"Wouldn't you be happy to have a chance to see the one thing you loved the most again? To see?" Mephisto's brow knit in concern. Humans were emotional, understanding, empathetic creatures, and now, here, when he needed it, Ariel seemed to hold back from that.
"I was elated that I had even the slimmest chance to go back there. The slightest possibility. It meant that I wasn't truly lost to this world. I would ascend and my corruptions would slip away. I would be what I was meant to be, again."
He stood and took one of the smaller pamphlets out of a bookcase and held it up to Ariel. "It's a book, and its purpose is to contain knowledge for those to learn." At that, he dropped the book on the floor and stood on it, crushing it under the heel of his black leather boot. "It fell." He picked it up, dusted off slightly, and then started ripping the pages from the edges, but never completely. Hell, not even halfway in. He knew that this was getting through to Ariel. "It became something not quite like itself." Now. If you were this book, wouldn't you want to be repaired and go back on that shelf, or even somewhere reasonable, where you could be used for your original purpose? Oh, right. Too bad." He lit the damn thing on fire and all that was left was a little bit of ash in his hands, which he dusted from his fingertips before sitting back down.
The book, incidentally, found itself in perfect condition back on the shelf again. Even Mephisto wasn't that cruel to fine literature.