//------------------------------//
// Rainbow Gull 
// Story: Surviving Sand Island 
// by The 24th Pegasus 
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The wind tugged on Rainbow’s feathers with a million invisible little fingers, trying to drag her back to the earth. But all it took was a few flaps of her wings to carry her momentum forward and shake off the drag pulling her back, if only for a little while. The sky was her domain, her home, and gravity and the elements couldn’t bring her down if they tried.

Overhead, the morning sun beat down on her, quickly building up a fiery heat in her outstretched wings only counterbalanced by the rush of cool air around and over them. It was a cloudless day with a constant but gentle breeze—a perfect day for flying. Without any clouds, the sun quickly took to heating the land and sea below, and before Rarity and Gyro even left the island on the raft, Rainbow rode a thermal to five thousand feet. Over the ocean, the thermals wouldn’t be as strong, so she was determined to get what height she could before she embarked to the southwest to conserve her energy and not put stress on her healed wing.

And then there was nothing to do but fly and glide, and that was the fun part. Down below, she could see the wake the raft left as Rarity propelled it along with her magic. It was deceptively small for how quickly the raft glided over the surface, likely a side effect from whatever it was Rarity was doing with her magic to make it move that fast. It wasn’t like a motorboat that had big propellers to churn up the water and a draft to push it aside. The raft had almost no draft and used magic to move, so the water was largely still and blue behind it. It would’ve made it difficult to track, had the raft not been a swiftly moving square of wood with a white pony sitting squarely in the middle.

Rainbow grunted and flapped her wings some more, collecting speed with each stroke. She started edging out in front of the raft and scanning her eyes across the sea far below her. For now, the seas were calm with an occasional chop from the waters flowing around the islands and meeting somewhere in the middle, and there wasn’t anything else in sight except for their raft below. To her right, the minotaurs’ island poked out of the morning haze, and she could even make out the rough outlines of buildings sitting on top of the mountain. Even still, the mountain’s peak was higher than she was, and it would’ve taken another few minutes of climbing to rise above it. As much as Rainbow was tempted to do so, she decided against it. Even if she could fly again, she was still wary about putting any unnecessary stress on her wing. If she hurt it again so soon, it’d never be as good as it used to.

But the important thing was that there were no minotaur canoes in the water and no siren fins slicing through the waves. After they’d seen the siren using their lagoon as a rehearsal studio, Rainbow had been nervous about the journey to the next island. If the siren caught them out in the open sea, then there was no telling what might happen. There wasn’t anywhere to run from a creature that big and that dangerous. Rainbow would’ve much preferred Rarity and Gyro to take their chances with a giant shark instead of a siren… even if they’d need a bigger raft.

Even with Rarity’s magic propelling the raft, however, it still wasn’t as fast as Rainbow once she really got up to speed. With a steady tailwind, Rainbow had pushed herself to a decent clip but had thus far been holding herself back to avoid outrunning the raft below. Now, with the southwest island beginning to draw near, she decided to fly on ahead and scout it out before the raft got too close. Pitching down by a few degrees, Rainbow began trading altitude for speed, and soon enough she had to crane her neck over her shoulder to locate the raft in the great blue ocean below.

The closer she got to the southwest island, the more detail she could pick out. What originally had looked like a mass of green and white from far out actually began to shape up into the shattered remains of a volcanic crater. At some point millions of years ago, the cone of the volcano must have exploded and collapsed into the surrounding sea, because Rainbow could spy a definitive circular arrangement to the chunks of stone and tiny islands jutting out of the water. In all, she counted nine islands of various size clustered in the area, with the easternmost being the largest. Though it wasn’t nearly as big as the minotaurs’ island, it was definitely the backbone of the island arrangement and made up the bulk of the land in that area. At about three-quarters of a mile tall and maybe five wide, the remains of the volcano’s eastern wall accounted for something like half of the available land, Rainbow estimated. The other eight islands varied in between from a mile across to barely more than a glorified sandbar, but none matched the size and scope of the eastern island.

Rainbow furrowed her brow. Unlike the minotaurs’ island and its abandoned temple on top of the mountain, Rainbow couldn’t see anything that looked like a shrine or a temple or something interesting that could clue them into where the next figurine was being held. If there was something there, it had to be underneath the trees, and Rainbow couldn’t see through them from this far out. With nine islands to look over, she felt her stomach drop. Who knew which one could possibly be hiding a shrine? If it happened to be anything like the shrine on their home island, it could be nearly impossible to find. And if anything else lived on that island, like more minotaurs, then they’d definitely be in trouble.

But what she could see piqued her interest. Smashed between some rocks outcropping from the shores of the eastern island was the wooden frame of some kind of vessel. Whatever it had once been, it was large and it had ended up there recently. The paint on its hull was still vibrant in some places and the decks seemed mostly intact. From where she flew, Rainbow couldn’t tell how old the wreck was, but it was definitely of Equestrian make. There was no way the minotaurs could ever make something like that.

She rubbed her chin between wing flaps. Could it be a piece of the Concordia? More importantly, did that mean there might be other survivors?

One thing was for certain: she needed to investigate. With that in mind, she started circling down to the raft to give Rarity a heads up before she took off.