//------------------------------// // The Opening Moves // Story: Surviving Sand Island // by The 24th Pegasus //------------------------------// “Alright! Everypony together! One! Two! Three!” Rainbow Dash, Champagne, and Stargazer all struck their hooves down, pummeling the rough cloud beneath them. Their hooves cleaved a narrow trench in the surface of the cloud, which Rainbow immediately began to force open with her forelegs before the cloud could close itself up. “Come on, get in there!” Rainbow shouted, encouraging the other two to jump in right alongside her. Grunting and groaning, the three pegasi slowly wedged the block of cloud off of its parent body, attempting to shear it off like a glacier would calve an iceberg. Only, the section of cloud they were working with was much smaller than a glacier, and it was only the three pegasi against a surprisingly stubborn cloud. “Why is this so difficult?!” Stargazer groaned. The stallion wedged his back into the gap so he could push with his hind legs and wings, slowly but surely opening the gap more. “I thought you said the magic was gone!” “I never said that!” Rainbow protested. “I just said that it might be! And it is! Kinda!” “Kind of? That’s not really helping us, is it?” Champagne’s cheeks puffed out as she exerted herself to break the cloud free. “It’s still so difficult to break off!” “The clouds aren’t purely held together by magic anymore,” Rainbow said, relaxing her limbs and buying herself a few seconds of rest before she continued to push. “You can tell by how they feel! They’re softer, spongier! It’s like… slightly warm ice cream!” Stargazer blinked. “…what?” “What?” Rainbow echoed back at him. “It’s true! It’s like… you’ve got some warm and mushy stuff on the outside, but the core is still solid and kinda hard! That’s basically what these clouds are doing!” “I never thought I would hear clouds likened to ice cream,” Champagne said. “You are obviously not a weathermare. You get that spiel a zillion times as a newbie.” Stargazer grunted in frustration. “Look, can we stop worrying about whether or not the clouds are ice cream and start worrying about getting this chunk split off?” “My thoughts exactly.” Rainbow grimaced and once more extended her limbs, putting all of her muscle into calving the tiny piece of cloud before they could drift too much farther away. The section of cloud was hardly larger than the door, and Rainbow hoped to compress it even more when they brought it to ground level. But she didn’t even know if it would become easier to work with once they broke it off of its parent cloud, or if it would remain rigid and continue to resist their weather magic. But they kept at it, even as the sun continued to vanish behind them. Little by little, the flaming orb dipped below the horizon until it vanished entirely, leaving only a fading yellow glow to the sky. To the east, the sky darkened to a deep blue, then on to black, and a pale white glow began to rise out of the ocean, slowly lighting up the horizon as the stars began to appear, one by one. The noise of the archipelago beneath the three pegasi began to fade away, replaced by the pounding in Rainbow’s chest, the sound of her heart urging her to work faster. “The moonlight’s going to get onto that door in a few minutes!” Rainbow shouted, redoubling her efforts to break off the cloud. “C’mon! We gotta get this thing off! Push!” “C’mon!” Stargazer shouted, fully arching his back and sliding down deeper into the wedge. “We almost have it!” With one last valiant effort, the three pegasi managed to split the cloud the entire way through. Rainbow Dash immediately twisted over herself to push it away from its parent cloud before it could stick back together. Her wings frantically buzzed to move the cloud, but thankfully for her, it began to move much more easily now that it had been separated. Stargazer and Champagne quickly joined at her sides, and the three pegasi began to push the cloud down into the heart of the archipelago. “Sweet Celestia, we finally got it,” Stargazer said. “I didn’t think we’d ever break it off.” “I knew we would,” Rainbow Dash said. “Mostly because I’m too stubborn to give up.” The three pegasi dropped with the cloud as fast as they could, dumping it in front of the moon door. “Good!” Rainbow shouted, already hopping on top of the cloud. “Now help me pack it down! Jump!” She felt the cloud attempting to resist her hooves as she jumped up and down on it, but she persisted anyway. With the help of her friends, they managed to take the puffy white cloud chunk and push it down more and more, thickening the spaces in between to hopefully stop the moonlight from getting through. It went from white and light to thick and gray in a few minutes, and when Rainbow nervously glanced over her shoulder, she saw the faintest trace of the moon beginning to peek through the trees. “Put it in place now!” she shouted, jumping off of the cloud and beginning to push it over the door. With Champagne guiding it from the top and Stargazer assisting her below, they were able to get it to cover the part of the door that wasn’t protected by the mud-covered mat just before the moon could shine its light more directly on the tomb. They took a few steps back to admire their work, and Rainbow let out a deep sigh of relief. “Holy crap, we did it,” she said. “We actually did it.” “Why didn’t we try that earlier?” Champagne asked. “We could have saved ourselves the rush.” “Because I was stupid and thought we could cover it up with the fronds and stuff in time,” Rainbow said. “Besides, the clouds aren’t going to last. We’ll have to keep an eye on this thing the entire night to make sure it doesn’t go away while the moon is still up. And tomorrow, we’ll have to finish what we started so we can actually leave this place behind.” Stargazer nodded. “At least it’s done,” he said. “And we can focus on searching some of the other shrines around here while the moon is up to illuminate them.” “Maybe they’ll have something we need,” Rainbow said. “It’s about time we pulled our own weight.” “Then let’s get started,” Champagne said. “We might as well do it now before we get too tired to look some more.” “That’s the spirit.” Rainbow fluttered out of the stairwell and started looking around at the structures nearest the stairs. “There’s gotta be something good in one of these!” ----- Deep beneath the water and many miles away… Rarity used her hooves about as much as her fins to slowly make her way down through the tunnels, following Melody’s lead. It was simply easier to navigate the cramped quarters in such a way, especially the closer they got to the weighted door. She still didn’t feel entirely in her element in her siren body, and she couldn’t effortlessly push herself along with tiny flicks of her tail like Melody did. She felt somewhat jealous at the ease which Melody could move herself, but it also reminded her that she was still a pony. If she got too used to this, then turning back to normal might be more complicated than it needed to. “We’re almost there,” Melody said. “Just another hall and around the corner.” “Good.” Rarity grimaced through the water. “I prefer the bigger spaces in this structure, not these cramped corridors. The sooner we’re done with them, the better.” Together, the two sirens swam down the last hall. Rarity raised a scaly eyebrow at the tattered strips of cloth she saw floating in the water or resting along the floor. For some reason, she didn’t remember them being there before, and a sinking feeling settled into her gut. “Uh, Melody, darling? How often does trash and garbage end up down here?” “Not all that often,” Melody said. “Why?” “Because there’s all this cloth in here, and I’m starting to wonder—oof! Goodness, dear, why did you stop?” Melody didn’t respond; her eyes were locked on something around the corner, and her jaw was slack. Suddenly very worried, Rarity hurriedly pushed her way past Melody through a cramped space in the bottom of the tunnel, just barely large enough to allow the two sirens to coexist side by side. There, peeking her head around the corner, Rarity saw what had caused Melody to fall silent. The door laid in ruins. Chunks of stone had been scattered all about, and the chains themselves were broken and shattered, links dotting the ground. The fake collapsed ceiling in the chamber beyond had been completely torn down, actually collapsing the structure and exposing a stone sarcophagus that had been split in half. Other bits of cloth were pinned under rocks or floating in the water, and Rarity swore that she saw a crushed limb or two sticking out of the collapsed ceiling. But worst of all, the sarcophagus was empty. Completely empty. “Something happened while we were gone,” she said. “The body’s gone.” “There are corpses here,” Melody said. “You can smell the stink.” Rarity wasn’t sure she wanted to, but she was sure that there was a tickle of something rancid on her nose. “They got out of the tomb last night,” she concluded, her already white face paling further. Her hooves covered her face in nervous worry, and her tail flailed about in anxiety and panic. “We have to tell everypony,” she said. “They need to know now!”