Parting with the raft had been hard. While Rarity had wanted to do nothing more but stay at the raft with Rainbow and the others, she had to leave them to the mercy of the currents to rejoin Melody. After all, she and Melody were the first line of defense, as well as the last. If they couldn’t stop Soft Step from getting to the pegasi, then all was lost.
Melody didn’t turn her head to the side when Rarity glided over to her. Her eyes remained locked on the east, waiting for any sign of movement in the dark sky or on the rolling black waves. “Are they safe?” she asked, not even looking at Rarity.
Rarity sighed and nodded. “They are,” she said. “They’re drifting out to the west end of the islands. As far away from it all as they can get.”
“Good.” Melody slouched and she scratched at her beak. “Now it’s on us to stay vigilant until daybreak.”
Just the mere mention of how long they had to stay alert made Rarity yawn. When Melody shot her a look, she sank into the water. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just… just tired. It’s been a long night.”
The green siren nodded her head in agreement. “Yeah, it has been very long. We swam to the atoll and back, and now we have to stay awake for four hours or so. Trust me, I would like nothing more than to sleep, too.”
Rarity rolled onto her back, idly floating on the surface of the water. “At least between the two of us, she should be easy to spot, right?”
“Maybe not,” Melody said. “I don’t know what kind of powers she has. But hopefully we can at least spot her army coming across the seafloor. That will be the best indicator if she’s coming or not.”
“Assuming she even brings them with her,” Rarity said. “It certainly takes a while to fly or swim between these islands. I imagine waiting for a horde of mummies to clumsily shuffle their way across the sand would take much longer.”
“Good point.” Melody shrugged and stretched her legs. “Then if it’s just her, this will be easier to handle. Not having to fight a horde of mummies at the same time will be a bonus.”
“Not that they’d be much of a threat to us, right?” Rarity ran a hoof over the scales on her chest. “Our armor would be too thick and strong for their teeth.”
“That’s the hope, but who knows if they’ve been magically augmented in some fashion.” Melody frowned at the reflection of the moonlight on the water. “I wish that I had seen this alicorn before and gotten to see what she was capable of. We’re trying to fight a very dangerous foe blind. We will have to be very cautious.”
Rarity hummed her agreement. “At least we only need to delay her until daybreak,” she said. “Then we can take care of this much more peacefully.”
“Yes, but if I see an opening to finish this, I’m going to take it,” Melody said.
Rarity blinked. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if she lets her guard down and I have a chance, I’m going to kill her.” At Rarity’s look of horror, Melody frowned. “I know that she was a friend of yours, once. But she’s a slave to an evil deity now. She won’t hesitate to kill us, and if we aren’t careful, she will. And if she dies, then we stop all of this. We can lock her away and stop the moon god from threatening us again.”
“But she’s just an innocent pony caught up in the middle of this!” Rarity protested. “She doesn’t deserve death! If we can save her, then we must!”
Melody looked like she wanted to say more, but she stayed her tongue. “The important thing is that Soft Step doesn’t get to them,” she finally said. “We can at least agree on that.”
“Right.” Rarity slowly nodded, but she could already feel the conflict of interests growing between them. She wanted to find some way to peacefully subdue Soft Step in the hopes of saving her later. Melody just wanted to rip the pony apart and put a permanent end to this, once and for all. But Rarity had to believe that there was another way. If Soft Step had been transformed, then she could be reverted. Somehow. She just didn’t know how, yet.
For the time being, at least, she turned her attention to the east. None of this would matter if the alicorn simply managed to slip by her and Melody while they were talking. All she needed to do now was remain vigilant and slowly count down the hours until daylight.
She covered her beak with a hoof as she yawned. That, unfortunately, was much, much easier said than done.
-----
The shadows moved, shifted, curled, coalesced—and finally formed into a silhouette. Soft Step swayed as her hooves became solid and made contact with the ground, a momentary flicker of vertigo upsetting her balance. Dissolving into shadow, though a gift granted to her by Him, was far from natural. She needed more practice, but it had worked well enough. It certainly had been more than enough to slip by the two sirens floating in the water, supposedly on the lookout for her.
She scoffed. What clueless creatures. For all their strength and beauty, they were no match for Him. If she wanted to, she could rend them apart with just a fraction of His power. But unfortunately, that was all she had: a mere fraction, and a painfully small one at that. So long as the ritual remained unfinished, the bulk of His otherworldly power remained locked away, sealed in a dimension beyond the material plane of the world. It was up to her to bridge the gap and unlock it, and then her work would finally be finished.
But to do that, she had to find the pegasi. She looked around the ruins of the tomb and listened with keen ears, but she neither heard nor saw anything. At the very least, she had figured the rainbow-maned one would have stuck out easily, but there was nothing. Which, she supposed, made sense. If the two sirens had gone to high alert trying to spy her approach from the shrine, then that meant they must have known she was coming. If so, then they had to have known what she was coming for. The pegasi had disappeared, but where to, she couldn’t say.
But she knew who she could ask to find out…
Of course, that involved subduing a siren. Even with all her power, that was no easy task. Their songs were dangerous, their armor too tough to tear through with her teeth, and their beaks large enough to snap clean through her waist in a single bite. She could take them on alone, but it would be dangerous. And she already had risked too much tonight in His plan.
Which was why she needed her reinforcements.
Closing her eyes, she felt out through the island, tapping into the shadows and darkness that blanketed everything, both above and below the ground. She could feel numerous bird and primate skeletons, along with the carcasses of other wildlife—all useless to her. She needed something more. Sure, there were the rotting corpses of the pirates and the survivors scattered around her, and many of those would certainly be useful. If their horns or wings were intact, then they could use some of their magic, or at least, whatever they had left in their bodies. But would it be enough to fight off a siren?
Then she felt something lying a bit further from the ruins. A body with great power still in its bones. She recognized the pirate captain immediately from the unique aura still clinging onto her corpse. She had been trained in powerful, almost forgotten magic. Magic like that doesn’t just go away. Magic like that leaves its mark on the bones and the horn.
Spreading her wings, Soft Step took off and began to fly in that direction. The right corpse was worth a thousand of the wrong corpses, and in the remains of the pirate who called herself Squall, Soft Step knew she’d found her champion.
With that kind of magic on her side, fighting sirens would be a breeze.