//------------------------------// // Let the Players Take Their Seats // Story: Surviving Sand Island // by The 24th Pegasus //------------------------------// The afternoon continued to beat on. By the time Rarity and Melody arrived at the atoll, Rarity supposed it must have been about four in the afternoon. The sheer distance between the islands amazed her; it always seemed like it took them longer to go from one to the other than it should. But out here in the ocean, where there was nothing to break up what you could and couldn’t see save for the curvature of the horizon, Rarity felt like her sense of distance had been twisted and warped. ‘Far’ wasn’t something distant like the hills of the valley around Ponyville; ‘far’ meant something beneath the horizon, where the curve of the globe gave it its own enormous mountain to hide behind, a mountain of blue ocean meeting blue sky and spewing clouds from the seam in between. But, for a siren with a belly full of fish and a heartstone full of magic, it wasn’t that taxing of a journey. If anything, it was mostly peaceful, relaxing. There was a sort of meditative serenity to powering through the water, moving like a dragon of the sea. The rhythmic swishing of her tail was like the steady beat of a song. Everything about her was an instrument in an orchestra, one that defined who and what she was. It felt truly right and glorious. Or maybe it was just a side effect of being a siren. When a species is manifested out of the pure idea of music, of course they would have many attachments to song, real or merely perceived. Rarity had to wonder how much of that mindset was creeping into her pony mind held in a siren’s brain. It wasn’t exactly that pleasant to think about. Yet it wasn’t too much longer before they could finally spot the rise of the sand demarcating the edges of the atoll before them. Melody began to swim to the surface and Rarity followed her, momentarily wincing as her muscles forcefully contracted to clear the water out of her lungs and allow her to breathe in the different medium. With their heads above the water, the two sirens approached the island until Melody abruptly coiled her tail and launched herself into the sky, a rainbow briefly appearing beneath her in the cascade of water shed by her scales. She hovered above Rarity, who had come to a complete stop, and smiled. “Well? Ready to try again?” Rarity remembered her last attempt, and the painful flop that had concluded it. “Hopefully it will go better than the last time…” Once more, Rarity paddled her tail to give herself some speed, and once more, she burst out of the water. But this time, she at least understood the sensations awaiting her. The momentary vertigo was nothing, and the sense of weightlessness felt natural. She willed herself to fly, and as she moved her tail, she continued to move as if she had never left the water, climbing up to Melody’s level almost effortlessly. She chewed on her scaly lips for a second before she realized how bad of an idea that was with the swords in her mouth. Her entire body felt tense and rigid, and coming to a hover instead of continuing to climb or fall was much more difficult than she imagined it would be. Grimaching, Rarity held her legs out like they would help her keep her balance and place in the sky, and her eyes blinked to Melody. “I’m… doing the best I can,” she said. “How do you do this so naturally?” “Practice,” Melody said. “Every little siren tries to fly high enough to touch the clouds when we’re growing up. We can’t actually do it, though; our magic gets weaker the farther away from the sea we get, and we can’t fly for very long.” Almost as if on cue, Rarity felt her ability to fly falter. Only a grimace and a dedicated effort to stay airborne through sheer willpower kept her from falling back into the water’s surface. Melody saw it, chuckled lightly, and immediately crossed over the atoll’s thin treeline so Rarity didn’t have to hover in place for much longer. “Let’s just get back in the water,” she said, ending her own ability to fly while still in the air and diving straight into the center of the atoll’s lagoon, her body streamlining out like a torpedo. Rarity grunted in agreement and likewise followed suit, kicking her tail and splashing down into the water with much less grace than Melody. Once she had a moment to adjust, she spied Melody’s tail slipping into the hole in the lagoon floor that led into the hidden underground chambers of the sunken temple, and moved to follow her. After navigating the aquatic tunnels for a minute, the two sirens ended up at the bottom of the network, where collapsed stone halls seemed to radiate off in different directions. Though Rarity had swam through it once or twice now, she still realized she’d be hopelessly lost without Melody there to guide her around. After all, the siren had spent so much time in these tunnels that she could probably navigate them with her eyes closed. “So,” Rarity said, looking around them. “Where’s a good place to start?” “Deeper into the structure,” Melody said, choosing a hall seemingly at random and drifting into it. She let her green eyes wander up and down the stone walls, half-heartedly trying to glean any information from them. “We’re at one of the older points of the temple right now. Anything carved here is ancient history, and it’s not really going to help us. We need to go further if we want to get to the part where they’d actually fought the dark avatar and erected the barrier.” Rarity nodded and began to follow Melody, frowning at and brushing aside a loose strip of cloth floating in the water as she passed. “I suppose so. Do you think we should go back to where the final figurine was?” “I was going to go there anyway,” Melody said. “That chamber was created entirely for this purpose. If we were going to find any clues down here, then that’s the best place to go looking. Plus…” She looked over her shoulder at Rarity. “Wasn’t the avatar’s body down here? Didn’t you say something about that?” Rarity shuddered and remembered the feeling of the other thing that was in the sarcophagus she couldn’t really see and didn’t want to touch. “I think so,” she said. “I’d seen something to that effect on the archipelago in some engravings in a shrine. After the Ponynesians cut off the avatar’s head and its horn, they took the headless body and buried it in here. It showed a temple rising out of the water, but I didn’t know what it was until later.” “Then if the avatar’s body is down here, we might want to destroy it,” Melody said. “With the moon god starting to draw strength again and trying to take down the barriers, we can’t leave anything for him that might help him do that. I don’t know how he would use his old avatar’s body, especially if he has a new one, but I don’t want that to be our downfall because we thought it was useless.” Rarity nodded in whole-hearted agreement. “Well, it was still there yesterday. I doubt it’s gone anywhere, sheltered as it is.” “I hope you’re right,” Melody said, swimming faster along the underwater halls. “I’m afraid of what it’d mean if you aren’t.”