My momentum vanished, leaving my standing still on a solid surface. I was unable to see, still blinded by the light.

All of a sudden, waves of sound broke through the ringing in my ears.

"For the Nectar!!"

It was the roar of a crowd. Their words echoed from high and around.

My nostrils tightened. I smelled birds' droppings, feather dust, and sunbaked stone, along with a whiff of dulcet sweetness hanging somewhere near.

I blinked and rubbed my eyes, only to stop when I realized things were amiss.

For one: I was wearing fingerless white leather gauntlets. For another: both the hands the gauntlets were on and the arms attached to them weren't the least bit human. My fingers were tipped in short, sharp claws and backed in rugged, yellow-brown scales. The same scales continued down the back of my hands and forearms.

The rest was feathers. Very, very pretty feathers, overall green in hue, but with a gorgeous iridescence that was honestly kind of spellbinding to behold. This gave me a sinking feeling that the stiff narrow thing blocking the middle of my vision was a beak.

I also had some kind of collar around my neck.

Feeling a disturbance on my back, I reached back to find—oh!

It looked like I had wings now.

Anxious, I ran my clawed fingers through my head feathers, taking care to avoid my eye.

It seemed I'd been betwEfE'd.

Well, at least I still had a face this time around.

The me of two weeks ago would have been totally freaked out by this transformation. The me of now, on the other hand, was mostly concerned with not dying.

I blinked again, and the rest of my vision cleared.

The crowd cheered again: "For the Nectar!!"

The noise hit me like a sledgehammer.

I looked around, mystified, and more than a little bit shocked.

I was inside a colosseum unlike any other. It was a hollow tower, and—if I had to guess—broader than a city block. Alternating layers of rows of stands and sections of bare stone banded the structure's inner walls. Massive holes opened in the sections of plain stone in between the stand-layers, showing views onto green horizons and blue skies. The stands were positively abuzz with movement. Rubies and emeralds glistened in the sunlight where they weren't covered by the shadows of the crown-like ceiling towering high overhead.

No: they weren't gems. They were twEfE.

Latecomers zipped in through the sky-holes, rushing to take their seats. Armored guards hovered up to break up squabbles wherever they broke out.

It was amazing to watch. There was just one, teeny tiny problem: I wasn't in the stands. Oh no, I was down in the arena.

Oof.

I was going to have to do some more fighting, wasn't I?

"Son of a biscuit…" I muttered. I really wasn't in the mood for more fighting.

Unfortunately, the audience very much was.

A jocular voice clanged through the arena. "And here come our last contestants, folks! Hold on to your nectariats, things are about to get wild in the Cage!"

The crowd went nuts. "For the Nectar! For the Nectar!"

The birds jumped up and down, many fluttering directly over their seats. They raised their arms up and out, holding them at an angle with their fists tightly closed. Iridescent feathers shimmered in the afternoon sunlight as the audience swung their arms in waves.

Sweet deliciousness trickled through stone channels in front of each row of seats, giving the audience something to lick up. Many of the twEfE held drink containers, some of them almost comically large.

"Get ready to rumblllllllle!" the announcer said

The people pumped their fists and cheered. "Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!"

My eyes finally made it to the bottom of the arena, where I had the misfortune of currently standing. The lowest ring of seats surrounded the combat floor, though several body-heights above the ground. The arena's floor was tessellated in snub-edged triangles spread among a lattice of hexagonal tiles. The ones I was standing on were warm beneath the soles of my shoes.

At least a dozen twEfE warriors stood in the arena, more or less evenly spaced from one another, and everyone—myself included—decked out with pale leathery armor and matching helmets. Worse, we were armed to the beaks, with daggers, knives, short-swords, and naginata-like polearms, all with blades that glistened in the sunlight.

It was hard not to notice the serrations at the tips of their beaks, which made visible sawtooth ridges. I kept flashing back to documentary footage of packs of Benundi raptors rending flesh from their prey, spraying blood every which way, reminding me of why I disliked free-for-alls.

Three fountains stood in the arena, positioned at the tips of an imaginary triangle. Each one had to be at least twice my height, and had been carved from stone in the shape of giant chanterelles, or something near enough to that. A mild breeze carried more of the sweet scent away from them.

It made me hungry.

The announcer bellowed: "Let the battle begin!"

I gulped. All thoughts of food left my mind as wings buzzed into action all around me, like strings setting off in a fugue. The vibrations made my skull thrum. As I was not at all used to this sort of thing, I kind of just stood in place looking around in astonishment while the warriors shouted battle cries and took flight.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

The war cries of twEfE braves are not something you easily forget—or, for that matter, survive. It's like the shrieking whistle of an approaching bomb, only it bolts across the sky in thick swarms that move so quickly, it makes it seem like they've already gutted you like a fish before the sounds even reached your ears.

The fight was almost incomprehensible to me. I could barely follow it. Streaks of iridescence dashed through the air, crackling with bolts of fire and lightning. Laser beams materialized out of nowhere and swept across the arena, frying everything in their path, while barriers sparked into existence whenever a wayward attack got too close to the audience.

Lights flashed from one of the combatants with stun grenade intensity. Weird sounds shrieked through the air, making my head spin.

The first body fell, smacking onto the floor a couple feet away from me, leaking out blood. The bird had been electrocuted, burned, and impaled seemingly all at once. A spear stuck up from his chest.

So, I did the smart thing and ran like heck.

Overhead, copies of twEfE flickered in and out of existence, warriors' clones surrounding one another. Some of the twEfE moved so quickly, I could have sworn they're teleporting.

I freely admit I screamed in terror all throughout this.

Firebolts charred the stone as I ran. Electricity sparked through raining blood. Bones crunched as the next few dead bodies plummeted to the ground.

Nothing makes you turn around like a burning corpse suddenly smacking into the ground just two feet in front of you.

I ran on pure adrenaline, or whatever its avian equivalent⁠ was.

Not knowing what to do I picked the nearest fountain and ran for it, arms pumping, wings flailing behind me.

I could barely make out the gaps between my heartbeats.

I ducked in cover just in time to dodge a downward-aimed magic laser beam blasting at the nearby tile. Bits of charred bone and armor stuck out from the middle of the deep black stain the magic left behind. I crouched low to the ground, pressing my back against the fountain's narrow base as I huddled in its shadow, only to flinch as part of my back scraped against the stone.

Or, wait a minute, I thought, is that…?

Shrill screams hacked through the air overhead. They were the kind of noises that made you really, really wish you were somewhere else.

I hunched down, unabashedly cowering. My dainty bird toes scraped their short claws along the ground. Noticing that, I realized my feet felt like they were twice as long as they should have been because they pretty much were.

Birds—and twEfE—were digitigrade; they walked on their toes.

Also—ugh—the way the base of the fountain pressed against my wings made it feel like someone was giving me a wedgie.

Cowering gave me time to think. While the combatants overhead were busy engaging in hummingbird violence, I tried to make sense of where I was and—just as importantly—why I was.

Barring some kind of inexplicable mistake, I had to assume that I was inside the K'rrt's Prison, or at least what d'zd lore claimed was supposed to be their Prison. That being said, if I went with the pattern established by my transformations into a krummholtz and a d'zd, the fact that I'd been turned into a twEfE meant that the Prison was an Archive, just not a d'zd Archive.

Obviously, this made no sense. The K'rrt were supposed to be here, the good ones, anyhow.

"Well, folks, would you look at that?" the announcer said, "Number Seven is kwekek!"

Did he mean me?

Then the crowd started yelling all sorts of rude, angry, nasty, and just generally very hurtful things, confirming that, yes, the announcer had meant me.

"And the people have spoken!" the announcer said, with hostile smugness. "Let's get our wobbly warrior back into the air!"

All of a sudden, I heard stone scraping against stone. A moment later, something caught hold of my wings and started tugging me down.

I looked up.

"Fudge!"

The fountain was sinking!

Tensing my thighs, I pushed off the ground, away from the fountain, pulling a tail feather in the process.

I squeaked in pain.

Then things got worse.

SHWING!

A naginata hurtled down toward me. I barely managed to dodge it. The weapon broke as it hit the stone; its blade nicked sparks.

CRUNCH!

A twEfE hit the ground just to the right of me. A couple seconds later, his served, blood-dripping wings came into view, slowly lilting downward.

Then everything shook, and then the ground beneath my feet started to rise.

The snub-edged triangle tile I was on shot up the quickest. Terrified, I sprinted forward, toe claws clicking on the stone. A gust of wind ruffled my feathers right as the triangle rocketed upwards.

I leapt off the edge, toward the next tile. My foot hit the tile sooner than I'd been expecting, which nearly caused me to stumble, but I managed to keep my balance with the help of a panicked flutter of my wings.

I caught a glimpse of what lurked over the edge.

Fricassee me!

There wasn't any ground pushing the tiles up. The darn things were levitating into the air, revealing a sea of rusty spikes waiting beneath them. The hexagonal tiles in between the triangles stayed at ground level, forming posts to hop to and from, and unlike the tiles, the posts didn't seem to be moving.

On the one hand, that made them a much more attractive place for me to wait from. On the other hand, I really sucked at platforming games.

With a groan, I ran as fast as I could, skipping from tile to tile until I got ahead of the advancing rise and reached the arena's edge. The tiles directly against the wall hadn't moved, so I could rest here, even if it made me a sitting duck.

The crowd broke out in shrieks of delight as a profusion of explosions—fireballs, force blasts—slammed into the wayward tiles, launching blood, guts, and broken weapons every which way.

"Herald's Nectar, would you look at that!" the announcer yelled. "I guess I should have bet my extra nectar supplies on Number Three, instead of the favorite! Damn, look at him go!"

I turned and looked up.

Whoa.

A dual-wielding badass was speeding through the mêlée like a ninja, with a small knife in each hand. He moved faster than any of the other twEfE.

I couldn't help but stare as I ran, though it did help that the tiles at the arena's edge weren't flying into the air.

It was hard not to gawk.

"Ninja" was absolutely the right descriptor for this guy. He attacked his rivals with what could only be described as extreme prejudice. With every blow, he'd leave a knife embedded in his target's soft parts, and then blast them away just by flaring his palm open. The warrior fired blazing fireballs in dazzling colors to keep his enemies occupied as his knives flew out of their victims and back into his hands.

He painted the rusty spikes in the blood of his foes. He moved, he stabbed; he blasted, he stabbed. He blocked enemy attacks with walls of energy. He stole several lightning bolts and redirected them back at their casters.

Three fighters tried to gang up on him, only for him to scream and blast them back with a wave of force that knocked one of them down onto the spikes in a fatal impalement and sent the other two flying, slamming them into the edges of passing levitating tiles.

I had to pick up the pace just to dodge all the bodies.

A fourth twEfE flew at the ninja from behind and slammed him with a wave of color. The ninja screamed in pain as his knives glowed white hot in his hands.

He threw them to the ground and flew up, but not before his assailant lacerated his chest with a swing of their serrated beak.

I ran along the stretch of tiles at the arena's edge. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the glowing knives explode into dozens of shards that flew around like molten wasps.

A second later, suddenly, a burning pain lanced my side and knocked me down. Screaming, I reached out and grabbed the edge of the tile jutting from the wall, and held on for dear life. I pulled and pulled, and by some agonizing miracle, managed to bring myself back onto the tile.

I reached for the source of the pain on my side, only to yelp as my hand touched something unbearably hot.

I looked down.

I hadn't been imagining things. The ninja had in fact blown up his knives into shards. One of the shards was embedded in me, and it was too hot to the touch for me to pull it out!

Desperate, I pulled myself forward with my arms, dragging myself along the ground. The knife fragment in me burned and burned. I could smell my own flesh being cooked—and I wasn't the only one.

All around, the remaining fighters fumbled and yelled, desperately trying to extract the knife fragments smoldering in their bodies.

The ninja buzzed up to the middle of the arena, raised his arms and beak to the sky, and let out a yell: "Etwe-E, father of storms! Lend me your wrath!"

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