“You are expected.”

“You are late.”

I look at the two guards. They’re both mostly naked, dressed only in thin strips of something like linen wrapped around their hands and calves. They’re don’t seem to have any genitalia, not that I was able to see in the moments before I got a grip on my gawking and moved my gaze to about a decimeter past their heads, and they’re either both of the same sex or they don’t have any significant dimorphism.

Their wings are absolutely enormous. Each of them is pretty near the edge of the entryway, with almost the full three-meter span separating them, but their wings overlap significantly in the center, blocking our path. Their plumage is long and two-toned, each feather half black and half crimson for the Tazi on my left and black-and-indigo for the Tazi on my right, and the feathering isn’t uniform, with different shapes on different parts of the wing. I’m pretty sure it all is very significant, or possibly just implies a bunch of things to an ornithologist about how they fly and what their home environment is.

I’m not an ornithologist, not any kind of biologist, so to me it just looks pretty.

“No rule bars our entry.”

“Is this so?”

Amber and the guards are bickering back and forth, and I don’t really pay any attention to them. If we have to kill them, well, I have a full loadout of Motes and orbs conjured, and that’ll be my likely-unnecessary contribution to the fight. In the meantime, I’m staring at the carvings on the arches.

I recognize some of the wing topology on a macro level, in the sense that I can tell a bird wing from a beetle wing from a bat wing; yes, I spent my years on a spaceship, but it was a spaceship with vast tracts of carefully-nurtured pseudo-nature, and with a complex and deep ecology in those tracts. Butterflies are pollinators, and sure, flowers can be manually pollinated or, more likely, pollinated via simple automata that are very, very carefully built so as not to damage the flowers, but manual pollination is unreasonably labor-intensive on an ecological scale and the “simple” automata are still a huge investment of resources into complex machines that would damage the rest of the ecology. So butterflies, and birds, and likewise the entire range; beetles and other insects, owls, bats, and more.

Well, not the entire range. I glare at one of the images, lost in thought; I still remember mosquitos, and I’m glad that the Spirit’s ecologists didn’t see it necessary to retain them. Their wings are distinctive, and the effects of just the one afternoon are an indelible stain in my memory.

I return my gaze to the carvings. It’s not just that there’s differences in the wing shapes; there are different feathers on different instances of the carvings that are in more detail, carved with what feels like a steadier hand. I’m mostly staring at the bird feathers for a while, taking in the differences between the types; there’s outside feathers and inside feathers, longer ones and shorter ones, different ways they attach to the bone, and I think more sets, and there’s something that’s almost but not exactly like a pattern to which carvings have which feathers in clearer not-exactly-font, but I’m distracted by a tap on my shoulder.

I sort of jolt, and look around. The Tazim that were blocking the entry don’t have their previously-overlapping wings out anymore, and I mean that completely literally; the one’s right wing and the other’s left wing are gone, and they’re standing sort of bow-legged like they’re having trouble balancing. Their other wings are still there, and there’s no signs of struggle or blood, so things are probably fine.

I open my mouth to ask, anyway, not that it’s necessary or necessarily a good idea, but Amber shakes her head minutely and reaches over to gently pinch my lips closed. I might have misunderstood the first gesture, but the second one is unambiguous, and the words fall out of my head anyway as I grab her retreating hand to kiss her palm before releasing it.

We walk through the archway; the guards ignore us, we ignore the guards, and when there’s a gentle whump of displaced air, I turn around and see their wings in full display again. I want to pop my Visor, but we’re still on the move and my party isn’t breaking step, so I keep walking as well.

Past the archway, we’ve entered what seems to be an entry hall on a titanic scale. There are eight archways behind us, ranging from two meters across to eight meters across and from four meters tall to a truly colossal twenty meters tall, and the stone floor we walk on is worked in rough patterns of pathways that weave and merge together. All of the archways I can see out of the corner of my eyes end in solid walls of stone, like there was never an opening or a door, and I take a look behind us; yep, where we were just walking is a flat wall now, decorated with all of the stonework feathers that I had entertained myself with while everyone else talked.

The guards are still there, and one of them turns towards me and winks, which sets me off laughing a little as we walk on. I shake my head at Amber’s raised eyebrow, leaning my head against her shoulder for a moment, and the moment passes.

The entry hall is… strange. Every time I try to estimate its size, I get a wildly different result, all of them titanic; it’s almost like the act of doing any real estimation causes it to grow. For all I know, that’s literally what it’s doing, and I give it up after a bit. It’s enough to know that the eight archway paths merge eventually into one wide one, stonework getting smoother and more elegant as they do so. The carvings are the same geometric tesselations that had decorated the earlier entry corridor adjoining the liminal space, only this time they’re perfect in design and execution; there are no gaps, per se, only tiny regular polygons of negative stone-space among the larger ones, and I have a feeling that’s just to help with footing somehow.

We arrive at the towering gates ahead of us eventually, walking in what rapidly becomes tedious silence. Realistically it’s not exactly a long time, only a few minutes, but it wears on; the flooring loses its ability to hold my interest pretty fast, and I’m left trying to figure out what I should expect, what we should expect.

None of my musings and mullings prepared me for the gates to dissolve into motes of mana, just as I got close enough to start picking out the patterns. There’s a curtain, more of a scrim really, hanging in strips from the ceiling some gargantuan distance above us, and I feel the cold discomfort trickling down the back of my neck as we approach it.

I’ve got a full load of Motes up, I remind myself. I’ve got an overpowered Paladin, a woman out of literal legend, and a woman whose Class quite literally calls her out as a prodigy. I have no reason to believe we’ll be anything but fine, no reason to believe regardless that the Temple is going to pull a fast one by having us walk through curtains into a combat encounter. My pace hitches just the slightest amount anyway, and everyone else slows to adjust, staying in what I recognize as a formation.

When we cross the curtains into the stadium, the sound hits us like a hammer, hard enough that one of my Motes fires to dampen the effect.

“His home the stars and his footsteps crossing the abyss.” It’s an announcer’s voice, and he practically echoes. His voice is booming and vast, with amazing resonance. “He walks the path of the Outsider and swears to forge his own destiny. From beyond the shroud of the Void, please welcome the Runewright, the Magelord, the Outsider… Adam! Levi! James!”

I glance around. My feet kept taking me forwards on inertia despite the roaring of the crowds, and the others are still with me as we make our way towards what’s clearly a stage.

“His path to being present is not a simple one, gentlebeings and savages! He’s recruited one architect-spirit and destroyed another! The Temple itself wants him dead!”

There’s a few dozen people on it, standing in a bunch of clumps. At first, I think it’s eight clumps, but then I look again and see that no, there’s one open space between two of the groups, so that’s one clump for each one of the other pathways we walked down.

“But he’s in luck, because the Lady Herself is who’s around today, and She’s taken a shine to the angle of his sails, and brought him here: to the Tournament of Champions!”

Rei’s group is immediately to our right, and they don’t react, and we don’t react, and everything is supremely awkward as the announcer’s rich voice carries on.