It's Not That Simple
“If there was a way out of these islands, I would have figured it out by now,” Melody said. “I’ve been here for so long, I’ve searched every nook and cranny of the seabed. There is no way to get past the barrier.”
“Not get past the barrier,” Rarity corrected her. “My friends and I think we discovered the source of the barrier, and we think we know how to lower it. All we need to do are collect four statuettes and put them in a shrine beneath one of the islands. Once we do that…” She hesitated and shrugged. “Well, to be fair, I don’t know exactly what will happen when we do that, or if we need to do anything else. But we’re all but certain that will help us take down the barrier and send us all home.”
Rarity looked around, and her heart momentarily dropped when she realized she hadn’t seen any of her belongings since waking up in Melody’s cave. “Speaking of which, what happened to my belongings? I had one of the statuettes on me when I passed out on the beach. Did you take it, or did you leave it behind?”
To her surprise, Melody wasn’t smiling or excited at the prospect of taking down the barrier and leaving the island. In fact, she appeared to be quite the opposite: frowning and concerned. “You can’t take down the barrier,” she said.
“We… can’t?” Rarity asked. “Were we wrong about the figurines? What do you mean?”
“I mean that you shouldn’t.” The siren covered her muzzle with her hoof and looked down into the water. “Do you even understand why this barrier is around these islands? What exactly is going on here?”
Rarity’s ears fell a bit, and suddenly a finger of worry entered her mind. “No?” she said. “I don’t… we just want to go home.”
Melody sighed and sank down into the water. “I’ve… had a lot of time to explore these islands and learn what I can about what’s going on here. Of course, it’s hard to get to everything because of how locked away it is and, well, my sheer size. But there’s an entire temple under the atoll here. This cave is just one chamber of it.”
Rarity looked around and realized that made sense. The signs were there that the cavern had been shaped by pony hooves, however improbable it seemed. And then the bedroom she’d woken up in was definitely not sized for a siren. Rarity had to wonder how Melody even got her into that room in the first place and took care of her, given her great size. “There’s more to it than this?”
“Yes. Deeper in the water. This is just one of the few air-filled chambers inside.” Melody shook her head. “But there’s also murals down there. The ponies that lived here didn’t have a written language, I don’t think, but they used pictures to tell stories. It’s how I learned so much; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to understand anything, not nearly enough to know that lowering the barrier is a bad idea.”
“And why is it a bad idea?” Rarity asked. “Why is it a bad idea to get rid of the single thing stopping us from going home?”
“Because there won’t be a home for you to go back to if you take it down,” Melody said. “Everything you know will come to an end. Everything.”
Rarity thought back to her experience in the tomb when she recovered the unicorn figurine. Pitch blackness, a being that seemed to be made from the absolute dark itself, a voice that seared through her very being. Enchanted, almost zombified ponies, and unfathomably powerful and old magic saturating the air. There had undoubtedly been something evil and horrifying in that tomb, and if Melody could swim to the islands but not leave, Rarity started to realize that the barrier surrounding the islands might have been more something to contain them and whatever dark secrets they held.
“I found something inside a tomb beneath one of the islands of the archipelago,” Rarity said. “It was like… pure darkness given form. It talked to me, talked through me, like it was everywhere. Something far greater than me.” She looked up at Melody and swallowed hard. “Is that… is that what the islands are trying to contain?”
“You opened the tomb?” Melody’s scaly face paled. “If you have… then we’re already out of time.”
“Just tell me what’s going on,” Rarity said. “Maybe there’s something we can do. We just don’t know anything; we’re clueless and stumbling about trying to find our way home.”
Melody lowered her eyes and gathered her thoughts for a few moments. “I… don’t know if this is all correct,” she said. “I’ve only had faded pictures to study for a long time. But this place used to be filled with ponies until a seven or eight hundred years ago. They had two gods: a sun god and a moon god. They lived in harmony and ruled the world together, but something changed.
“Some of the followers of the moon god tried to summon their god into this world,” Melody continued. “They sought to give him a physical form so he could rule the islands and the world in eternal darkness. They were stopped by the cult of the sun god. What once was a unified island chain of ponies split in two between sun and moon, and there was a raging civil war. In the end, the followers of the sun god won, but they’d decimated their population—and they only interrupted the cult of the night.”
“Interrupted?” Rarity asked. “What do you mean?”
Melody shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly sure. I didn’t know what it meant at first. But from what you told me, they succeeded in drawing some essence of their moon god into this world. He then created an avatar to wage war and gain power in his name, but the avatar was slain, its horn separated from its body, and its body buried somewhere else. But they never banished the essence of the moon god. He’s still here. But what they could do is contain it.”
The siren gestured around the chamber. “I think they used whatever population they still had left to perform a powerful ritual to isolate these islands from the rest of the world. They created figurines and imbued them with the power of the four pony races, then scattered them across the islands. Those figurines maintain a barrier that keeps everything that enters these islands trapped inside. They don’t want the darkness of the moon god to go free and swallow the world.”
“What happened to them all?” Rarity asked. “We only found bones at the sun temple, and there were a lot of bodies in the tomb at the archipelago. They didn’t… you know. Did they?”
“Maybe,” Melody said, shrugging. “But they didn’t last very much longer afterwards. They only had enough time to put these murals onto their existing temples, and then they just… died out. The minotaurs are much more recent, I think. They’ve only been here for a few centuries, maybe. They came long after the ponies here all died out.”
Melody reached into a crack in the stone and pulled out the figurine of the unicorn. “Getting all four of these will lower the barrier and stop containing the dark spirit that’s been trapped here. If you do that… the rest of the world might very well fall to it, too. So I can’t let you have this.” The siren frowned, and she dropped the figurine into the water. Her draconian eyes focused on Rarity, and the unicorn shrank back a little. “If you get these figurines… if you bring them all to that shrine… everything you know will die.” She swallowed hard, and added, “Including us.”
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the timing is very itneresting that nearly the same time as Nightmare Moon. But Melody is wrong. the world is doomed if Rainbow and Rarity don't get back beign EOH bearers.
Well, shoot.
So Melody would rather doom Rarity (and the others, by extension) to a life of imprisonment and almost certain death, instead of letting her pursue the goal of breaking the ward and saving everyone, albeit with potential apocalyptic risk?
What a real sweetheart she is, good intentions or no. Rarity said herself that the tomb's been opened and disturbed; what does the siren have to gain by impeding Rarity? They'll all be dead if they don't do something, and once the survivors have been dealt with, the moon god will use his undead army to free itself anyway.
8842513
But Rarity, and by extension Melody, don't know about anything getting out yet. Perhaps with the update from Dash and company a better plan can be made. Also, Equestria has four adult Alicorns. This Moon Avatar done goofed.
8842557
I'm aware of this, which is why I'm pretty sure Melody will have a change of heart later. After all, the temple's submerged in the atoll; Melody would be the best equipped to navigate it in search of the last figurine.
Well, shit
Melody, sweetie, I appreciate your concern, but I don’t think you realize who you’re talking to. These ponies can handle some Eldritch monster. Besides, with the zombies on the loose, the figurines will be found and returned to the map eventually. You’re just delaying the inevitable.
"Darling, no offense but 'saving the world' is pretty much my job description. Much happened in Equestria in the last few years, and we have four Alicorns now. Do believe me when I tell you that things won't be nearly as dire as you believe."
Oh, so it's just a monster, then? Pfft, pretty sure they can handle a monster or two.
So, it's only a fragment of their evil moon god.
Yeah, drop the barrier, round up the girls, tell Luna someone's stepping on her shine, Harmonize up and smack it down like it's Tirek while Luna plays soccer with its horn for trying to take over the night.
Ooops...
Double oops...
The oops had been tripled!
Such a plot twist! Sure not entirely unexpected, but to have it confirmed...
Seriously, they are fucked now.
Should she tell him exactly what she did in the temple? Including how she accidentally gave her blood to the horn?
Okay but you're going to die either way, trapped in a tropical snow globe with Notmare Moon. So the best course of action would be to hold on to the statuettes for now, since at this point you're either killing the boss or dying trying.
8845562
Notmare Moon... such puns should be... pun-ished