//------------------------------// // The Ice Sentinel V // Story: Rainbow Dash's Unstoppable Ego // by MagicS //------------------------------// Rainbow Dash woke up sore with a crick in her neck after sleeping awkwardly on that uncomfortable rock. She stretched and winced when she turned her head too fast in the wrong way, a painful lance shooting up the muscles in her neck. “Ugh, just what I needed...” She blinked her eyes a few times to get accustomed to the warped light in here and to remind herself just where she was. Right. Inside the glacier after running—retreating—from the monster. She had found this cavern and chose to rest inside it for the night instead of taking the possibility of getting lost randomly in the tunnels while searching for an exit. At least the fact she had woken up without a problem meant that the ice monster hadn’t found her. But now there was a new problem that she hadn’t thought about when she first came into this cavern. Namely that there were a bunch more tunnels leading out of it and she had to choose just one to go in. Each one was just another possibility that she might get more and more lost in here, she could end up going to the center of the glacier or the bottom of it and never find her way out. There probably wasn’t anything to eat in here either. Plenty to drink though… Rainbow Dash thought as she jumped up and kicked off the tip of an icicle hanging above her before flipping it into her mouth, crunching down and chewing on her improvised ice cube. Aside from a little soreness in places, Rainbow Dash was feeling pretty good. And that soreness would pass naturally after she walked around for a bit. She still needed to figure out which tunnel to head out though. Looking at the one she had initially came from there was another on the wall of the cavern adjacent to it, why not just stick to what was closest? If it came down to it she’d just have to return to this big room and search another tunnel. Just like she had planned to do with that first branching off that had led her here if it didn’t go anywhere. Rainbow Dash used the greater area in this cavern to first test out her wings, gliding around low and close to the icy floor to make sure she was just as maneuverable as normal and nothing hurt after yesterday. Satisfied, she touched down and checked her back leg where the monster had slashed her. “Eugh,” she stuck out her tongue. The wounds were closed up but it still wasn’t exactly a pretty sight. She would need to find some running water somewhere before she could clean it up all the way. Or make it rain with a cloud once she got out of here. Rainbow Dash stretched her whole body like a cat and took her first steps into the second tunnel leading out of this cavern. It was just as narrow as the other one which meant she had to keep her wings closed and could maybe jump a little without hitting her head. The morning light easily shined through the ice and kept the glacial pathway just as well lit as when she had been walking yesterday. It wasn’t that cold either; or perhaps it was and her body had already completely adjusted to it. Maybe if you transplanted Fluttershy here right now she’d be shivering and freezing solid. Her hooves on the ice brought that familiar clackity clack back to her ears. Constantly. It made her annoyed enough to furrow her brow instantly and try to ignore it, not like that did much. Occasionally she would glance at the walls of ice around her and spy more rocks frozen within them. She hadn’t noticed that the previous day. Perhaps this area of the glacier had a bunch of rocks in it for some reason and the others didn’t. How were glaciers formed anyways? Was it like, a lake that just got really cold at one point and never unfroze. No, that didn’t make any sense. Rainbow Dash was a weather pony not a climate pony or whatever studied or learned about this kind of stuff. All she knew was that there weren’t any glaciers around Ponyville and no one wanted one there either. Rainbow Dash chipped off another piece of ice from the walls and sucked on it for some water. She hadn’t eaten much lately so it was all she could do. That was another thing though if the monster kept hounding her; she might not be at 100 percent to fight it with an empty stomach. So she either needed to find food fast or beat that thing fast before the hunger pains came to her. Hunger would be just as debilitating as exhaustion and whatever the magical numbing effect the monster created in her when she touched it was. “This is so dumb, I’m not the one who’s supposed to figure this kind of stuff out! I’m the one who flies in and beats bad ponies up,” Rainbow Dash grumbled as she thought about her problems with the ice monster pursuing her. “I wonder if I could just yell out for Discord and have him take care of it… ugh, no way. I’d never live that down. He’d never let me live it down.” Discord was a “friend” she hadn’t thought about on the journey yet. Did he have her back? It was impossible to know for her and she didn’t really want to find out. He was probably busy with Fluttershy right now anyways, drinking tea or some other girly boring thing she liked to do. Not that she was insulting Fluttershy! It’s just that her and Rainbow Dash’s interests didn’t really match up. Fluttershy liked things quiet and calm and with lots of animals around her. Rainbow Dash was the exact opposite, something they had known since they were fillies. She had still never really gotten along too well with most of Fluttershy’s pets… especially Angel, bleh. What if Fluttershy ever went on an adventure like this? That was almost too crazy to think. Rainbow Dash smiled at the thought of her pink and yellow friend, she always had a calming effect on her and it made her walk through the glacier a little easier. She wasn’t sure what time of day it was at the moment though. She was fairly certain she slept early so she probably woke up pretty early too. It looked bright enough to be the middle of the day but the distorting effect that the ice had on the sunlight might make it seem brighter or darker than it really was on the outside. Rainbow Dash figured it was still early morning, giving her a lot of time to search through the glacier today. This time it wasn’t long until she came to another place where the tunnel she was walking through branched off, although there was more to it than just splitting into right and left tunnels now. Rainbow Dash stood at a crossroads where three paths through the ice were before her, directly in front of her the tunnel kept going into what looked like a small, circular chamber, while to the sides of that two more tunnels went off diagonally. Frowning, Dash stepped forward to check them all out at first. The two diagonal tunnels looked like all the rest but the room in front of her where the path stopped was a little different. It was a small and darker lit chamber with a slope leading down into it, Rainbow Dash opened her wings slightly and floated to the floor of the chamber to check it out. There were a few alcoves in the chamber she couldn’t see from outside, but they didn’t look natural, the rough edges and claw marks around them looked like something had dug them out in the walls of the chamber and filled them… up… with… bones. Rainbow Dash gulped as she saw the piles and piles of animal bones that had been stored in the alcoves of this small room. “Probably isn’t good to be in this place...” It couldn’t have been the ice monster, she thought. It couldn’t fit through these tunnels and why would it do something like this in the first place? There must have been some other animal in here, something carnivorous that used this chamber as its feeding grounds. Rainbow Dash wasn’t scared of anything like that, she was more than capable of fending off any normal wild animal or beast, just like she did back in Ponyville with stuff from the Everfree. But she didn’t want to potentially exhaust herself when she knew what was waiting for her outside this glacier. And the narrow tunnels in here took away her greatest advantage in a fight of being able to just easily fly around and dodge her opponent. Rainbow Dash decided to step out of the chamber and choose one of the other tunnels to go down. Her ears shot up as a familiar clacking sound was faintly heard coming from the left tunnel. The sound of something walking over the ice of these glacier paths, coming towards her and this bone chamber. The steady click of claws on ice grew louder as she stood there, wondering if whatever it was could smell her already or would hear her if she started moving. “Forget it,” she silently said under breath and started walking down the right tunnel. Whatever it was and whether it would care about her or not was irrelevant, it just meant that she already had the decision of which tunnel to take made for her. She did decide to quicken her pace a little as she walked in the opposite direction of whatever the thing that shared these ice tunnels with her was though. As the sound of her hooves thumping on the ice filled her ears again she tried to keep one of them open for hearing if that other thing was coming after her. She thought she heard something else mixed in there so she paused, looking over her shoulder to see the empty crossroads. Rainbow Dash narrowed her eyes. Everything had gone silent and it didn’t look like she was being chased yet so she resumed walking… but as soon as she did she heard that extra clicking in there echoing around with her own hoofsteps. Rainbow Dash came to a halt again, abruptly, and listened. She heard the faintest couple of clicks against the ice floor before they stopped too and didn’t start up again while she stood there in her tunnel like a statue. “Great, just what I need,” Rainbow Dash said to herself. It was walking in step with her. So now she was being hunted by some random animal inside this glacier too? She needed to leave even quicker than she thought. This tunnel was too narrow to fly through but she had enough confidence in her legs that she could outrun anything chasing her if she had to. She quickened her pace again and renewed her search for an exit to this glacier. The tunnel went on and on and Rainbow Dash heard the extra noise from her new pursuer’s claws mixed in with her own steps the entire time. She didn’t look back anymore, knowing that if the thing was actually close enough to pose a danger she would be sure. Instead she kept her focus entirely on getting out of here. This tunnel curved and turned a lot more on its own than most of the others she had been through, she couldn’t see how far it went or where it might end before opening up into another chamber or branching off into more tunnels. It was getting aggravating not knowing where she was or where she was going and her wings were becoming restless. She wanted to fly, she wanted to see the sky, to stop feeling claustrophobic and stop being chased. She sincerely hoped she hadn’t taken the wrong set of tunnels way back. On one last turn she looked ahead to see a light at the end of the tunnel. An exit? It had to be. There was nothing else that could explain light pouring in like that. Rainbow Dash grinned and started running. Forget what was chasing her, she was about to get out of here!