Surviving Sand Island

by The 24th Pegasus


Knock First!

There was nothing like a good meal after a hard day’s frantic work to finish a project before the deadline. For Rainbow Dash, it was doubly so when that deadline would have meant her death and the deaths of all her friends on the islands. Unfortunately for her, the archipelago barely had what she could consider a good meal, and she was frankly disappointed by the service. It had to be the worst celebratory dinner she’d had in a long time, but in all honesty, she couldn’t complain too much about the reward. Not dying was a very strong prize for all her hard work.

So instead, she tried to breathe, smile, and relax in the afterglow of her success with Champagne and Stargazer. The three pegasi had harvested a bounty of grass and other plants of questionable edibility, along with a very, very small supplement of berries for a little flavor to their otherwise bland, green meal. Rainbow had wanted to snag a coconut or two from the trees, but it would have taken far too much work to open them up and get at the meat inside. So instead, she could only glower at the coconuts from below and again curse herself for not bringing a little something extra to snack on from the home island.

At the very least, their makeshift door block seemed to be working. Rainbow had poked around it a little bit after they’d positioned the cloud, and hardly any moonlight could make it through the compacted water vapor, if any. The entirety of the door from top to bottom was shrouded in shadow, and it remained still and impassive. Even still, Rainbow had to be honest with herself; was the door staying closed because of them, or because it wasn’t the full moon? They still didn’t really know for sure, but she stood by her decision to block it up as best as they could. They just didn’t know, and it was far, far better to be safe than sorry and mummy food.

“Well, Rainbow?”

Rainbow’s ears perked and she blinked in surprise. Champagne and Stargazer were both looking at her expectantly, waiting for her to fill in some bit of a conversation she hadn’t been paying attention to while wading through her own thoughts. She coughed once and let a silly smile settle on her muzzle. “Uhhh… yes, one hundred and twenty percent.”

Champagne chuckled and shook her head. “You weren’t listening, were you.”

“Guilty as charged.” Rainbow snickered and sat up, stretching her wings and arching her back. “Sorry, I was kinda zoned out. What were you saying?”

“We were just talking about what we’d do when we got out of here,” Stargazer said. “I said that we’d get to meet the princesses—all of them—but Champagne doesn’t think so. So I wanted to know what you thought.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Rainbow said. “We’ll meet all of them. No doubt about that. In case you’ve forgotten, Princess Twilight is, like, my best friend, and me and Rares are pretty tight with the others. We’ll get a whole parade up to the castle when we get back!”

Champagne’s wings fluttered and she rubbed her hooves together. “A parade? That sounds fun! That is certainly one way to reward us for staying alive and saving the world!”

“I’m gonna have a long talk with Princess Luna and Twilight after this,” Rainbow said. “If we’re dealing with some kind of moon god that can destroy the world, I wanna know why we’ve never heard about it. Heck, I wanna know if it was even gonna be a problem in the first place! Maybe Luna just could’ve whooped its flank as soon as the barrier went down, easy peasy!”

“Do you really think she could’ve just taken care of this whole mess herself?” Stargazer asked.

Rainbow’s smile faltered into an unsure shrug. “I mean, I’d like to think so. She’s super strong and stuff. But in all honesty, the princesses get beat around by a lot of crap. I’m pretty sure something that’s powered by blood sacrifices and is an actual, like, god might be a little bit too much for anypony to deal with. Even the princesses.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing we’re trying to keep it contained here.” Stargazer lifted his head to the sky, where some of the stars were visible through the canopy of palm fronds. “But can we actually stop it, though? If Soft Step is an alicorn, and she’s bent entirely to that thing’s will…”

“We have two sirens,” Rainbow reminded him. “I’m pretty sure Melody and Rarity can thrash her around if need be. Maybe they can even restrain her, knock her out!”

“And then what do we do?” Champagne asked. “How do we make her normal again?”

Rainbow faltered. “I… I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I don’t want to just give up on her. There’s some way we can save her. There has to be!”

“Then we’ll try,” Stargazer assured her. “We’ll give it our best. But what do we do if we can’t?”

“Then we let the princesses sort it out when we get back to them. They’ll know what to do. I mean, Celestia made Twilight and Cadance into alicorns, so she has to know how to go the other way, right?”

“If you say so.” The three pegasi fell into silence as they took a few more bites of their meals, listening to the sounds of the wildlife around them. Rainbow had to admit, it truly was a peaceful night, now that the immediate threat to their lives was taken care of. She wondered how many more of these she would get to experience. Would they end because she went home, or because she died? She didn’t know, and there was no way for her to tell.

In the meanwhile, all they could do was try to find a way back home and survive another day.

-----

Gyro’s whole body felt warm and fuzzy, like she was floating in an endless expanse of honey. She was vaguely aware of her surroundings, of Hot Coals lying next to her, of the smell in the air, but she didn’t care. She was happy, and there was nothing in the world that could bother her.

Coals said something to her, but she hardly paid attention to what it was. She felt his lips at her ear, against her cheek, but it was all nothing compared to the feeling of joy rushing through her from her tail. She was just happy that all her tools still worked properly, even despite her spinal injury. Maybe when she finally got home, her and Coals would have something to show for it, too.

The hut shook as something bumped into it. Coals raised his head and looked towards the door. “Hey, a little privacy, please!” he shouted through the fronds covering the door. “If you guys found something, we’ll take a look at it later.”

Gyro lifted her head enough to see a shadow stop in front of the door, the silhouette dancing from the flickering flames of the fire behind it. She saw a hoof raise towards the fronds and slowly, lethargically, pull them aside. In its place, a heavily bandaged face peered through the gap, the cloth stained with brown splotches, a shattered, toothless jaw hanging wide open, revealing a deep, black void in its throat. One eye was messy and bloodshot; the other was gone completely. It hissed at them, spitting black bile at the two ponies as they lay in the sand.

Gyro matched it with a terrified, panicked scream of her own.