sensible to seek independent verification of the most important details before committing to an irreversible bargain," he blusters.

He's rather shaken by the extent of her powers, but endeavours to conceal this. He also refrains, once again, from objecting to being patronised. She is, assuming her story is true, several hundred years older than he. 

It helps, a little, if he imagines her looking like his grandmother. 

"But if you call someone else, what guarantee do I have that you won't make the deal with them? I'm protecting my interests."

"Of course it is in your interest to prevent me from summoning. But that does not mean that it was not in my interest to make the attempt," he points out.

"Regardless, it is clear that you will not allow me to verify your claims by any external means. With that in mind, I instead have a few questions to ask you. Is that more agreeable?"

"Go ahead."

Where to start? He decides, arbitrarily, to proceed in chronological order.

"Firstly, by what means do you intend to extract my soul? Will it cause any pain, or other immediate side effects? How will I know that the transfer has been successfully carried out?"

"It's faerie magic. You won't feel a thing."

Really.

"Will there be any effects on the rest of my life?" he checks next.

"Say, my ability to enter churches, or make moral decisions?"

"You'll be more selfish, but you're already only looking to make yourself immortal, so I wouldn't worry about it."

So far, she has an immediate answer to every question, although the answers themselves are not particularly detailed. The very speed and confidence of the answers makes them suspicious, though: this cannot be a situation which occurs frequently, and she has admitted that she has not been summoned at all in a while; he would expect more hesitancy as she tries to remember the information.

On the other hand, there have already been indications that her memory is better than his, and he may be mistaken in judging her as he would a human. Perhaps she can truly recall the information so readily, and is simplifying her explanations so as not to overwhelm the puny mortal with too much detail.

"How much more selfish? How does this manifest; is it an increase in some kind of impulse towards selfishness, or a lessening of more altruistic instincts?"

Shrug. "Eh. Kinda depends on you."

So, she is avoiding providing further detail; he is beginning to be suspicious that she is reaching the limits of her creativity, not her knowledge. There is no shame, especially for a woman, in admitting ignorance about the precise details of some minor point. 

"In what way? Does it change based on my soul, my personality, the individual decisions I have to make - "

"Your soul is like, the bit that does the caring-about-other-people. Some people have big souls and losing them changes them a lot. Some people have small souls and don't really change."

"That should be no problem, then. It seems my soul is smaller than some."

That reminds him of another question.

"Can you determine by looking the size of a person's soul? Would you notice someone who did not have one?"

"Only if I tried to take it."

Well, isn't that convenient. 

He tries to remember the other questions he had prepared.

"Does immortality, of the sort which you propose to trade me, protect only against death from old age, or from dying in full generality?"

"Just old age."

He nods, unsurprised. He will simply have to be careful, then. 

"Will it make me any younger than I now appear, or will I simply cease aging at this point?" he asks to fill the time while he composes a suitably tight wording for his next real question.

"Making you younger would be a separate thing."

"Yes, I thought that might be the case."

And is it not convenient that there will apparently be nothing to tell him whether either part of the deal has actually taken place, until he notices either that he continues to age or that he does not, which will take six months at an absolute minimum. 

Now for the most important questions.

"Does the bargaining away of my soul make any difference to what will occur if I do, in fact, die of causes other than old age?"

A careful question deserves a careful answer. "Yes."

Jeremiah resists the urge to sigh, reminding himself that it would not be helpful.

"What changes result?" he asks with studied patience. 

"You go to wherever your soul is already, instead of your destination being determined by your soul's quality."

Interesting. That implies that Evanathe at least believes in the existence of multiple afterlives, with one's destination determined by one's morality, even if she does not have any more conclusive evidence than the Church. 

"So when I die, I will find myself in Fairyland?" he checks.

"Unless I get bored and send your soul somewhere else."

"Where else might you send it?" he wonders.

The question is apparently an idle one, but if the answer, or one of the answers, is 'Hell', he will use that as an excuse to call off the deal immediately. 

Shrug. "Depends who's offering what. I know a couple angels who collect odds and ends."

More suspiciously vague answers. 

"So Heaven is one possibility? What about Hell, or even here on Earth?"

"Demons are kinda prickly. Hard to make a good deal with. And mortals are... well, no offense, but you're mostly boring."

"Oh, none taken," he says with a grin.

"You are easily the most interesting person with whom I have spoken in the past decade, and I very much doubt that a random selection could produce one of the most interesting faeries, which suggests that your kind are collectively far more interesting than we mortals."

He's flattering her, but it has the benefit of being true. 

"I am willing to make the deal, on one condition," he says, clasping his hands behind his back so that she will not see them shake.

"And what's that?"

The wording of this has to be the most careful he has ever been. He must communicate his true intent clearly and exactly, not leaving Evanathe any space in which to obey the letter of his condition while violating the spirit. At the same time, he must not offend her by seeming to give orders. 

"I must ask that you are not responsible, directly or indirectly, for causing my soul to be in Hell at any time, so far as you have power to prevent this."

She looks at him consideringly for a moment, as if gauging his resolve, then nods.

"Very well."

"Then I believe we are agreed: my soul in exchange for immortality, subject to the aforementioned condition."

He holds out a hand for her to shake, not knowing how faeries seal bargains but hoping that the meaning of the gesture will be conveyed.

She takes his hand and smiles, pulling air past his ears to create a whooshing noise.

...he feels no different.

He thought he would at least be able to notice that he suddenly lacked a fundamental part of himself, even if he was correct in the conjecture that he possessed a less great soul than some. But he feels as though absolutely nothing has changed.

"Is - is it done?" he asks, voice cracking. She said that she could tell whether a person had a soul by attempting to take it - 

"Oh, yes," she says, doing her best attempt at 'unsettling smile'.

"Oh."

He - had a soul. And now he does not. 

He is immortal, assuming that the faerie did not cheat him, but - he had a soul. He had a soul and traded it away for a better chance - not even certainty - of escaping damnation. And yet, in doing so, he has surely damned himself irrevocably.

What was he thinking? Clearly the faerie bewitched him, convinced him that she was trustworthy, just enough, just for long enough to make the bargain. And now she stands there gloating - grinning - he wants her gone, wants to be alone and safe again so that he can mourn his lost soul in peace - 

And a smiling minute later, she disappears without a trace.

Ha, yeah, that was totally worth it.

He stands there for a long time, staring at the empty space where the faerie was, not quite believing that she is truly gone.

When nothing inexplicably animates, and no mocking laughter fills the air, he eventually moves, stumbling backwards until his hand catches the edge of his desk and he can slide down it to curl up on the floor and sob.

He stays there for hours. It's not comfortable. He is too exhausted and wrung-out to care.

Finally, as dawn begins to lighten the sky outside, he sleeps.