...and she didn't fall.
Rainbow's jaw dropped. She stared down at the ocean, watching in blissful shock as the waves drew further and further away. The pegasus was ascending. What's more, her muscles didn't ache from the whole ordeal. If she didn't know better, she'd wager that all of her strength and health had completely returned.
It was due to this numb state of shock that the following outburst startled her so.
“Rainbow! Wait! What about me?!” The voice then shrieked in distress.
Rainbow twirled about, gliding backwards on outstretched wings.
The Tower had sunk beneath the waves. In Rainbow's exhausted vision, she almost thought she could see a flailing figure amidst the collecting foam. Something shrieked, shimmered, and then vanished beneath the waves.
Rainbow bit her lip, drifting limply through the tempestuous winds. Lighting brimmed overhead, and as the flash faded, she sensed a lavender streak beneath her ascending figure.
“Aaaah! Celestia! What's happening?!? I don't understand!”
Rainbow yelped. She twirled in every direction. Just then—with a monster-like groan—the thunderclouds overhead released their moisture. Rainbow felt rain for the first time in weeks, and it was drenching, a veritable wall of water dousing her feathers and weighing her down.
The pegasus struggled to keep aloft. On one hand, she didn't want to plummet into the ocean waves. On the other, she was worried about ascending into the clouds and being fried alive by lightning. All around her, the world pulsed and strobed. Furious thunder only served to deafen her with each drowning minute that lurched by. Not since battling a chaos dragon did Rainbow feel so tiny and helpless.
“Rainbow! Look!”
Wet and hyperventilating, Rainbow's eyes scoured the horizon. Through the thickening monsoon, she saw the distant, bobbing white speck of Yaerfaerda.
“Land! It's land, Rainbow!”
The pegasus blinked. Her head tilted lower.
In the subsequent flashes of lightning, she saw a dark line of sand to the east, flanked by the unmistakable shudder of windswept palm trees. It was a pitifully tiny sneeze of land at best: an island on the border of chaos. Unless her expert eyes were deceiving her, the distance to shore had to have been over five hundred meters.
“Go, Rainbow Dash! Fly!”
Rainbow's lungs heaved. Every breath filled her nostrils with rainwater, and she had to spit the moisture out of her muzzle. “Mfrnnngh... guhhh!” She flapped her sopping wet feathers, fighting against the storm.
The horizon rocked. Yaerfaerda streaked left and right with each tug of her wing muscles.
“You can make it! I know you can!”
Rainbow snarled. Her tail whipped wetly behind her as she thrust forward. The fluid in her ears went wild, and she knew she was plummeting. Soon, her hooves skimmed the turbulent waters, but with several savage flaps of her wings she managed to pull herself up again, gliding ever desperately east.
“Just a little further, Rainbow Dash! You can do it! Come on...”
Rainbow was whimpering at this point. Her vision twitched, drowned by rain and blinded by lightning. It wasn't until the dark waves beneath here were replaced with dark sand that she finally gave in with a gasp.
The mare fell.
When she hit the earth, the impact rocked through her, sending a deliciously numbing jolt through her spine. Rainbow rolled—she didn't know how many times—and came to a rough stop, her wincing muzzle digging up a haphazard trench of wet sand.
“Yes! We made it! Oh my gosh, I-I can't believe how close that was!”
The voice hovered over Rainbow Dash. The pegasus blinked, sensing a streak of lavender through the sand ahead of her, then tracing along her forelimbs... and through them.
“What?! But... but that doesn't make any sense! Rainbow, are you okay? Rainbow?!”
The rain and the noise was too much. Rainbow's eyes rolled back in her head, and the wet world turned black all around her.
“Oh no, Rainbow! Stay with me, please!”
She fell unconscious.
“Stay with—!”