//------------------------------// // The Survivors // Story: Surviving Sand Island // by The 24th Pegasus //------------------------------// Rainbow Dash frantically beat her wings as she zoomed to the south. She needed to go faster, faster, but she simply couldn’t. The air tightened around her whenever she approached supersonic speeds and pushed back, making her wings feel like they were buzzing through molasses. She didn’t have the strength or the altitude to push through another rainboom, not after everything she’d expended so far that night. For the one time in her life when she needed to be faster than she’d ever gone before, she simply couldn’t find the speed. The air was too thick, her altitude was too low, and her wings were too tired to go any faster. Why didn’t she just bash Soft Step’s face in with the rock? If she had done that, this would have all been over already. If she just could have murdered another pony as they lay helpless in front of her, thrown her conscience out the window, she could have avoided all of this. But she wasn’t strong enough to kill like that, not when she thought she had a chance to save a friend. And she’d come so close. So close to doing the right thing, being the valiant hero. But cruel fate had another plan in mind, and the rock she needed to shatter Soft’s horn off of her skull had slipped out of her grasp and given the alicorn enough time to recover and flee. “Why couldn’t I have been the Element of Practicality?” Rainbow asked herself. “Then I could have done what I needed to and not try to save them all…” She flinched when a crack of light flickered on the sea in front of her. That had to be Soft Step! And if she was casting magic out in the open sea, then that mean she had to have found the raft… The panic let Rainbow drill a little deeper into her reserves for a quick spurt of energy. If Soft Step was at the raft, she had to stop her before it was too late! But by the time she made it to the raft, barely thirty seconds later, there wasn’t much of a raft left at all. There were only logs rolling away from each other, split into driftwood and dumping their supplies into the drink. Rainbow’s mouth hung slightly agape as she witnessed the carnage in front of her. She was too slow again, damn it! Why couldn’t she just fly faster?! “Gyro,” Rainbow whispered to herself, scanning the wreckage for any sign of the gray mare. Soft had only wanted the pegasi; would she even bother to drag Gyro back to the island with her? Or would she just let her drown? Taking a deep breath, Rainbow closed her protective third eyelid and splashed into the water. It was difficult to see very far through the murky haze, but a burst of bubbles glittered as they rose to the surface from somewhere below her. Squinting and peering downwards, Rainbow saw the barest shape of a dark silhouette struggling and flailing at the water around it as it nevertheless sank further and further to the bottom. “…!!!” Rainbow kicked her hooves at the surface and started paddling herself downwards with her wings, quickly slicing through the turbulent water in pursuit of the drowning pony. Thankfully, Gyro’s panicked flailing had kept her from sinking too far, but Rainbow did have to grab onto her shoulders to try and calm her before she could grab the mare lest she receive an earth pony buck to the face. It wouldn’t do if they both drowned, after all. Then there really wouldn’t be anypony to stop Soft Step before it was too late. She saw Gyro’s eyelids crack open just long enough to glance at her before the salt left Gyro hissing in pain and closing them once again. But at the very least, she had stopped flailing, and that was good enough for Rainbow. Darting around behind Gyro, she wrapped her forelegs around the mare’s chest and began to swim upwards, again using her wings for extra propulsion. In a few seconds, she’d dragged Gyro back to the surface and dumped her on a log, making sure to support her while she clutched at the slippery wood and coughed and sputtered for her breath. Once Gyro had finally sucked down some air and calmed herself down, Rainbow wrapped her forelegs around the log and tried to pull her little body halfway out of the water to let her waterlogged wings dry out. “What happened?” she asked the engineer. “Where’s the others?” “They’re… t-they’re gone,” Gyro stammered, still trying to catch her breath. “Soft Step was here… she sank the raft and took them.” A blue eye flicked to Rainbow beneath a frown, and Rainbow had to scramble to cling onto the log when Gyro struck her so hard that she nearly fell off of it. “What the actual shit were you thinking, Rainbow?!” the engineer bellowed at her. “We had a plan! We had a plan and you fucked everything up!” “They needed my help!” Rainbow protested, glaring back at Gyro. “You couldn’t see it from way down here, but I could see everything up in those clouds! Soft Step was flinging around some absolutely crazy magic and—!” “You could only think of Rarity, couldn’t you?” Gyro said, her lips parting to reveal gritted teeth. “Fuck the rest of the plan, right? You had to dump it all to make sure Rarity was okay—!” “I love her!” Rainbow shouted back, her wings trembling as she started to seethe. “Wouldn’t you want to go help out if Coals had to go fight some alicorn of death and you ran away with your tail between your legs?!” Gyro struck Rainbow again, this time actually knocking her into the water before she managed to splash her way back onto the log. “If I’d stayed on that island to help Coals instead of running away like he wanted me to, none of us would have had any idea Soft Step was coming here and that she’d already taken over the shrine,” she spat. “The mummies got him but I got away instead of fighting, and that saved us. But you don’t even trust Rarity enough to hold her own as a big fucking siren that you had to ruin our plan to be hero! It’s your fault that Soft Step found us, you stupid blue idiot! Your rainboom knocked away all the clouds and then she knew exactly where we were!” Rainbow wanted to retaliate, but Gyro was right. Instead, she shrank down on the log, her wing crests angled almost like curtains to hide behind. “All I wanted to do was help,” she said. “Soft Step was too powerful for Melody and Rarity to take on by themselves. We almost defeated her, almost, and the rainboom put her down for the count, but…” “But what?” “I couldn’t finish her,” Rainbow said. She looked up at Gyro, regret plainly filling her eyes. “She was lying on some bits of wreckage sticking out of the shoals, horribly burnt because of the daylight spell Melody put on me. I had a rock in my hooves. I could have either bashed her skull in or broke her horn off and tried to spare her.” Gyro’s glare softened just a touch. “And?” “I tried to break her horn,” Rainbow said. “I tried to spare her. And she got away. Now we’re all paying for it.” Gyro sighed and let her shoulders sag. “You tried to do the right thing, I guess,” she said. “I guess I should just be happy that you’re alive.” “Yeah,” Rainbow said, frowning at the wood under her chin. “Yeah, I guess.” “So what now?” Gyro asked her. “What do we do? Where are our sirens? How do we get back to the island and stop her?” “That’s just it,” Rainbow said. “I don’t know. I don’t know how we’re going to get back. I don’t know what we’re going to do if we do. And… and I don’t know what happened to Melody and Rarity.” Gyro blinked. “You… you don’t? But I thought you said—?” “Soft Step claimed she killed Rarity by the time I got to her,” Rainbow said, her voice shaking. “That’s what that explosion on the water was. And Melody… Soft made decoys of herself and turned invisible. Then she shot Melody through the back with a spell.” She grimaced and shuddered. “If they’re both still alive… if they’re not…” She sniffled, and Gyro heard it. Her rage forgotten, the engineer slid across the log and wrapped a foreleg around Rainbow’s shoulders. “It’ll be alright,” she said, her voice promising something Rainbow knew not even she believed. “We’ll… we’ll find a way. Somehow.” Rainbow didn’t know if the truth or the lie hurt more.