Rainbow Dash slowly arced out of her rainboom, her hooves skimming the waves below at the very nadir of her dive. She simply held her wings straight and let the air do most of the work for her, gradually slowing her down from supersonic speeds to a much more reasonable glide. The turbulent air her wings threw off was still enough to kick up the water behind her, leaving a wake of frothy white as she slowly looped back around to where she thought she’d seen Soft Step fall.
Melody’s enchantment had started to fail her, and her coat was no longer the brightly glowing beacon it had once been. It only dully glowed now, just enough to send ripples of light across the water to compete with the moonlight shining down on it, but not much more. Her rainboom must have ruined the enchantment, much like how it had damaged the weather enchantment over the archipelago last time. And, just like last time, her rainboom had cleared the clouds, leaving behind only patchy wisps that tumbled about without something larger to anchor themselves to. Rainbow suddenly realized that in her attempt to destroy Soft Step and her clones, she’d evaporated the cloud cover Gyro and the others had been using to stay out of sight of the moon. She needed to find the alicorn fast and finish the fight before it was too late.
As she circled back around to where she thought she’d rainboomed over, tiny flakes of ash raining down from the sky stuck themselves to her face and clung to her hair. She turned her wings up at a sharp angle to brake herself, and picked up twenty or thirty feet to survey the area in doing so. Finally coming to a stop, she hovered in place and looked around, searching for where Soft Step had fallen to. When she didn’t see anything in the water, she turned her attention closer to the archipelago, where she spotted a burnt body clinging to a piece of newly rotting wood sticking out of the water, wedged into the shoals somewhere beneath the waves.
Fluttering over to the chunk of wreckage from the Concordia, Rainbow found herself hovering over Soft’s charred form. But to her immense surprise, the alicorn was still alive, and she clung tightly to the piece of wreckage, even though her breathing was labored. Rainbow didn’t know how she was alive; the solar rainboom had turned her skin into leather, and all of her feathers were blackened and crumbled into ash at the slightest movement. Whether or not the mare could even physically open her eyes was another matter entirely. She seemed so weak, so frail, so beaten lying there—a far cry from the murderous demigod who had struck down Melody right in front of Rainbow’s eyes.
“It’s over, Soft,” Rainbow said, hovering next to the mare’s head. “You’re finished. Now I need to know how I can help you.”
“Help… me…?” Soft croaked, her head barely moving, the skin from her chin clinging to the wood instead of her skull when she tried to look at Rainbow. “You… cannot…”
“I know you’re still in there, somewhere,” Rainbow said, moving to perch on the wood above Soft. “I just want to help you come back to us, Soft. I want to free you from being a slave to this crazy moon god. How do I do that?”
Soft Step winced and laid her head back down on the piece of wreckage. “My… my horn…” she finally croaked. “His gift… His curse…”
Rainbow hopped off of the piece of wreckage and quickly scanned the area for something that would help. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a knife of cleaver conveniently lodged in the wreckage, but she did find a loose chunk of stone sitting just below the water’s surface. When the piece of wreckage landed in the shoals, it must have broken that stone loose. Quickly diving down into the water to retrieve the stone, Rainbow hefted it up in her hooves and felt the weight. It was crude, sure, but it would be heavy enough to snap a horn off in a solid whack. She just hoped Soft would be able to forgive her when this was all over. It would just be adding more pain to an already excruciating amount of agony.
Fluttering back to the alicorn, Rainbow perched herself just above Soft’s head and lifted the stone above her own. She looked down at the helpless mare below her. It would be so easy to drive the stone through her skull, caving it entirely and smashing her brains into paste on the wreckage. The mare would never again be able to threaten them, and they could stop the moon god’s plans indefinitely. All it would cost was one mare’s life.
“I’m really sorry about this, Esses,” Rainbow said, grimacing at the mare lying helpless below her. Her hooves tightened on the stone, and she tried to swallow the lump in her throat. “But I really hope this works!”
Grunting, she drove the stone down on the curved horn sticking out of Soft’s skull. There was a crunch and the alicorn cried out in pain, and the shock of the blow sent the stone tumbling out of Rainbow’s grasp and into the water. When she pulled back a bit to examine her work, she found blood pooling from the cracks she’d made in the horn, but had failed to cleave it the whole way off.
“Grrrr… Luna poop,” Rainbow cursed to herself, trying to spot where the stone had fallen to. Another blow would do it, but she’d lost the rock. Jumping off the wreckage, she once more started to search through the shoals, trying to find it again.
But as Rainbow searched through the water, Soft Step gasped and began to slowly raise her head. The blow from the stone had scraped away some of the char and ash covering her horn, exposing the enamel to the light of the moon. The cracks began to heal, and Soft’s coat started to soften and regrow its hair, spreading out from the base of her horn. She soon found the strength to open her eyes, and the blood that had pooled into the sclera pulled back into the vessels in her eyes, allowing her to see clearly again. Ashen feathers began to regrow, and strength poured back into the alicorn’s limbs as she began to move on the wreckage.
Rainbow heard her grunting and spun in place, her hoof resting on the stone again. “Soft!” she shouted at the alicorn as the mare sat up, her coat beginning to retake its green color. “No! Fight it, I’ve got the rock—!”
A wing swinging across Soft’s body struck Rainbow in the chest and sent the pegasus cartwheeling into the black of the night. Bit by bit, Soft Step forced herself to stand and unfurl her wings to their full glory. Her horn was still cracked and damaged, true, but the moonlight washing over her rejuvenated her once more.
She closed her eyes and seemed to briefly meditate on the wreckage, but it wasn’t very long before she opened them again and let a cruel smile settle on her lips. “Ah, I see you now,” she purred to herself, and her damaged horn began to crackle with energy once more.
Rainbow Dash came flying back to the wreckage as fast as she could, but not even she was fast enough to stop the mare before she vanished into the shadows one last time.