Rainbow Dash flew upwards for the better part of five minutes. She gritted her teeth, glancing around at the shadowy walls blurring beside her. The pegasus knew that she was cruising along at a fairly slow speed, but it still astonished her just how tall--not to mention remarkably hollow--the body of Granite Mountain was.
The higher she climbed, the danker the air grew. She felt like sneezing several times, as if some inexplicable humidity was tickling her nose. Where the moisture could be coming from, Rainbow had no earthly clue. However, as her ascent pierced further up the “neck” of the mountain, she got the distinct impression that an enormous source of water was looming above her.
She climbed and climbed, easily flying past the distance she and Churning had scaled on her previous flight. She winced, shuddering through the moist cold. Rainbow did her best not to think about Churning. With the buffalo victims missing for days--maybe even weeks--it was hard to realistically believe that Churning had any better of a fate. The pony wasn’t familiar with magic, much less petrification. How was she to know if the process could be reversed? And would the mountain ram be the same living thing once he was no longer a frozen stone statue?
“He was an okay guy, after all.” Rainbow shrugged in mid-flight, her voice echoing off the slick rock walls. “I mean, he didn’t murder any ponies, and I didn’t spontaneously combust from talking to him.”
Just then, a drop or two of moisture splattered off Rainbow’s muzzle.
“Aaugh!” She gritted her teeth, wincing. “There’d better not be a bunch of bats perched above me or else I’m gonna throw up.”
Instead, her flight came to an abrupt stop as she finally reached the ceiling of the tall-tall passageway. She gasped, braking in mid-air just centimeters before a dangling forest of stalactites could pierce her blue body.
She hovered in place, gawking at the sharp points. Her eyes traced beads of moisture running down the jagged tips and eventually dropping off into the hollow of the mountain below.
“Oh right. They talked about this sort of stuff in school,” she muttered quietly. “At least, I think they did.” She sighed, her ears drooping. “Course, knowing my luck, I dropped out right before ‘Basilisk Slaying 101.’”
She lowered her altitude slightly, gazing around at the dark-dark walls around her.
“Darn it… why isn’t this stupid eye lighting up?” she grumbled aloud. “I had flown a quarter of this distance when Churning and I first ran into the Slithering.” She chewed on her lip and hovered in a slowly descending circle. “Maybe--like--if I retrace my wing-flaps or something--”
Just then, there was a pulse of light.
Rainbow’s body jerked, fell a few feet, and compensated by flapping her wings again. She narrowed her eyes, tilting her head down to gaze at the jar hanging in her grasp like a dormant lantern.
The murky liquids inside sloshed and sloshed.
Rainbow’s lips pursed as she studied the container closer.
With an explosion of bubbles, the eye spun towards her and lit up like the front of a train.
“Gaaah!” Rainbow winced, almost dropping the rattling container in her grasp. She caught her breath and adjusted her grip of the thing’s handle, panting as she saw the eye twirling around, shining a spotlight all across the thin corridor. “Yeesh. Celestia, I hate this barfy thing!”
The eye spun and twitched, casting refracted waterlight across the domain.
“What is it, little guy?” Rainbow smirked devilishly. “You know where your master is, huh? Don’tcha?”
The eye jerked up and own, almost like a snake’s head nodding. The reptilian iris narrowed and widened with tongues of flame, causing the liquid inside the container to boil.
“Come on. Show me the way to’em, lil’ guy. I just wanna give the big ol’ dude a hug.”
In response, the eye spun, blurred, and came to a jagged stop, pointing at a thin cleft built into the throat of the vertical tunnel.
“Heh… that wasn’t so hard, now was it?” Rainbow Dash flew with the jar towards the hole, feeling cold air pelting her face as if the mountain was breathing on her. She gulped and threaded herself--and the eye-lantern--through the slit with only inches to spare. “Yeah… the hard part’s in the next stage. Lucky me…”
She pressed her way down the corridor, leaving the chamber behind in darkness.