Sunset Shimmer, who was exhausted from the lengthy trek to Jarukia's shrine, and from the subsequent battle with the acolytes and templars, decided to lay beside her brother Radiant Dawn in the shade of the golden idol of Jarukia.
"I can't believe...you came back for me." Radiant said to Sunset, his throat dry from being in the hot desert. "You risked your life and came back again."
"Of course I did, Red." said Sunset. "You're my brother. What kind of sister would I be if I didn't look out for you the way you've looked out for me."
She leaned against Radiant, and the two siblings passionately cuddled together. Trixie, Sunflower, and Pressure Point watched this.
"Wow, those two sure love each other a lot." said Sunflower, before turning to Trixie and Pressure. "Now why can't you two get along like them?"
"Because we're not brother and sister." Pressure Point replied. "We're cousins."
"Distant cousins, too." said Trixie.
"Yo' still family, ain'tcha?" said Sunflower. "Ya know, I may not always agree with my li'l sistah Babs all the time, but we still care for each othah. So what's stoppin' you two from doin' da same?"
"Because one of us actually takes their work seriously, and the other is a hopeless loudmouth." said Pressure Point, venomous loudmouth. "We're as different as night and day."
"Hey, so are Princesses Celestia and Luna." said Trixie. "In fact, they are night and day."
"We demand an explanation, temps!" Lightning Dust said as she circled around Mauve Mirage, who was very aloof about being held prisoner. "Why did you try to attack us?"
"Simple: for committing crimes against us." said Mauve. "You made a disgrace of us when you and your accomplices disrupted our templar operations at Fort Echidna."
"Hey, Firewing totally had it coming." said Lightning. "He killed or injured a lot of innocent ponyfolk. In fact, between what his boys did and what you just tried, I'm surprised the princesses haven't declared war on you, or at least banished you all from Equestria."
"Because not all of us seem to want you Royalists all dead." said Mauve. "The Prime Minister may not be interested in total war, but it doesn't mean the whole lot of us have to be happy about sharing land with a bunch of delusional blighters like yourself."
"I tell ya, as soon as the princesses find out what happened here..." said Lightning, snidely.
"New Mustangia is outside of their government, and we're not even in Equestria." said Mauve. "So what happens here is beyond their jurisdiction."
"We'll see about that." said Lightning.
Suddenly, there was a low rumbling in the ground.
"What the heck was that?" asked Nose Nip, who stood nearby.
"I think it might've been a tremor." said Golden Sun. "Not too big, since it didn't even seem like a 2.0..."
Lightning Dust then went over to Amethyst Nightcrawler.
"As for you, what made you think trying to sacrifice my boyfriend would be a good idea?" asked Lightning Dust.
"I didn't expect a foreigner, much less a pegasus like yourself to understand." said Amethyst.
"Dude, stop being a jerk, and just answer the question." said Lightning.
"We already told the others why we did what we did, and you were there when I explained it." said Amethyst. "If you need explaining again, then talk to your friends, and not to me."
Lightning lifted up a hoof to strike Amethyst on the head, but then stopped herself when she decided she was above stooping so low.
"This zealot just ain't worth it." she thought. "Gotta stay cool, gotta stay graceful. Gotta stay...professional."
"Hey, Pressure!" said Lightning Dust, aloud. "Why don't ya come over here and check this wacko out?"
Pressure heard and was complied to investigate.
"Why don't you check Amethyst's brain-waves to see something ain't screwin' with his head." Lightning suggested.
Pressure nodded, then let his horn glow as he skimmed his head above Amethyst's.
"Well, there does seem to be some minor head trauma and...something else." Pressure noted as he magically scanned the cult leader's brain. "Nervous systems were never my strong-suit, but I am picking up abnormal brainwaves, as if something reverse-engineered Amethyst's entire mindset. He doesn't realize what he is doing is any different from what he did before."
"So it would seem the acolytes were tricked after all." said Felix Summerset.
"I...remember now." said Amethyst, slowly. "During our last ritual, when our lord Jarukia spoke to us, his voice seemed to change, as did his personality. But still we suspected nothing. We were in a trance of some sort when he gave us our orders. But we don't know what caused the trance, either. But whatever happened, we have shamed our lord in the name of an impostor."
He bowed his head in remorse.
"But who? Who would dare impersonate a god, and what happened to our real deity?"
"Maybe this is a good sign you guys shouldn'ta been, uh...takin' orders from a statue to begin with?!" questioned Frosty.
"Don't be so naive!" said Amethyst. "Jarukia exists in a plane of existence beyond our own, and his powers are beyond anything you've ever seen your alicorn rulers do."
"Oh, I'll bet." snarked Mauve, nearby.
"But now something has severed his connection to our golden idol of him." said Amethyst, ignoring Mauve's comment. "And I fear something terrible may happen now."
"Why? What's any worse that what's already been said and done?" asked Lightning Dust.
Then the ground rumbled again, this time even harder and longer than before.
"Hey, professor! Is that another earthquake?" said Teddy, nervously.
"I'm starting to think it isn't." said Golden Sun. "The rumbling seems too consistent now to be a natural movement of the world's tectonic plates. This has to be either some magic at work, or..."
Suddenly, about fifty yards from the shrine, a large heap of sand was shot upwards into a dusty cloud, as if a land-mine had been detonated underneath the desert. Immediately after the sand went upwards, a long, knotted shape with a pointed end protruded from a swirling vortex that had opened up.
"Is that some kind of sand-worm?!" said Radiant Dawn, ecstatic.
"No." said Scarlet, shaking her head. "It's..."
Just then, a humped shape started to emerge from the sand in front of the long tail-like thing. As it rose higher and higher, sand fell from it, revealing its white armored body and eight legs. Its fanged mouth slowly opened, as did its multiple red-and-black eyes. It was some kind of albino scorpion, and it was gigantic, roughly the size of a Hercules C-130 cargo plane. Even an ursa would've thought twice before facing this creature, which had a tail that, if straightened, would have been as long as a high-rise building.
"What the buck is that thing?!" said Trixie, absolutely horrified.
"It's only like, the biggest darn scorpion I've ever seen in my life." said Lightning Dust.
"It is the Guardian of the Desert himself!" said Amethyst Nightcrawler. "Mordikaukis has risen from his long slumber!"
"What the heck is Mortduhwatsists?" said Lightning.
"He is the archenemy of our lord Jarukia!" said Amethyst. "As Jarukia spreads vegetation throughout the desert, Mordikaukis preserves the desert's dryness and desolation."
Mordikaukis reared his head, raised his tail and Volkswagen-sized, crustacean-like claws into the air, and let out a deep roar that could be heard for miles.
"After two-thousand years, desert has changed!" said a telepathic deep voice, likely belonging to Mordikaukis. "Who dares place shrine of enemy on guardian's resting-place? Punishment must be given!"
Mordikaukis roared again, and slowly started to crawl forward, snapping his claws as he went. He went was going faster and faster as he moved forward, until he was close enough to the shrine to strike the foundations of it with his tail. The stinger hit so fast that Sunset and the others didn't even have time to blink before the idol started to crack. The ponies all fled in every direction they could.
"Let sand judge fates of idol-worshippers..." Mordikaukis said, swiping his claws across the sand.
He spun his claws in place, and a swirling vortex of sand appeared at the feet of several ponies in the crowd. Templars and acolytes were ensnared in the sand, being "screwed" into the ground by the vortexes. As soon as they were buried to their necks, they were subsequently shot hundreds of feet into the sky, from which they would hit the ground dead or severely injured. These sand-traps opened up in every direction, even if there weren't any ponies near them. Sunset Shimmer wound up being caught in one of them, but she was able to teleport out just before she could be launched into the air.
Suddenly, a panicked shriek announced that Lightning Dust was caught in one of the sand-traps. Before any of her friends could reach her in time to pull her out, she was fired upwards like she was shot out of a cannon. She stopped in mid-air just in front of Mordikaukis, a smug expression on her face.
"Hey guess what, stupid?" she mockingly said to Mordikaukis, her hooves on her hips. "I can fly!"
"No, you stupid...pegasus!" Mordikaukis' deep voice telepathically shouted as his long tail lunged forward.
The stinger seemed to strike Lightning square in the belly, causing Sunset and the others to gasp in horror. But they didn't see Lightning's body anywhere, and Mordikaukis seemed to notice this, since it was looking up at its own tail.
"Huh...where are you, stupid pegasus?" Mordikaukis wondered.
"'Oh, yoo-hoo!" Lightning's voiced called down to him.
Mordikaukis looked up again, and saw that Lightning Dust was riding on the tip of his armored tail like a human would ride a horse.
"Looking for me, big boy?" Lightning taunted, batting her eyes.
"Lightning Dust, are you okay?!" Sunset called up to her.
"Yeah, I'm fine!" Lightning called back down. "Just get yourselves out of here! I've got this covered!"
Sunset hesitated, but Radiant encouraged her.
"Let's go, Sunny." he said. "She knows what she's doing. Believe me!"
Sunset looked at her brother, then nodded.
"Right." said Sunset. "Let's get to the Summerstar!"
Her friends and family hardly needed prompting, because they all bolted to the airship as soon as Sunset finished her sentence. As soon as they were aboard, they all got themselves ready for a quick flight as far away from the area as possible. Nose Nip and Frosty feverishly got the Summerstar airborne, not wanting to wait to see if Lightning would be able to make it or not. Luckily for them, Mordikaukis seemed to already be too distracted to try bringing them down in mid-flight.
Mordikaukis kept lunging his tail back and forth through the air, not to attack the ship, but to try and throw the small pegasus off of him. But to his complete annoyance, Lightning just kept clinging to him like a leech.
"Whoooooooo, whooooooooo, whoooooooooo!" Lightning dizzily exclaimed, as the tail kept rhythmically shooting back and forth like a carnival ride from Tartarus itself. "Ride 'em, cowboy!"
"You not pegasus!" Mordikaukis telepathically yelled at her. "You annoying pixie. No, pixie much less annoying. Pixie...makes...sense! I...am not like...enemy! I am not like cow! Pixie-pony...deserve to...die!"
Then he smashed his tail into the sand, clearly intending to crush Lightning Dust, who simply latched off at just that moment.
"Meh!" Lightning taunted, blowing a raspberry.
Suddenly, the tail snapped back up, whacking Lightning further into the sky and falling back on Mordikaukis' tail, which would then knock her up again and again like a tennis racket. This happened five times, while Mordikaukis laughed in amusement as he did so, until Lightning grabbed onto the stinger again.
"Ugh...let my tail go!" shouted Mordikaukis.
"Nope." said Lightning back to him.
"Then die!" Mordikaukis bellowed into her mind.
He spun the tail around and around in the air until Lightning Dust finally was thrown off and sent hurdling across the sky towards the Summerstar.
Pressure Point, Maud Pie, and Teddy all opened the loading ramp to let Lightning Dust in, in case she managed to break off early.
"Look, there she is right now!" Teddy shouted recognizing the speeding shape of Lightning.
"Oh, no." said Pressure Point, realizing why Lightning was coming in as fast as she was.
Before either stallion could dodge her trajectory, they were both knocked over by Lightning Dust, whose fall was broken by a stationary Maud Pie, who remained standing while Lightning herself slid to the floor.
"Thanks, Maud." she said, dazed.
Then she passed out from the combined pain and exhaustion, while Maud simply said:
"Ow."
"Crazy ponies." thought Mordikaukis, turning his eyes to the templars and acolytes that were now fleeing across the desert. "All of them...crazy. Worse than...other pegasus. Must...take...vacation...and kill them all later!"
Then he burrowed back underground, disappearing from sight.