Rarity hardly waited more than two minutes after Melody left to rise to her hooves and start looking around. She knew she didn’t have a whole lot of time before the siren returned, especially if Rainbow Dash had followed Melody’s arrow to the island. Though Melody was convinced that lowering the barrier was a bad idea, and some part of Rarity was worried that the siren might be horribly right to worry, another part of her, a cocky, confident part, was sure that Equestria could more than handle whatever horrors the islands could throw at it. After all, her and her friends had faced down many menaces before, right? And if somehow that wasn’t enough, Equestria also had four alicorns. They could give it a run for its money, she was sure.

But then again, Tirek had bested them all, even fighting Twilight to a standstill when she had all of the alicorns’ power. It had taken the powerful magic of the Tree of Harmony to defeat him. Rarity didn’t know how powerful this shade of a dark deity was, or if it had somehow made itself a new avatar like Melody had said. But everything she’d ever encountered or fought before was a magical creature or spirit of some kind. Even Discord was a magical aberration more than a literal deity. What if the Ponynesians were right, and they’d somehow summoned part of a true god of darkness and destruction?

Rarity slapped herself across the muzzle and vigorously shook her head. “Now you’re worrying too much, Rarity,” the seamstress muttered to herself. “Too much time reading silly stories. You’re filling your head with nonsense.” Sighing, she started to pace in an attempt to shake those thoughts away. She didn’t need to deal with them right now.

For now, she figured her best way of going about was to assume that they could find some way to get home and contain whatever monstrosity she’d encountered in the oily darkness of the tomb. There wasn’t any point in sitting on her flank and waiting to see if they died or not with the next full moon. They only had this small window to act, and Rarity damn sure wasn’t about to waste it on the words of a worried siren who’d been isolated from the outside world for the past eight decades.

…A worried siren who had eight decades to study the murals and carvings scattered across the islands…

“You’re doing it again, Rarity,” Rarity growled at herself. Huffing, she abruptly stopped her pacing and strode toward the edge of the pool in the cave. Maybe actually doing something instead of idly pacing would get her mind in the right place.

Peering through the murky water, Rarity struggled to make out anything below the glassy surface. While the flickering silver torchlights provided plenty of illumination for the stone walls of the cave, their light didn’t penetrate through the water all that far. Rarity could barely make out the jagged contours of stone descending deep into the water—when her own reflection didn’t obscure the view, at least. Growling, Rarity splashed her hoof into the water, breaking the still mirror on its surface. Normally, she would have loved to spend a few minutes to admire her reflection, but there wasn’t much to admire now. She hadn’t even seen her reflection since the fight with Squall, and she didn’t want to start now. She already knew she looked like a freak with her missing ear and deep scar slicing down across her brow and into her cheek. Add to that the feeling of her ribs poking through her chest and thinning coat, and Rarity figured she could have been mistaken for a victim of war instead of just a marooned survivor.

With some degree of irony, she noted that she probably looked like she would have fit in perfectly with the pirates that had caused all their troubles in the first place.

But, dashing her reflection to pieces at least gave her a brief window to peer a little deeper into the murky waters. The hole in the floor fell down for about a hundred feet before it opened up again, and Rarity thought she could see massive archways lining the bottom. Several holes decorated the stone walls from top to bottom, and Rarity knew it was from one of those that Melody had pulled out the figurine earlier. But then she’d dropped it straight down, and now the dark coloration of the unicorn figurine blended in with the shadows covering the rocky floor. All Rarity needed to retrieve the statuette with her magic was to see it, but she couldn’t even see it right now.

Frowning, Rarity let her magic build on her horn until she’d summoned a light source. Then, just like she’d done with Rainbow in the tomb, she flung the light source into the water. With her hooves practically grasping at the edge of the stone platform, Rarity watched her little ball of light drop down, down, down, illuminating its surroundings as it went. It was then that she noticed the structure seemed like it wasn’t exactly designed to all be underwater; she saw a staircase ringing the edges of the hole, and what looked like the beginnings of other chambers and rooms that abruptly ended when they reached the outside. To Rarity, it looked like the hole in the ground might once have been filled with floors, but they’d collapsed into the rubble lining the bottom a long time ago. It gave the appearance that this temple that Melody lived in was definitely once designed to be inhabitable by the Ponynesians, but had long ago sunk into the ground.

Just before the light hit the floor and fizzled out, however, Rarity thought she saw a glint of obsidian in the basalt rubble. But as soon as she blinked, it was gone. Was that the statuette, all the way down there? She needed to drop another light to be sure.

Before she could, however, she saw something dart into the hole. Green scales reflected some of the light of the cavern, and soon, Rarity saw Melody swimming up to meet her. She barely managed to back away from the water before the siren burst out of the hole with a splash, her cheeks slightly bulged out and her hooves reaching for the edge with an uncomfortable swiftness that Rarity didn’t usually see from the siren. Still, she was surprised to see Melody back so quickly. “Did you find them?” she asked the siren. “Are they on the island?”

Melody nodded quickly, and then lowered her head towards the platform. There, she opened her beak, and a rattled and slimy rainbow pegasus tumbled out of her maw. Grimacing, Melody quickly dunked her muzzle back in the water and rinsed her mouth out. “I don’t like the taste of sweat and feathers,” the siren said. “At least fish scales don’t leave your tongue feeling like it’s covered in dust!”

But Rarity’s attention was already turned to the trembling pegasus lying on the ground in front of her. “Rainbow Dash?!” Rarity exclaimed, bounding over to the blue mare’s side. She slid to her knees and nuzzled the pegasus, paying no mind to the siren saliva covering her coat. “Oh my goodness, I’m so happy to see you!”

“I’m… I’m happy to see you too, Rares…” Rainbow managed, still quite obviously shaken up from the ordeal. She let her weight fall limply against Rarity’s side, and her ruby eyes darted up toward Melody. “I… I think I’ll just… hold my breath, next time…”