Rarity eyed the remainder of the ascent with wary blue eyes. The further they climbed, the more sparse the hoofholds and ledges became. Once more, Rarity wished that she had the horn strength to simply fly up to the top of the rocks instead of climbing around the sides.
But at the very least, she had Gyro to do most of the pathfinding work for her. The earth pony was as nimble and sure-hoofed as a mountain goat, her gray hooves never slipping or failing to find traction on tiny rocky outcroppings. Rarity simply did her best to try and follow the mare’s hoofsteps and keep up.
Eventually, however, they reached a ledge with no easy way to progress. In front of them, the rocks dropped away to a dizzying and sheer plunge to the shoals below, and there wasn’t any path to backtrack and navigate behind them. There was only another ledge a couple inches wide about ten feet straight up against a flat face of rock. As far as Rarity could tell, there wasn’t any way to proceed.
“Great, we’ve come all this way only to be stopped by a dead end,” she grumbled. “How are we even going to get down from here? If we have to navigate that rocky ascent again, I may just fling myself off the cliff now and save time.”
“No dead end, only a new challenge,” Gyro said. Rising onto her hind legs, she rested her forehooves against the wall and squinted at the ledge above her. “If I give you a boost, can you pick me up after?”
Rarity blinked. “Well I… I suppose I could, seeing as how you weigh much less than a makeshift ramshackle wooden raft, and it’s easier to lift others instead of myself, but I don’t even think that me standing on your back would give me the height I needed to grab the ledge.”
Gyro rubbed her chin and thought. “Okay, that’s no problem. We can still do it.”
“Excuse me? No problem? How do you mean?” Rarity emphatically gestured to the ledge above them. “I’m not going to be able to make it up there unless you were to throw me or—” Her pupils shrunk to tiny pinpricks. “Oh, no, don’t you even dare—!”
Gray forelegs wrapped around her shoulders and hefted her off the ground. “I promise I won’t miss, I have great aim!” Gyro said, rising onto her hind legs.
“You said you were terrible at horseshoes!”
“That’s different!” Gyro grunted as she took aim at the ledge, her hind hooves sliding and legs trembling as she supported the weight of two ponies on them. “I’ll count to three. You ready?”
“No! Heavens, no, put me down!” Rarity screeched, too frightened to squirm or flail in case the sudden motion made Gyro lose her balance and sent them both tumbling off the side.
“Good! I’ll throw on three.” Licking her lips, Gyro’s shoulders tensed. “One!”
And then she flung Rarity, who screamed in surprise and fear. Her four white legs shot out in different directions as, alarmed, she went flying toward the ledge. One of them made contact with a crook of rock, and Rarity immediately grimaced and wrapped her shaking forelegs around it. Her tail swayed back and forth as her lower body dangled from the ledge, and with strength fueled by sheer terror, the fashionista pulled herself up onto the next ledge.
“Oh, awesome, you made it!” Gyro shouted from below her. Spinning around, Rarity trembled and peered over the edge to see Gyro looking straight up at her. “I was worried for a second I’d actually miss!”
“You are, quite literally, the worst mare to have ever lived!” Rarity spat at her, her voice squeaking and cracking as she shook. “I could have died!”
“But you didn’t, right? It’s all water under the bridge now.”
“You didn’t even count to three!”
“You would’ve started freaking out and flailing if I waited that long.”
The amused smirk on her muzzle reminded Rarity of another mare she knew. “No wonder you and Rainbow get along so well,” she growled. “You both take pleasure out of messing with me!”
“I’ll admit it’s pretty funny sometimes…” Gyro shook her head. “Yeah but like, can you float me up now? I don’t want to be stuck on this little ledge forever.”
Rarity let magic build on her horn, yet she nevertheless scowled at the mechanic. “Maybe you should have thought about that before you forced me into a nonconsensual pony-toss…”
Blue magic wrapped around Gyro’s form, and soon Rarity shifted her focus to picking the mare up. Though holding and lifting a fully grown pony was taxing in itself, it was nothing compared to picking up the raft, so Rarity managed without putting too much strain on her already exhausted horn. Once she finally lifted Gyro up to her level, she made eye contact with the earth pony and grinned.
Gyro’s ears fell. “Oh no.”
Without much more warning than that, Rarity let magic surge through her horn. The field holding Gyro in the air brightened and, moments later, catapulted the mare up the remaining twenty or thirty feet of cliff face still left to climb. The mechanic shrieked and flailed her legs as if that would suddenly grant her the gift of flight. She disappeared over the top of the rocky mesa, and moments later Rarity heard something hit the ground, followed by a few groans from Gyro.
“I’m sorry, I forgot to count to three,” Rarity quipped. Turning in place, she found a mild slope up the side of the cliff that would take her to the top without too much hassle. Thankfully she wouldn’t need Gyro to navigate that. Perhaps a little too late to help, she wondered if she’d thrown Gyro too hard. Hopefully she hadn’t hurt her friend. But earth ponies were tough, so she was probably fine.
Without too much difficulty, Rarity picked her way through the rest of the ascent and finally poked her head over the top. Gyro sat a little ways off to the side, rubbing her ribs, and she shot Rarity a pained wince. “Okay, I probably deserved that. I’ve only got a bruised rib or two, at least.”
Rarity wilted and immediately scampered up the last bit of rock. “Oh, Gyro, darling, I’m so terribly sorry. I didn’t mean to throw you that hard. I just wanted to make sure that I got you to the top safely, so I put a little extra power into the spell.” She knelt down by Gyro’s side and made sure that none of the gray mare’s bones were actually broken. “I didn’t want my petty revenge to actually get you hurt.”
“I’m an earth pony, with my constitution I’ll feel better in like, a few hours.” Almost as if to prove her point, Gyro stood up and stretched her legs out. “I’ll be fine, though, don’t worry. Now, let’s see what we’ve got here…”
Though Rarity still worried about the mechanic, she instead kept her concerns to herself. Following Gyro, she allowed her eyes to wander up to the piece of hull perched between twin rocky spires. Though a few planks of wood edged out behind the spires kept the section of the hull in place, Rarity could tell that the bulk of the weight rested on a rocky finger rising about forty feet out of the ground. How that piece of the hull had landed there without slipping off was beyond Rarity, but the stiff breeze coming in from the sea made it creak and rock ever so slightly.
“We should be careful around here,” Rarity murmured to Gyro, almost as if she was afraid her voice would cause the wreckage to slip and fall like a loud noise triggering an avalanche. “That thing’s tenuously balanced on the rocks. If it falls, it could knock us off the rocks with it.”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Gyro said, striding even closer in spite of it. “The wind definitely had to have played a role in this section of the hull landing here. It would’ve have to have come down flat, but shift to an angle a bit before impact. Otherwise, that rocky spire would’ve shattered right through it, but it also needed to come down slow enough from air resistance not to break apart anyways.”
“Yes, but how is this going to help us find Rainbow?” Rarity asked. “She’s obviously not up here, and I don’t see any sign of her.”
“Well, she was here, alright,” Gyro said, pointing to a chunk of wood jutting out of some brush. “There’s a piece of the Concordia’s name plate, and somepony with feathers brushed the dirt off it. Recently, too.”
Rarity trotted closer to get a look and confirm Gyro’s suspicions. “That must’ve been her, then,” she said. “But where did she go from here?”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Gyro said. “I doubt we can figure it out from here.”
“So what do we do?” Rarity asked. “Go back to the camp? How are we going to get down from here?”
“Not sure about that one,” Gyro said. “But I bet we can get a lot of useful stuff out of this bit of the hull here. It hasn’t been touched yet, and there’s bound to be good things in the wreckage, like cloth and wire.”
Rarity craned her neck back. “That would mean we’d have to go into the wreckage, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah, it would.” Rolling her shoulders, Gyro positioned herself beneath a hole in the wreckage’s underside. “Give me a boost. And don’t throw me this time, ‘kay?”