Leaving Champagne behind to enjoy her breakfast and more peacefully wake up than she herself had done, Rainbow picked up altitude and climbed above the island at a leisurely pace. Even though she hadn’t admitted it to Champagne, the flight last night had taken a lot out of her wings as well. They were still stiff and sore, and she couldn’t work them too vigorously for fear of cramping the muscles. After all, a serious cramp would ground her for some time, and then she’d have to climb all the way back up again later. It was best if she took her time and didn’t push herself, especially with how weakened and tired she felt.
At any rate, the slow climb afforded her ample opportunity to scout the lower reaches of the island for anything that might be hiding beneath the trees. The atoll, Rainbow quickly realized, was the largest of the islands in terms of its circumference, but the smallest in overall area. The thin walls and beaches of the atoll seemed to go on for miles, forming an irregularly shaped enclosure that kept a vast lagoon of calm and still water neatly enclosed within its sandy beaches. The overall size of the atoll even rivaled the archipelago the survivors of the Concordia had ended up at, but the thin and narrow beaches barely made up for more dry land than what Rainbow could find on her home island. Some of the beaches were barely more than glorified sandbars, just barely thick and tall enough to separate the ocean from the lagoon. After quickly scanning the atoll’s sandy ring, Rainbow concluded that the thickest part of the atoll had to be no more than a few hundred feet wide.
Yet she knew that there had to be a temple or shrine or something hidden on the spindly limbs of the atoll. It was clearly marked on the map underneath the home island, even if time and weathering had thinned it out much more than it had been depicted there. But that meant that there had to be something important here regardless. Unfortunately, the trouble lied in actually finding such a temple or shrine. And for the time being, Rainbow couldn’t see anything.
Fifteen minutes of circling higher and higher rewarded Rainbow with no probable leads to go off of. The trees were simply too thin to conceal something like they had on the archipelago, and there were even entire stretches of the atoll that were bare of vegetation. These sections of crisp, white sand broke up the island into chunks of pristine beach, without even anything as slight as a rock or bump for Rainbow to investigate. She realized she was quickly running out of possible places for a structure or something to hide on this island that would house Rarity. Unless it was hidden beneath the sand or somewhere else, Rainbow had no idea where this final Ponynesian temple could be, or even what happened to Rarity.
Growling in frustration, Rainbow swooped down low over the island, surrendering all the altitude she’d built up to perform a closer inspection of the beach. If she couldn’t see anything from the air, maybe a closer inspection of the beaches would give her some clues to Rarity’s whereabouts. There had to be some blemish to the sand that hadn’t been covered up by the tides and the winds, right? It’d only been a few nights. Maybe if she was lucky, she’d find more bloodstains on the beach or something. All she asked for was something that would lead her to where her marefriend had gone.
But nearly an hour of searching turned up nothing, absolutely nothing. Rainbow completed an entire circumnavigation of the atoll, her keen eyes scrutinizing every inch of the beaches, every grain of sand on the shore, but had found nothing. No blood, no hairs, no signs of activity. It didn’t take very long before Rainbow started to wonder if the arrow on the beach had been a red herring or simply meant something else entirely, and in her desperation to find Rarity, she had merely assumed that it meant she was on this island. But what if it didn’t? What if her jumping to conclusions had led them wrong, and now they were wasting time out here, looking for Rarity at someplace she wasn’t?
Maybe she missed something. She had to have missed something. She simply couldn’t accept that she might have been wrong. Rarity was here somewhere, she knew it. She just didn’t have any idea where exactly Rarity was.
“Rainbow Dash?” Rainbow jumped at her name, and when she looked to the side, she realized she’d ended up back in front of their camp. Champagne watched her with a cocked eyebrow, concern plainly written on her face. “Have you found anything? Take a seat, you look like you’re running yourself ragged out there.”
Rainbow groaned, but she trudged over to Champagne anyways. Sitting down, she leaned back against one of the trees and took a drink of the water. “I haven’t found anything,” she admitted. “There’s just… no trace of her. Nothing at all. No hoofprints, no blood, no hidden underground structures. There’s just sand and trees. Nothing.”
“Are you sure?” Champagne asked. “Maybe I can help you look.”
Rainbow nodded. “I’m sure there’s just something I missed,” she said. “I’m pretty tired, so I could’ve easily glanced over something. I just need to keep looking.” A beat, and then she added, “I refuse to believe that I made a mistake. Rarity’s here, somewhere. That, I’m sure of.”
“Then we’ll find her,” Champagne assured her. “We just need to look harder. She’ll turn up before long.”
“I certainly hope so. I don’t know what I’d do if she d—!”
A sudden burst of water cut Rainbow’s words off. Both pegasi jumped and whipped their heads toward the shore, where a plume of frothy seawater erupted on the surface. Bursting out of that geyser was an enormous body of glittering emerald scales, seemingly propelled through the air by the paddling of its huge tail. Motes of reflected green light dazzled and danced over the two ponies and the island, and soon it was passing overhead. In a few seconds, it dropped behind the trees, out of sight, and another splash of water erupted from the interior of the atoll.
Champagne balked at the sight and cowered back into the shadow of the trees. “W-what was that?” she stuttered. “I’ve never seen anything like that before!”
But Rainbow had. Those few seconds had afforded her more than enough time to make sense of what she had seen. She realized she’d seen those green scales and translucent fins once before, and the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. If something had taken Rarity from the beaches of the archipelago, why wouldn’t it be anything other than a siren? Her hooves were the same size as the giant prints Rainbow had found on the beach. Suddenly, she knew for a fact that Rarity was somewhere on the atoll… or maybe even beneath it.
Standing up, Rainbow began to hurry towards the lagoon in the middle. “Come on,” she said to Champagne, not bothering to waste any time and see if the Prench mare was following her. “We need to take a look at the lagoon.”