Soul binding

Gyrazin looked up as he heard the cracking sound of thunder above him. He saw an overcast sky, through which a small motor jet was hard at work drawing a trail of white smoke with its engines. For a second he even considered flying up to the plane and make the pilots crash it, but he knew that this would leave the souls of all those on board the plane free to reach their destinations, which would mean the majority of them would elude his masters again.
Gyrazin, a grey gargoyle capable of turning himself as well as other things to stone, winced as he imagined the punishments the Dark Lords would unleash on him if he should come to such a pass. He closely wrapped his wings around himself as the thought of his upcoming punishment sent shivers down his very spine. Humans thought stone was a tough material, capable of withstanding a lot, and in general it was so, but in front of the wrath of the Dark Lords, it would stand as much chance of survival as the average ant would have of withstanding a stampede of wildebeests.
Once again the gargoyle glanced up at the grey sky, from which the first drops of healthy spring rain where beginning to fall. He hadn't been able to win a single soul for the underworld today, something that bothered him immensely, sent his spirits sinking and his anger rising. Not for the first time, Gyrazin wondered where he had gone astray, lost his touch.
He had been a miracle worker during the industrial revolution, convincing many beginning industrialists to sell their souls to him for a short and fleeting period of prosperity. Little could they know that they would, after their regular life had ended, spend eternity in the underworld, deprived of everything that made them human, except the memories of their scarce moments of life.
For the very first time in his existence, the greyness of the world around him began to bother Gyrazin. It didn't, as usually, remind him of the underworld, or the particularly morbid skies that sometimes hung above Sans Christi, the island where he had first been given life. As a matter of fact, they seemed to add to his anger and weariness.
Suddenly, a soft noise behind him interrupted the gargoyles reflections on his past and abruptly brought him back to the present. Gyrazin gazed over his shoulder and vaguely saw a small black shadow rapidly trying to avoid his gaze by disappearing behind his back. A fleeting expression of annoyance occupied the gargoyles face for a brief instant, then he sighed and his face regained his usual emotionless expression.
`C'mon, Gribon,' Gyrazin spoke softly, `don't fool around. I'm not in the mood for your games today.' He waited for a few seconds, but nothing happened. `Come out right now Gribon, or I'll tie you to a furnace again for another decade! I'm sure you'll recall that isn't a very pleasant experience?'
Silence followed the threat, but after a few seconds a small nightcat appeared before him in a puff of red and black smoke. Its small, bat-like wings flapped slowly as it hovered in the air before Gyrazin. A both anxious and angry expression was to be seen on the nightcat's cat-like face, something which was underlined once more by the nervous beating of its tail.
Gyrazin looked at his only remaining servant and once again realised he must have really used his credit with the Dark Lords to the limit, if they decided he should make do with such a minor netherworld creature as a nightcat. And a degenerate one at that.
`Aw, boss,' Gribon said, uneasy, as he knew very well that his master could very well execute the threat he had spoken of earlier, `what's happened to your sense of humour? We used to have such a good time in this line of business...' A short pause, as the nightcat noticed his master's discomfort for the first time. Then, in an unsuccessful attempt to show some sympathy: `I take it your day hasn't been all that glorious, eh boss?'
Gyrazin growled something, but didn't respond at once.
`That bad, eh boss?' Gribon stroked his whiskers nonchalantly, an obvious sign of unease for those who knew how to read the body language of nightcats. After another period of silence, Gribon slowly descended and landed beside his master's stone foot, where he was once again startled by the big, sharp claws that emerged from it. Especially since they were twitching nervously, something Gribon had never, in his century and a half of service, seen before. He looked up at his master. Slowly, the nightcat began to understand.
`Not a single one today, boss?'
Gyrazin shook his head slowly, seemingly in disbelief of this fact, as if he himself couldn't comprehend why his luck had turned so.
In earlier times, a mere couple of centuries ago, it used to be an achievement whenever a Netherworld creature could win the soul of a governmental member over for their cause. Nowadays, politicians already gave their souls away before anyone, Netherworld or Nirvanian, could even make an attempt at winning them over. Even to other mortals! Gyrazin shivered again. What was the universe coming to, if mortals could even sell their souls to other mortals?
Silently, Gyrazin cursed magicians and wizards alike. Because he knew magic had not, as was a common misconception amongst mortals, become extinct as technology advanced. It had merely become integrated into the large, numb society, where it hadn't lost anything of it's former power. It had merely taken on a new form and had become divided amongst more people. This hadn't weakened the magic however, more of the opposite, actually, as the miraculous achievements of the humans clearly demonstrated.
This was something that bothered Gyrazin immensely, the variety of the modern human culture and civilisation. How could he bribe influential individuals in a world where they could already buy anything they wanted? A crucial mistake Gyrazin, as well as others from the Netherworld had made, was that they had believed that helping humans to fill their pockets by setting up industrial empires was harmless. A very understandable mistake, perhaps, as the Soulbinders of the Netherworld hadn't taken the fact into account that, even though the people they gave these powerful tools to had indeed only lived their short time span of life, but now, their offspring were also benefiting from this knowledge. They were, in fact, well underway to create a world in which Soulbinders could no longer function any more, as there would be nothing left they could offer humans that would be worth a soul. Of course there would always be fools amongst the pack, willing to sell their immortal soul for a triviality, so Soulbinding would never go out of business completely, but Gyrazin wondered if he would be amongst the lucky few that would remain, so to say, active.
He shook his head and shrugged. Time would tell, as it always had before.