//------------------------------// // Old Bones // Story: Surviving Sand Island // by The 24th Pegasus //------------------------------// Rainbow Dash couldn’t help but feel a sense of eager giddiness as she started exploring the tomb. While the sun temple had been cool and all, this ancient moon tomb or whatever it was promised to be even cooler. Maybe it had something to do with all the decaying carvings and creepy statues that the sun temple lacked, but the tomb felt more like a set of ancient ruins Daring Do would actually visit than the sun temple did. Of course, if this was anything like the kind of southern Equestrian ruins Daring Do tended to explore, then she had to keep an eye out for all manner of cleverly hidden traps, but that didn’t really worry her too much. She knew she’d be able to spot anything before her or her companions accidentally set it off. The hallway past the two thestral statues continued onwards for about thirty feet before it formed an intersection. Three ancient doors stood before Rainbow and her friends, with one in front and one on each side. All had been sealed shut, but the wide seams down the doors and the cracks in their stone faces told Rainbow that they wouldn’t be too hard to get open. That, and they didn’t have any weird locking mechanisms tied to them like the doors in the sun temple did. “So, which way next?” Rainbow asked as her group finally caught up to her. “Want to take a vote?” “I’m going to assume that going straight ahead leads further into the tomb,” Rarity said. “Perhaps it would be wise to check the other rooms along the way before we rush straight to the middle.” “We don’t exactly have a lot of time, though.” Rainbow rubbed her chin and looked to the two stallions with them. “Thoughts, you two?” Stargazer shrugged. “It’s probably worth it to go investigate everything while we can,” he said. “We might end up needing another way out if worst comes to worst.” “If those bats were inside here, there has to be another way out,” Ball Bearings said. “They wouldn’t roost inside if there wasn’t a way for them to get out.” Rainbow nodded. “Yeah, good idea.” She turned her attention to the other doors and frowned. The carvings on the doors didn’t give her all that much to go off of, but the ones on her left and right seemed almost identical. She also noticed that there was a large hole in the top of the center door; bats could probably fly in and out through that. That meant another exit had to be further along the middle path, so it was likely worth it to check out the side doors first. “Let’s get this left door open,” she said, making an executive decision as the group’s unofficial leader. “Ball Bearings, you and Rares are the hornheads, see if you two can pry this thing open.” Rarity shot Rainbow a dirty look but nevertheless stepped forward to lend her magic to the endeavor. “Be careful that I do not pry you open, darling,” she said, her blue magic joining Bearings’ around the seam in the door. “‘Hornhead’ is quite the insensitive slur.” “It was just a joke,” Rainbow said, shaking her head. She made a startled yelp and jumped backwards when the door suddenly crumbled and collapsed under the unicorns’ magic, and Rarity accidentally flung bits of stone back at them all. The stones holding the doorframe up slid and shook, and dust and dirt fell from the ceiling as the temple’s foundations shifted now that the door they’d been resting on had been destroyed. Rarity blinked. “That was unexpected,” she said to herself, and then turned around to Rainbow with concern in her eyes. “I didn’t hit you, did I? I swear to Celestia, that was unintentional!” “Relax, Rares, I’m fine,” Rainbow said, brushing a little bit of dirt off her coat. “I probably would’ve deserved it anyway.” Once she was sure she was still in one piece, she turned her attention to the other two ponies. “You two okay?” she asked, to which she received a pair of nods. Chilly air seemed to waft out of the now opened room in front of them, cold and moist. Rainbow cautiously strode forward into the room, Rarity and her light not too far behind her. The blue light illuminated a small room with a flat stone table in the middle and numerous alcoves carved into the wall. Unlike the ones that held the statues in the entrance room, however, these ones were cut horizontally and stacked three or four tall from floor to ceiling. And in each one, a bundle of rags lied still with limbs crossed over chests. Rainbow grimaced and trotted back a few steps when she realized what they were. Rarity, on the other hoof, shrieked in revulsion and immediately backed out of the door, nearly leaving Rainbow in the dark. “Rarity, calm down!” Rainbow shouted in frustration, glaring at the retreating blue mote of light moving back down the hallway. Sighing, she gestured to Ball Bearings, and within a few seconds, the unicorn summoned forth a replacement light for them to see by. There were probably thirty or forty mummified ponies inside of this room, with some rotting tools and equipment left on the center table. Each body had been carefully prepared and laid to rest in its alcove, and the wrappings were still in decent condition after all this time spent in an open air chamber filled with humidity and harsh tropical temperatures. That wasn’t to say all the corpses were perfectly intact or even in a good enough condition to look at without Rainbow feeling like she would lose her dinner, but it was clear this burial chamber hadn’t been disturbed in a long time. Rainbow almost felt like a villain for opening the door and disturbing the rest of ponies who’d been down here for at least a thousand years. She felt like a graverobber when she remembered that she was looking for a statuette to steal from this place so she could simply go home. “I’m gonna guess the other room is the same as this one,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “In which case, we probably shouldn’t bother opening it.” “Agreed,” Ball Bearings said, brushing some dirt and dust out of his mane. “That statue we’re looking for is probably deeper in the tomb.” Rainbow nodded in agreement, her eyes wandering to a large bust of a fanged unicorn jutting out of the far wall of the burial chamber. The stone pony seemed almost alive and menacing, and Rainbow wasn’t entirely sure that if she stuck her hoof in its mouth for some stupid reason she wouldn’t lose it. Its eyes seemed to lock onto hers, and another cold chill ran down her spine and made her flitter her wings like she was trying to shake it away. Swallowing hard, she forced herself to turn away and trot back into the intersection. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get this door open.” She looked back down the long hallway and saw Rarity lingering in the distance, only visible by the light shining on her horn. “Rarity, get back here. They’re not zombies or anything, they’re just corpses.” “They are disgusting!” Rarity shouted back. “I don’t want anything to deal with them!” Rainbow growled and grinded her teeth together. “Come on, Rares, we need your magic down here! I know they’re nasty and stuff, but it’s not like we’re asking you to touch them, right?” Rarity hesitated, but after a few seconds, the blue light started to move back down the hallway to her. “I just don’t want to have to even look at them,” Rarity said when she was close enough, pointedly looking away from the open door to the burial chamber. “The thought that I will one day look like that is not something that I like to think about!” “Then don’t think about it, Rares,” Rainbow said, trying to calm her marefriend down. “I bet you’ll leave a pretty corpse when you die!” “Thinking about death and how easy it is for me to catch a bad case of it in here is not helping either,” Rarity insisted. Rolling her eyes, Rainbow hopped up enough to kiss Rarity and try to calm her down that way. Then, winking, she sidled over to Rarity’s side and draped a wing over her back. “I’ll keep you safe, then,” she said, nuzzling Rarity’s cheek. “I’ll keep the spooky dead ponies away from you.” That at least seemed to get Rarity to relax a little. “Well, good, then. At least I can count on that.” “Yup. Now,” Rainbow took a few steps back, just in case the next door broke apart again when the unicorns tried to open it. “Let’s see what’s behind door number two!”