//------------------------------//
// Given a Bargain 
// Story: The Last Apple Family Reunion 
// by crash826 
//------------------------------//

As Applejack walked, the Pit stretched out, infinitely close and always central. Occasionally, she attempted a route change - walking in a straight line rather than with the curve of the ground - but, inevitably, the canyon curved with her new direction, so that the Pit was always, eventually, dead center. Thankfully, she could navigate, to an extent, by working with the tomb-apartments as landmarks. Her stomach lurched as her sense of direction, so adept on solid land, faltered in the land of the dead, but she managed to get close enough to a tomb - a few hundred feet from the Pit, maybe? - at which she stopped and decided to get her bearings.

With the time to rest, now, she took in the building. It was bone-white, inset with lead, and windows of pale white glass decorated the sides. The architecture was an indistinct, ornate style that Applejack mentally categorized - along with magic, robotics, Twilight's calculating engine and the entire nation of Prance - as Fancy. Above the door, lead letters spelled COURT OF EYE FOR AN EYE. And below that, a bone-chip eye, with a lead knife-emblem pierced into the center.

Applejack laid against the wall and considered her options again. As far she could tell, going into the Pit meant not coming out for a long while, and that notion was only reinforced by the way the land shifted. Only by dint of constant effort did she keep herself from walking downward, and even so, she'd still descended about ten or fifteen feet. To come back up was very probably harder than that. From what the green shade had said, searching on her own - as she had planned - might not be wise. And Tartarus was traditionally inhospitable to the living. The best option, possibly, was to find some way of getting assistance from the shades...

She groaned.

Shades who hated and feared the Pit, and who wanted her to stay up here with them and entertain them for as long as she was alive. The bright ones would never help her go down there, and the dull ones were very probably useless.

Allowing natural curiosity to overtake her worries for the moment, Applejack walked to the door and pulled it open, then walked inside. Within, she was immediately overtaken by the incredibly dramatic architectural sense of the passed-on. The walls were luxuriously skull-laden and inset with byzantine corpse faces and silver-and-lead inlaid coffins. Separate, they might be a little dark and frightening, but - combined - they gave the impression that the place was a very small palace designed by a necrophiliac. (She noted that it looked new - behind the gimcrack-evil decor, the walls seemed ancient, and a little ugly. There was a suggestion of deformation.)

In the center, there was a tall podium, around which a long line of shades - mostly the brighter shades, she noticed - was looped. The back of the line was near the door, where she had come in. Applejack took a place at the back of the line, if only to find out the purpose of the court. As she waited, humming vaguely under her breath, she observed the center, she noticed a single shade - brighter than the others - on top, speaking quietly to those who approached her. As they got close, they asked nonspecific questions to the podium's occupant, and she muttered oddly resonant answers. As they left, the shades placed little objects around the pillar - one dropped a toy robot, another a framed photograph. Each seemed... not bright, but not as dark as those objects in its surroundings.

Eventually, the line brought her to the front. The mare at the podium looked down at her and waited. Applejack had no idea what to say. So she said what came to mind first.

"Er, howdy. Nice... not-weather we're havin'." The mare cocked an eyebrow. "Or... not havin'?"

"...I take it that you are new, dear. What is your name?" The mare's face curled into a curious, thin smile.

"Apple Fritter. Nice ta meet ya." Applejack extended a tentative hoof, then retracted it when she realized that the pillar was far too high for a hoofshake.

"Well, dear, I can tell just by looking at you that you have lived an incredibly full life. Your coloration is bright enough to be a living mare! Why, I believe that you could be a fantastic eye trader, should you ever feel the need for anything down here." The mare caught herself. "Oh, but you don't know what that is, do you?"

"Well, ma'am, Ah reckon Ah can make a good guess. You're one of 'em, and -" Applejack pointed to the pile of glowing relics. "- You trade something 'r other fer these little trinkets. And it's called eye trading on account'a the fact that you hold it in this building with the eye over the door."

"Close, but no. We call it eye trading because all trades are equivalent - an eye for an eye, so to speak. The Underworld takes care of those who make unequal deals." Applejack thought on that - she'd be in no trouble, of course, since she was honest in all her dealings. She could admire a place with an ethic like that.

"These 'trinkets' are, essentially, fragments of the living parts of shades," said the mare. "And when you have one, you have a certain degree of control over its owner." The eye trader surveyed them. "I've got a fairly good haul, which is why I'm so bright."

Applejack had a thought. "...could you use one'a them things to find its owner? 'Cause... I'm lookin' for somepony, and..."

"Oh, everypony's looking for somepony." She waved her hoof. "The odds of me having any part of whoever you're looking for is slim." Applejack muttered a quiet curse. "But I can help you... if you're willing to pay a great fee. And you have to ask yourself, before you pay - will finding this pony be worth it? You could just make a new death for yourself down here." The eye trader looked concerned. "Everypony always wants to find somepony, and it's never as good as they expect -"

Applejack didn't have time for this.

"Sure I'm sure. What do Ah pay?"

The eye trader sighed and slumped on her podium. "Alright. Fine, dear. I'll need..." She considered. "What about your hat?"

Applejack said nothing at all. Her expression said it all for her. It wasn't her hat. It was her pappy's hat.

The eye trader wisely said nothing more on the subject. Instead, she considered, and settled on: "I'll need the song you were humming while you waited in line."

Applejack considered. Could she find them any other way?

Would she like what she found?

She disregarded that last part. She was willing to pay with a song. "Alright. Ah'll pay with that."

And she sang into a silence like a hole in the sky:

"Thanks to all my good ol' friends, but now I'm sadly leavin',
"Soon I'll come back to the land, so there ain't no use grievin'.

A certain energy infused room as she sang, and each syllable inscribed itself on the podium in whitish ink, fading moments afterward. Around the room, shades - bright and dark alike, even those with blank eyes and blanker smiles, perked up and took notice. A few muttered half-asleep phrases, as if waking up.

"Thank yer folks fer bein' born, and thank yerself fer tryin'..."
"What's the point of livin' long..."

She hesitated. But this was her payment. To not pay wouldn't be honest.

"What's the point in livin' long, when all you do with livin' long is run away from dyin'..."

And with that, it was done. Applejack felt a sudden pressure in her chest, a sensation of air leaving her lungs, and within moments the tune - another line coming out, half-sung already - stopped coming out of her mouth. She could feel it vanish from her throat. A numbness spread along her skin, flew through her hair; her eyes burnt for a moment before becoming cooler, glassy. And she could feel, suddenly, the land of the Underworld under her feet - faintly, darkly, but still pulsing with death - not a mere lack of life, but a feeling of black famine, a polar opposite to the energy she could feel radiating from the soil.

She could guess that she would never feel the raw energy of the orchards so acutely again. Death had touched her.

The eye trader hummed a few bars under her breath, and her mane shone a little brighter. Around the room, the shades quieted down, the life force gone. "Dear, you may very well be the strongest shade I have ever seen. You've barely faded!" Her eyes narrowed. "Hardly like a shade at all, really." Applejack gulped. 

Then the trader smiled. "Outside, you'll find a road down to the Pit. Should you follow that path, you may very well be able to come back from there, once you've found whoever you're looking for."

Her face became grim. "But be warned. The path attracts the dark things of the Underworld. If you have no fears, you may see nothing more than a few shadows... But I doubt very much that that will happen."

It's worth it, thought Applejack. Even if I can't ever feel the land again. I just need to bring them back.

Even if I have to stay here.

She walked out the doors of the Eye Trader's. Outside, the path was written in calcium-white chalk, down to the Pit, far ahead. She adjusted her Stetson, felt the dead heart of the land under her feet, and went forth.