//------------------------------// // Can't Stop the Ocean // Story: Ofolrodi // by Imploding Colon //------------------------------// Th-Thump. Th-Thump. Th-Thump. Somehow, despite how loud the drumming had gotten in that city, Rainbow's ears had grown accustomed to their bass reverberations. Thus, she was able to march further and further into the periodic bedlam, using her senses to hone in on the noise... moving towards where it vibrated in greater and greater intensity. Th-Thump! Th-Thump! Th-Thump! "You know..." Applejack murmured, her voice barely audible beneath the steady thunder. "...the more I hear it... the less I feel that it's comin' from actual drums." "Well, that's a given," Rarity murmured back. "I mean who on earth—Light Side or Dark—could actually pound drums for this length of time?" "I always assumed it was a bunch of ponies," Fluttershy said. "All beating at once. Like some Dihmer ritual." "Shhhhh!" Twilight insisted. "Careful or we'll distract her!" All of the ghostly mares gazed at the anchor in question. Rainbow Dash was on the hunt—a hunt for noise. She crept down the curved streets of the Dihmer city, shuffling over smooth swaths of stone polished through the ages. She stretched her wings out slightly... and felt as the feathers fluttered from the sonic reverberations. Relying on innate pegasus instincts, she pivoted and turned herself towards the direction that the waves were pulsing from. "I think she's onto it now," Fluttershy murmured. The others watched intently. Th-Thump!! Th-Thump!! Th-Thump!! Rainbow passed another few blocks of crude stone buildings. The streets grew thinner and thinner... with less Dihmers marching around. The lower the elevation sloped, the more sparse the population, until it was only a few hairless stragglers shuffling down alleyways. As Rainbow proceeded, the buildings appeared more and more decrepit. What's more, the streets declined at such a dramatic angle that they could no longer maintain the foundations of the old-old structures built on top of them. The marefriends gawked at houses that had collapsed entirely, falling into piles of stone and boulders with no discernible pattern. It was as though some form of subsidence along the ocean's Edgeside banks had forced the landscape to sink over time, gobbling up the fringes of the city and making the outskirts uninhabitable even by Dihmer standards. Th-Thump!!! Th-Thump!!! Th-Thump!!! The haze that blanketed the landscape was beginning to disperse at these depths. Rainbow Dash peered, her eyes thinning and her lips pursed in rampant curiosity. The further the hill descended, the wreckage of the city morphed from large boulders and chunks of rock into a loose bed of gravel—almost powdery in its refinement. Rainbow Dash had to flap her wings a few times to hover over the landscape, or else her hooves might sink in the shifting sand-like substance. As she passed over, the successive beats caused the sediment to purpetually shake and shift, coating the earthen floor with a hovering mist of dust that never settled. Th-Thump!!! Th-Thump!!! Th-Thump!!! Rainbow Dash stepped through the mist. The air was rank with a stench that perplexed her with its strange familiarity. As she contemplated on the sensation, she glanced to her left. Muddied streams of all of the Curve's collected waters flowed in a translucent river downhill alongside her. As the tributaries and canals that had run through the city collected into one, the liquid coagulated into a sickly color—not gray or brown but a rusted fuchsia. Rainbow blinked. She sensed something large and black in her peripheral. She looked to her right. Jutting out of the mists and soot, she saw an enormous metal structure—a gigantic obsidian dock built out of industrial slabs of metal that jutted straight out of the upper lengths of the city. It took a bit of surveying, but Rainbow figured that the construct stretched all the way to the large metal foundry that they had sensed earlier pumping smoke into the Omega half of the city. Goblin tech, undoubtedly... and the huge docks stretched out on massive stilts as it cut like a dagger into the oceanic basin. The immense vacuum of space between the top of the docks and the bottom support struts spelled out the sheer magnitude of erosion that had happened to the Curveside ruins of the Dihmer city since the time it was first built. Cr-Crunch! Rainbow Dash stepped on something. Her friends gasped. Almost reluctantly, Rainbow Dash leaned forward and peered down at her hooves. Her left fetlock had snapped a brittle horse skull in half. The calcified enamel was stained with a fine coating of residue—crusted and hardened over time. It was a rust red color, or perhaps pink. Gazing across the powdery floor before her, Rainbow saw that dozens upon hundreds of equine bones were littered about the landscape. She saw legbones in one spot, skulls in another, and countless ribs and vertebrae spread at random. Most of the remains were half-sunken into the gravel shoreline, and occasionally she would spot a warning marker stuck in the sand, capped off by a slab of goblin metal with a bold red inscription that she couldn't decipher. The shoreline... Rainbow Dash had reached the ocean, and... TH-THUMP!!! TH-THUMP!!! TH-THUMP!!! ...the ocean had reached her. There were no waves. No crashing or receding. In fact... ...there was no water. The rancid smell filled Rainbow's nostrils, and she was taken back to a moment of heart-splitting recollection. Her mind drummed up thoughts of swirling cyclones and lightning strikes and howling winds... a time when she was more daring, more adventurous, more clueless. While her friends gawked in horror, she nevertheless stepped forward. After all, she had seen this all before. This phenomenon. This viscosity. Its glinting, slimey surface with a garrish texture of pink, pink, pink. "It's... it's not drums..." Fluttershy stammered. Twilight Sparkle gulped, her eyes reflecting an endless sea of fuschia. "It's a chorus." "TH-THOBBB!!!" "TH-THOBBB!!!" "TH-THOBBB!!!" The Ocean chanted. The Ocean sang. And with each note—with each otherworldly uvulation—the entire surface rippled and shook as one. Rainbow Dash didn't dare get within a yard of the shore's edge. She knew better. Scuffling to a stop, she stared into the unwavering slimy surface with an incredulous gaze. And soon, the ocean stared back. At sporadic lengths, a random assortment of bone-white eyeballs bobbed to the surface, rolled, blinked, and sank back down into the pink biomatter. "Waa-haa-haa-haa!" Rarity reeled back, clinging to Fluttershy and trembling. "What... in tarnation...?" Applejack grimaced so hard her muzzle might break. "Holey moley!" Pinkie's ears and mane drooped. "That does not look tasty!" "Rainbow..." Twilight turned towards their anchor with a shocked expression. "It's... is it—?" "It's the entire ocean..." Rainbow murmured. Her eyes lifted, spotting how the endless splotch of pink stretched upwards... occupying a huge chunk of the curve. "It's the entire friggin' ocean." She gulped. "It's all made up of the stuff!" "TH-THOBBB!!!" "TH-THOBBB!!!" "TH-THOBBB!!!" Fluttershy squirmed. She looked left and right, staring at the Alpha and Omega shorelines of the pink-filled basin. Every few dozen meters, giant skeletons of oddly-shaped beasts and droves of fossilized ponies were lying dormant, half-emerged from the pulsating mass. It looked as if the remains had been strewn their for eons. "Do..." Pinkie gulped. "...do we really gotta cross that?" Applejack shuddered. "That or the Bloodwings." Rainbow Dash clenched her teeth. Her wings drooped as she took a nervous step back. "So much for myths..."