//------------------------------// // The Greatest Showmare // Story: Surviving Sand Island // by The 24th Pegasus //------------------------------// Rainbow felt her breath quickening as the four alicorns began to encircle her, each one grinning with sheer malice. They all moved slightly differently, like they were all real, and Rainbow didn’t know which one was the real Soft Step. Who did she rush with the glow radiating from her coat? If she picked the wrong one, she’d pay for it dearly. Soft could reshuffle her copies, create more, or simply rend her apart with her magic. And even if Rainbow got away unharmed, she would only be able to keep it up for so long. She was a sprinter, not an endurance flier, and she’d already exhausted herself with all the flying she’d done that day, while Soft didn’t tire at all. The moon sustained her, and there was nothing Rainbow could do about that. The clouds were too far away for her to retreat to, and moving in that direction would only bring the alicorn closer to her friends. They didn’t stand a chance fighting her, and now that both Rarity and Melody were down for the count, it was just her, a glowing pegasus, against a Nightmare Moon lookalike who so far had proven much, much more dangerous than the real deal she’d faced years ago. She wondered if maybe Princess Luna’s dark persona was just a cheap imitation of the supernatural power she was dealing with here. “What are you going to do, little pegasus?” the Soft Steps taunted her, their voices making an odd and haunting echo as they spoke slightly out of sync with each other. “You’re outnumbered and outmatched. You can’t defeat all of me. His power sustains me, it gives me strength. You are nothing in the face of it!” “I have to be something if I forced you to do this crap!” Rainbow shouted back at them, slowly turning in place to watch all four. “How long can you keep this up, huh? There has to be a reason you didn’t do this as soon as you started fighting! I’m willing to bet that the moonlight can’t keep you powered up very long when you’re split up like this!” “So long as we rend you into paste, what does it matter?” The four alicorns began to fly in circles around Rainbow, teasing her and taking their sweet time before the fight resumed. “The only reason we’re keeping you around now is because we need to know where your friends are. We can’t just make do on one pegasus, oh no. We need two of you. We know there are three more out there somewhere. We’ve seen you by the light of the moon. But now they’re hiding somewhere, and only you came out to play.” They all stopped circling Rainbow and raised an eyebrow in unison. “I have to wonder why you did that. Is this some sort of ruse? Or were you stupid enough to actually believe you can stop me?” Rainbow growled and whipped her head between the different mares. “I am going to stop you,” she insisted. “And like it or not, Soft, I’m gonna snap that horn off your head and make you normal again!” “Oh? Then why don’t you come over here and try it!” The four alicorns all began to draw magic into their horns, and Rainbow chose one at random to fly towards. Four crisscrossing beams of moonlight sliced through the air from all around Rainbow, and only by some miracle did she manage to twist and weave out of the way without any tearing through her like they had Melody. Yelling, Rainbow led with her shoulder, checking the Soft Step in the neck, and kicking away from the body when it screamed and burst into flames. As the copy faded away into ash, the other three loosed a hail of shadowy darts at her. The cloud encompassed her from all sides, and Rainbow tried to fly out of it as quickly as she could. Though she dodged most of the darts, many of them stuck into her hide, shooting pain through her muscles. She could only afford herself a cry of agony and a spin to fling them out of her skin; if she stopped moving to pry them out, the alicorns could have overpowered her instantly. As she leveled out of her climb, the three alicorns all rose into the air in a roughly triangular formation. Their eyes glowed with moonlit fire, and each of them readied a different spell. One Soft Step materialized javelins, another, arrows, and the last charged her horn to loose a lance of moonlight in Rainbow’s direction. Gulping, Rainbow flipped about in midair and began to frantically fly off to the side, jittering around midflight to try and shake the torrential volley of magic heading her way. If the night sky hadn’t already been set afire by the blaze of light cast by her coat, she knew that the sheer amount of magic flying at her would have accomplished a similar effect. Roaring and shouting, Rainbow swung her body to the side and braved the hail of magic to fly at the alicorns again. They scattered as she approached, but she managed to catch one and punched right through its throat as its body turned into ash and cinders. She whirled about with a growl, her feathers scattering the copy’s ashes into the night, and kicked off of its dissolving corpse to fling herself at the next. Yet unfortunately for her, she chose wrong out of the two remaining opponents. The alicorn she flung herself onto laughed as it burned to death, until Rainbow was left clutching ashes and soot in her hooves. Rainbow whipped her head around and glared at Soft Step, who giggled wildly behind her. “What are you laughing about?!” Rainbow shouted at her. “You’ve got no more copies left!” “Do I?” Soft Step winked from her and let her horn glow, and before Rainbow could react, seven more copies of her appeared. The eight Soft Steps all loomed in on Rainbow, watching her with predatory eyes, though Rainbow was determined to keep her eyes locked on the original. “Every time you defeat my copies, I’ll just let Him refresh me and make more,” they all said in unison. “And you’re growing tired. How long before you cave? Five minutes? Ten?” As much as Rainbow wanted to deny it, she knew Soft was right. It was getting harder and harder to move her limbs, harder and harder to avoid the magic the alicorn and her copies flung at her. It wouldn’t be long before she slipped up and made a mistake. If she let Soft Step subdue her, let her rip through her mind and figure out where the other pegasi were hiding… She needed to end the fight now, with one blow. It was the only possible way. If she didn’t, then the fight was already lost. She could already feel victory slipping away, one beat of her wings at a time. There wasn’t time to waste energy thinking; she needed to act. And she was Rainbow Dash. There was only one action that came to her as naturally as drawing breath. So she flew. Her wings pushed her straight up into the air, climbing through the sky like hands grabbing at the rungs of a ladder. She poured just short of her everything into the climb, because she needed her everything for what would come next. Higher and higher she spiraled, until the air began to grow frigid around her, and the clouds started to dwindle like little mountains far below. Soft Step and her clones started to fly after Rainbow, though they took their time, knowing their quarry couldn’t, wouldn’t run far from them. “Where do you think you’re going to go?” They shouted after her. “You can flee all you want, but the moon watches you. All I have to do is step into the shadows and follow you wherever you go. You can’t run from me, pegasus! This is over!” But Rainbow Dash had no intention of running. Higher and higher she climbed, until her wings struggled to keep her aloft. She had pulled the stunt once on these islands, and it had set in motion the chain of events that had brought her here. Now, by the same stunt, she planned to end it. She stopped flapping her wings, coasting upwards until gravity robbed her of the last of her momentum. In that moment, at the apex of her climb, when she felt truly weightless, she saw the bright, starry sky overhead. The moon may have been fueling the abomination trying to kill her below, but the stars were Princess Luna’s and hers alone. She had placed them there, every last one of them carefully arranged into a beautiful, abstract expression on the greatest canvas in the entire world. Under their light, under her distant creation, Rainbow knew she would end this. Gravity tugged down on her tail, and the stars began to recede. Rainbow closed her eyes, tilted her wings back, and gradually flipped through the air until her nose pointed downwards, to the sea below. It was time to finish what she had started.