//------------------------------//
// The Bargain 
// Story: The Bargain 
// by horizon 
//------------------------------//

The dimensional portal rips open with the screaming of tortured souls.  I take up the bone pen filled with blood ink, carefully withdraw a sheet of virgin-skin vellum from its drawer, and settle back into my throne of skulls to await the supplicant.

"Hello!" a brightly colored pegasus chirps, flapping her wings as she hovers over the lake of molten brimstone.

I blink and look again.  Normally, only the most power-hungry and desperate of magi would dare approach one of the greater Lords of Hell.  This one has not a single protective sigil, nor the bargainer's taint that comes from deals with lesser demons that are easier for mortals to entreat.  Her limbs are not stained by the blood of the innocent which powers the portal.  She does not bear the ritual offerings.  She does have a plate of cookies.

My eyes linger upon them.  Ginger snaps.  Fresh baked.

She sets the cookies down on my desk.  My mouth waters.  I swallow my saliva.  It would not do for me — me! — to betray desire. 

"This one recognizes thee, mortal," I say, falling back on formality in the face of this ridiculousness.  "State thy reason for thy intrusion upon the domain of Snk'Skzz'thwt the Bargainer."

"Oh!" she says, surprise widening her eyes.  Her wings droop and her hooves start shuffling back and forth in an adorably awkward sort of dance.  "I'm sorry!  I kinda figured you were Snake-Skuzzthwait.  But, um, if I got the wrong address, I can just leave the cookies and go."

"No — thee — I —" I clench my fangs, take a deep breath, and ignore the tantalizing scent of ginger.  "Nnngh.  You speak to the lord of this realm, pony.  State your purpose."

"Ooooo….kay?" she says, then her face brightens.  "Oh, so you can help me sell my name?"

At least something is starting to make sense.  I feel my headache recede, and give her a fangy smirk.  "Of course.  And Snk'Skzzk'thwt knows you shall agree that quite a fair price is offered for it."

"Wow!"  Her eyes widen.  "And here I thought I'd have to pay you to take it!"

That is definitely not how this conversation goes.

"What," I growl.

"Well," she says with a sheepish shrug, "I wouldn't be selling it if I liked it, would I?"

Part of me screams to take this idiot mortal for all she is worth, if she is willing to pay to give up something so dear as a name.  The rest of me screams louder that this is a trap.  With an iron will born from immortal experience, I suppress my greed.  I'm still stinging from the last time a mortal tricked me, centuries ago.

"And why would you want to give up your name?" I ask this bewildering intruder.

"Oh.  Uh … the usual."  She looks, for the first time, uncomfortable.

"It occurs to Snk'Skzzk'thwt that this pony never introduced herself."

Her smile grows unsteady.  "I'd … kind of like to be Sunny Skies.  If I get a choice.  Or maybe Rainbow Raytracer, I do like prisms and I loved art back in school —"

"Mortal," I say in the Voice of Command which I ripped from the throat of a defeated angel untold aeons ago in the light-seared Plains of Gehenna.  "Speak thy True Name."

She whimpers, but the Voice tears a response from her lungs.  "A Terrible Baker."

Awkward silence fills the room.

Her muzzle flushes scarlet red over its usual orange.  Her ears droop.  "Um," she says in a small voice. 

I sigh inwardly, finally reaching familiar ground.  I've seen this before.  She has made a thoughtless trade in the goblin markets, or insulted some ancient witch.  "Snk'Skzzk'thwt is not in the business of lifting curses."

"It's not a curse!"

I roll my eyes.  There is a grinding shriek from the soul-tree desk as I slowly push the plate of cookies away.

The pony looks flustered for a moment, then frowns and shoots a hoof forward into the path of the plate.  "Hey," she says evenly.  "I'm not actually bad at baking, alright?"

"No," I growl, determined to twist the knife now that I've realized she is wasting my time.  "You're Terrible."

She doesn't even flinch.  "It's a name," she says, in the resigned voice of a being who has had this conversation more times than a mortal can recall.  "The cookies are perfectly fine."

"But your name—"

"And quite tasty."  She snatches one off the plate and stuffs it in her muzzle, chewing and swallowing.  "See?  Try one.  Really."

I curl lips back to reveal gleaming fangs — hoping that the sheen of new drool makes them look more intimidating.  "Do not be dense.  Your name defines you."

"Uh, no."  She rotates slightly and points toward the three blithely smiling suns adorning her orange-creamsicle flanks.  "That's your Mark's job.  Haven't you ever visited Equestria?"

"Do not change the subject," I snarl, feeling myself losing control of the conversation again.  "You dare claim your name is no curse?  Do you expect me to believe it was the product of choice, free of compulsion or bargain?" 

"Well, I…" Her voice trails off, and she gives me a weak smile.  "I didn't come here to complain about my parents, ha ha."

I grit my teeth and lean forward.  "Little pony, I am a Lord of Hell.  I have seen millennia upon millennia of every possible manner in which mortals fall from grace.  The small-minded who cannot overcome their petty failings.  The righteous who believe their lofty principles excuse their base actions.  The villains who delight in watching the world burn.  Every vintage of cruelty or of apathy which exists, I have savored until long past the time it dulls my palate.  And never — never — have I simultaneously tasted both the monumental ambition required to curse one's own offspring, and the transcendent stupidity to focus that curse so narrowly and inconsequentially.  It is a simple fact of sapience that no mortals capable of surviving to procreative adulthood are capable of naming their child 'A Terrible Baker'."

Her smile wavers and falls.  "Technically, they didn't," she says, ears drooping.  "I was 'A Terrible Pony' until I got married."

Oh.

Complete understanding finally coalesces — and, with it, my instincts reorient themselves.  This I can work with.  No matter how ridiculous the situation, she — like all my visitors — is a being with desperate needs.  Driven to the depths of Hell by desire, with an ocean of flaws to be exploited. 

Such as shame.  Which is simple to invoke; all it takes is a quiet, judgmental stare as I sit back down.  Nobody can live with a name like that without a tiny voice in the back of their head insisting that they must have done something to deserve it.  She tries to speak up in self-defense, but I silence her with a glare and a throat-clear; once she yields conversational momentum to me, I draw out the silence, and let a lifetime of insecurities do the work for me.  

Then the shifting air currents of stirring lava blast my muzzle with a powerful wave of aroma, direct from the heart of her plate.  

That odor suddenly commands every last scrap of my attention.  Lightly browned sugar from the underside of the baked goods mingles with the gentle tang of cooked ginger and the richness of fresh-churned butter.  I swallow a wave of saliva.  And I realize with a start that my arm is creeping toward the plate as if it belonged to someone else.  

There is a cookie in my claws.  

That is for the best, I tell myself.  That is what I should be doing.  Surely it is better to poison my curiosity with the bitter tang of disappointment than to let this damnable temptation linger.  When the cookie turns out to be as cursed as this pony's name, I can let my faint glimmer of crushed hope blacken and metastasize so that I can take appropriate glee in being the agent of her eternal damnation.

I take a tentative bite of ginger cookie.  

It is — and I do not use the term lightly — heavenly.  

It is as if, for a moment, the weight of my sins has dissolved and bled away, and I am standing under the warmth of sunlight, forgiving and radiant instead of harsh and judging.

"Um."  Her voice drags me out of bliss back to the harsh brimstone-choked present.  "If you …" She falters.  "Don't want the name.  I'm, um.  Sorry for wasting your time."  She wheels around and plods back toward the portal.

"Mmmmfhwfhfngggh!" I blurt out, as the source of my first-ever moment of unconditional bliss threatens to vanish forever.  Cookie crumbs spray everywhere.  I hurriedly swallow and shout, "I'll take it!"

The pony hesitates — then glances over her shoulder and stands a little straighter.  "Really?" 

"Yes!"

The room seems to brighten with her, in a manner not unlike the effect of the cookies.

"And, um … are you still going to trade me something for the name?"

I manage to restrain myself from saying "Anything you want" just barely long enough to blurt out, "A better one."

Her face brightens.  "Deal!"

I rush through our transaction and spend an agonizing eternity waiting for her to depart, eyes locked on the remaining cookies.  The instant the portal closes, I jam the whole thing into my maw, plate and all. 

My world dissolves into sugar and sunlight.  Somehow — despite knowing what to expect, and despite the ceramic shards stabbing into my gums — the second experience is even better than the first. 

Then the rush fades, and I realize that I missed an opportunity to bargain with her for additional plates.  I have no access to her world, and she is unlikely to return.  

I have doomed myself to an eternity of regrets.

My seneschal will find me, two days later, curled up behind my desk and whimpering a single word, over and over again:

Ponies.