//------------------------------//
// Ancient Comic Books 
// Story: Surviving Sand Island 
// by The 24th Pegasus 
//------------------------------//

Rarity watched Rainbow Dash lead her team of impromptu weather ponies up through the clouds, battling the fierce winds and rain the entire time. Their flight wavered and drifted as they beat their wings, and several times Rarity worried that a strong gust would knock the weaker fliers out of the air. But with dogged persistence, Rainbow led her team up to the floor of the storm, where they disappeared in a swirling haze of gray cloud.

That left Rarity, Ball Bearings, and Blow Off alone among the temple ruins. But with the rain quickly worsening as the night beat on, and no sign of Rainbow and her team clearing the clouds yet, shelter swiftly became Rarity’s number one priority. “We should find someplace dry to hide within,” Rarity said. Turning to her two companions, she glanced at each of them in turn. “You two defended this spot some time ago. Surely you found good places to hole up within when the inevitable rains came pouring down like tonight.”

“There was a crumbling shrine we used to hide from the weather,” Ball Bearings said, nodding off through the mist and haze beginning to accumulate around them. “It didn’t keep the wind out too well, but it at least kept the rain off our backs.”

“Then please, lead the way,” Rarity said. “Is it at least close to the door?”

“Close enough,” Blow Off said. “I imagine that we’ll be able to hear huge stone doors opening from anywhere on these ruins, though.”

“We don’t know if the moonlight will cause the large doors to open or if it will simply release something else somewhere else,” Rarity said. “Still, so long as the shrine is somewhat central to the location, then we should be able to hear any changes in our surroundings.”

The three ponies trudged across the ruins toward the shrine, heads hung low as if the rain and the moisture clinging to their manes were physically beating them down. But after a few minutes of wet and weary travel, Rarity finally saw what she supposed was the shrine in front of her. It was a small room of cut stone, decorated with carvings that had long since worn away due to the passage of time. What she could recognize, however, were depictions of the fanged unicorn of the night covering the walls around the entrance. Something about the simplistic art style carried a menacing undertone to it, and a shiver ran down Rarity’s spine. While it was clear that the Ponynesians had loved and worshipped their sun god, their moon god, in contrast, seemed to be one they feared and attributed malice and something almost evil to. The fact that this temple complex, this tomb was built under his signs and likeness unsettled Rarity for some irrational reason she couldn’t quite put her hoof on.

“In here,” Ball Bearings said, and he dipped his head as he scooted beneath a collapsing archway over the entrance. Rarity hurriedly followed him inside, putting aside her worries about the tomb and the shrine in favor of simply getting out of the rain, and Blow Off didn’t lag too far behind. Soon, all three ponies rose back up to their full height and started shaking water out of their coats.

“What is this place?” Rarity asked, her eyes wandering over the little interior building. “It looks almost like a chapel of sorts.”

“It might be,” Blow Off said. “We don’t know what this place was used for. The only furniture in here is an altar, but there’s nowhere for anypony to sit or kneel.”

Frowning, Rarity wandered deeper into the shrine. She had to light her horn to provide enough illumination to see by, and sure enough, the only thing on the floor was an altar placed upon a raised dais. Rarity cautiously approached it and ran a hoof over the old stones, noting very quickly that the altar had been carved from obsidian instead of the basalt used to make up the rest of the temple. The dark obsidian seemed the perfect compliment to the moon god’s dark and starry coat, still painted in vivid colors from within the shrine where it was mostly protected from the elements.

“A single altar to their moon god,” Rarity murmured to herself, continuing to walk around the altar. Her eyes wandered to the walls and the carvings decorating them around the back of the shrine, and after several seconds of examining them, she realized that they told a story if read from right to left. Frowning, she brightened her horn and stepped closer, trying to make sense of the strange carvings and what exactly they were trying to say.

There were four panels in all, or at least, four panels that Rarity could clearly make out. The first one, farthest to the right, showed the white pegasus sun god standing next to the black unicorn moon god. Both ponies, who Rarity assumed were probably brothers in the Ponynesian mythos, stood shoulder to shoulder, with the sun perched on the pegasus’ outstretched wing, and the moon pierced upon the tip of the unicorn’s horn as he held his head to the side. They seemed peaceful, or at least, peaceful enough. But Rarity knew that wasn’t going to last even before she got to the next panel based on what she remembered from the sun temple.

In the next panel, the moon god stood alone, but he’d been violently transformed, with fangs and slitted eyes decorating his face, and his horn twisted into a lethal and split protrusion from the top of his head. An army of bat-like ponies flew around him, and the night sky dominated the picture. Nightmare Moon’s eternal night had left its own impression on the Ponynesians, it seemed, and they’d interpreted it according to their own mythologies. Rarity found herself startled with how close to the actual events they’d managed to get despite being thousands of miles away from Canterlot.

The third panel showed the duel between the two gods. That was familiar enough, except instead of banishing the moon god to the moon, the sun god appeared to cut his head off with a curved sword of some kind. Rarity winced at the brutal and surprisingly graphic depiction of the moon god’s defeat. At least things had worked out much better in Equestria for everypony involved, Princess Luna included.

The fourth and final panel showed the sun god planting the moon god’s head on the moon, which was likely how the Ponynesians explained the sudden appearance of the Mare in the Moon following the event. But that wasn’t all. Beneath the moon, small and colorful ponies took the body of the dead moon god and dragged it into a temple rising out of a lagoon. At first, Rarity thought it was depicting the temple ruins she was currently standing on, but the geography of the surrounding land didn’t make sense. This was another temple somewhere else, a temple rising up out of the water. But where?

She quickly realized there was only one place it could have been. It must’ve been built on the final island her and Rainbow had yet to go to. But that left her with several more questions. Was there actually a body of a god buried there? She found that idea unlikely, but the Ponynesians seemed to be saying as much with their carvings. But then what was the point of this temple? Why dedicate a temple and tomb to a moon god killed by your sun god and then not even keep his body inside the tomb?

Rarity grumbled in frustration and shifted a little further left. There was a fifth panel here, but the collapsing shrine had completely destroyed it. Whatever conclusion it had once given the story had been reduced to rubble and lost to time. Even if Rarity found every single last piece of stone that once made up the final panel and pieced it back together, the carvings and paint were probably so worn down by now that she wouldn’t be able to figure out what it showed her. She only wondered what exactly a fifth and final panel could have told her of that story. It seemed mostly complete to her; maybe the Ponynesians had some variant of their own about Nightmare Moon’s return?

It was a fruitless endeavor, Rarity quickly realized, and one bound to simply give her a headache. There wasn’t any use worrying about it now, especially when she had other concerns to focus on. If she spent too much effort trying to figure out what could have been in the fifth and final panel, she’d ultimately end up missing any change to her surroundings when Rainbow Dash finally cleared the moonlight. That was what she needed to focus on right now, so she trudged back to the entrance to the shrine, lied down on a mostly dry slab of rock and kept her ear pointed out the door.

Hopefully Rainbow’s plan would work. She didn’t know what other options they’d have if it didn’t.