“This is bad! This is very, very bad!”
Rarity gnawed on her hooves in worry, likely doing more damage to them than she had anticipated thanks to her hardened beak. She’d burst around the corner and now swam in place in front of the shattered doors and split sarcophagus. Her blue eyes traced every structure and every shadow in the darkening temple, expecting a headless corpse to fling itself at her and rip her to shreds with its bare hooves. The situation had abruptly changed, and instead of scouring the sunken temple for more knowledge that could help them lower the barrier, they now had to warn everypony else before it was too late.
Melody swam forward into the chamber, her slit eyes gliding over the debris as she studied it in detail. “What are you doing?” Rarity asked her, too terrified to go deeper into the chamber. “We have to leave, we have to warn everypony, now! We can’t stay here! It’s too dangerous!”
“I just want to know what happened,” Melody said, beginning to dig through some of the debris. “It won’t help us to go swimming back to the islands screaming that the end is near without knowing how or why this happened. That’s not going to be very helpful to our friends.”
“I think the how and why is pretty straightforward!” Rarity impatiently swam forward and started to tug on Melody’s large dorsal fin. “Somehow, those horrid mummies Rainbow said so much about got out of their tomb and made their way here! Maybe Soft Step was with them, too!” After a few tugs, she swam back and started tapping her hooves together in borderline hysteria. “Rainbow and the others could have flown into a trap and been killed! O-Or maybe Soft Step is already at the home island completing the ritual to lower the barriers and destroy the world! We’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so is everypony else!”
“Then we need to know how to stop this,” Melody said. She lifted a large boulder and flinched backwards when a corpse snapped its jaw at her. Crying out in alarm, Melody slammed the rock back down on it, crushing its skull into paste and making the limbs twitch. Black blood began to drift up into the water, and Melody immediately shied away from it. “On second thought, maybe we should just go,” she said, continuing to glide backwards so the blood couldn’t get to her. “I think we’ve wasted enough time here as is.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Rarity said, turning about and following Melody out of the temple. The two sirens picked up speed as they navigated through the hallways, and Rarity couldn’t keep her eyes still and her attention focused straight ahead. How long had the sarcophagus been empty? Where was the body, where were the mummies, and where was Soft Step? Nothing had happened on their home island last night, and there hadn’t been any activity around the temple. So where could they be, and what were they doing?
Melody, it seemed, was at least having a more productive train of thought than Rarity’s own worried ramblings. “I wonder if nothing happening until we put all the statuettes together was a coincidence or not,” she said. “After all, we did all the hard work for the moon god. Do you think he was merely waiting for us to get them all in one place for him?”
Rarity thought back to her horrifying conversation with the dark spirit, and her subsequent escape from the final chamber. “I feel like he might just be that cunning,” Rarity said. “When I was about to escape from the final chamber, some of his thralls nearly got me. They started to hypnotize me with their glowing eyes. But then this darkness intervened, and I couldn’t see them anymore. It was all I needed to escape.” She swallowed hard. “I think the moon spirit wanted me to escape with the unicorn figurine. And now we’ve gone through the trouble of getting them all for him, and I even inadvertently gave its horn some blood…”
“So this is all part of his plan,” Melody said. “We put everything in position for him, and we’re all divided instead of together. And you and I, arguably everybody’s best defense against his minions, are as far removed from the shrine as we possibly can be. They’re vulnerable without us, and I’m willing to bet that the moon god has to be moving on it tonight.”
The two sirens twisted their way back to the central chamber with the tunnel that led up to the surface above them. “Rainbow Dash and the others might be in terrible danger at the archipelago,” Rarity said, already moving toward the exit ahead of Melody. “I’m going to swim there as fast as I can.”
“I’ll go with you,” Melody said. “Just in case.”
Rarity shook her head. “No, I need you to go to our home island and make sure everypony there knows what’s going on. They need to know as fast as possible, and I imagine you’re a faster swimmer than me. They need to get ready to defend the shrine from the moon god’s avatar, because if she gets inside…”
Melody nodded. “Right. Okay. I’ll keep an eye out for any mummies on the ocean floor, too. We might have passed some going here and didn’t notice because we weren’t looking for them.”
“Exactly what I’m worried about.” Rarity shook out her shoulders and pushed her way through the last bit to the surface. “I’m not sure if it would be a good thing or not to not see them on my way to the archipelago…”
The two sirens breached the surface, and Melody put a hoof on Rarity’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Just worry about finding Rainbow and the others, then getting back to the shrine as fast as possible. We still have a chance to stop this.”
Rarity took a deep breath to try and calm herself. “Right. Of course we do. We just need to play catch up…”
“We can do it,” Melody insisted. She squeezed Rarity’s shoulder some. “We just have to trust that we’re not too late.”