( Requested by xXMarkiplierForeverXx on Quotev)

For this one, I decided to take a bit of my personal story and combine Darkiplier with it!

You, the reader, are portrayed as a stone-hearted, winged competitor for an underground colosseum you never wanted to take part in. You know the pain of defeat and have yet to be acquainted with death, but with every battle you win your broken soul is weighed down with unbearable guilt.

(Besides your wings and legs, you can design your own demon. Share what you imagine him/her to be like in the comments!)

You've been here for years. Your kind is a popular source of entertainment for underground fights. Of course, you never really wanted to be here. Why would you want to kill other demons for other species' entertainment?

Demon. A commonly misunderstood name. The human definition of demonic is completely different from the race itself. Demons are a powerful species that value trading, magic, and for the most part, honesty.

Humans have got the bargaining part right, but not much else.

You stare out from your cell, (your animalistic/humanoid) (hands/paws/talons) gripping the bars. The bars shimmered greenish-blue; they are a glasslike material that could not be broken by anything. It is commonly used for fetters, shackles, and other kinds of bindings that not only prevented movement, but abilities linked to necromancy.

Necromancy, you ask? While most species call it 'magic', demons have, from the beginning, called it necromancy, which often gives them a bad reputation among other species that knew necromancy as an evil form of magic.

Anyways, beyond your lightbulb-shaped cell, you watch as the stall across from you is being cleaned out. You let out a sorrowful sigh, shaking your head. Another demon has probably been kidnapped today. You remember how afraid you were, the feeling of loneliness, disgust, and panic so strong you'd thrown up after your first fight. Sadly, your first fight had also been your first kill, and before then you didn't have a speck of blood on your (hands/paws/talons/hooves).

"Y/N."

You look up to the sound of your name, your (E/C) eyes glittering dangerously. As is common in underground colosseums, simple servants made of metal that are devoid of souls care for the demons in the prison. They are disposable, while a being with life is not.

Two servants stare at you, a massive cart behind them, plumes of steam rising from the six compartments in it. It's mealtime, and luckily for you, your cell isn't too far in the back. When you get your food, it's still warm. And, not only that, but you are a two-star fighter. You get to pick what you wanted, but the differences are tiny.

There's one problem, though.

"Mixed meat with berries or vegetables?" the one closest to you asks, its monotonous voice flat and indifferent.

"Berries," you mumble, and a third servant walks around from the back to a compartment in the middle. It opens the lid and bends down, bringing a medium-sized tray out. With a metal ladle, he scoops a mess of berries and meat that have been smashed together and mixed onto your tray.

That problem, by the way, is in the food itself.

You watch as the servant opens a hatch in the gate and slides the tray across the floor and to your feet.

"Enjoy your meal," it says, and they continue. You say nothing in return, and bend down. You begin eating, swallowing the sick feeling you have as you half-slurp half-chew the slop you've been given.

Remember the mixed meat part?

You shudder at the reminder. The meat was a mix of animals and slain demons. Your own kind. Of all the things you've had to get used to, cannibalism was one you knew you would never accept. You have heard that the bodies themselves were stuffed and sold, and the meat inside used for food, but you don't know if that's true or not.

Most days, you skip mealtimes. That was an option, although you wouldn't get fed for another four days. Water was replenished daily. But tonight? Tonight you couldn't skip.

You have a fight tonight, and you don't intend on dying quite yet. You needed your strength.

/_-|-_

You (growl/hiss/nicker) as the platform you're chained to is lifted by metallic servants. Demons aren't trusted to walk on their own, considering their physical prowess is usually, usually, immense. So, they are transported to the arena via platforms, which are made of the same glass-like material as their bindings. From what you remember of the material, it is extremely expensive and rare. You don't know exactly how wealthy the people running the colosseum are, but you know that they much be as rich as a king or queen.

The cell door swings open, and you are carried out into a wide hallway filled with other cells just like your own. You've memorized almost every demon along the way at this point, and the ride there would be pretty boring if you knew you weren't on your way to a deathmatch.

You lay impatiently on your platform, your tail flicking anxiously. You never could control your nerves before a fight; though it stopped you from being tortured - that's what happens when you refuse to fight or lose a fight - you still hadn't fully accepted the fact that you were fighting your own kind for entertainment purposes, even after nearly three decades of being stuck underground.

The hallways curved and branched off in various directions. You had memorized the route to the arena after years of being carried down them. About ten minutes pass before you are brought through an indestructible door and into a large room with a gate leading out to the arena. The servants sat your platform down in the middle before scurrying out, the last one slamming the door behind it.

You sigh and sit up, stretching your back. Before long you begin to feel a familiar buzz around the places where the unbreakable material is holding you to the platform. A buildup of energy causes you to be lightly zapped, but right after you feel it the dull glow within the chain fades, and it unhooks from the fetters (and shackles), which are still glowing.

You stand up and stretch out your legs, tail, and your wings, rolling your head from one side to the other. Your joints crack as you shake yourself, sand and dust flying from your (scales/fur/skin/feathers). You stretch out your wings and flap them a bit. You haven't been able to unfold your slightly damaged wings since your last fight, which was nearly three weeks ago.

You face the door to the arena, narrowing your eyes. You can see your opponent in the middle; a strange, two-legged demon with snake-like black skin and white quills along his back and tail. You begin to think that his back is armored and his underbelly isn't. He has a short muzzle, but as he roars to the excited crowd, you can see his overgrown teeth glittering in the light. His legs are short but extremely muscular. He looks fast.

You snort. You will be faster.

"And our next contender..." You can hear the announcer, his charming voice belonging to a young human male. You've seen him before, standing on the balcony.

As you stride up to the gate, it pulls up into the wall to let you out. You give a shake of your head as you enter the light of the colosseum and raise your wings high in a display of dominance and confidence, neither of which are truly

"(Y/N)!" the announcer exclaims, and the crowd cheers wildly.

To get the crowd excited, you let out a (roar/howl/yowl) that rattles through the arena. As you've learned, this usually makes a demon look like they're ready for a fight, or even eager for one, and gives them an aura of confidence. Your contender hisses at you, shaking his quills shaking together in a threat.

The announcer wastes no time. "FIGHT!"

The demon before you hisses and swings his tail at you, quills shooting out from their places and hurtling towards you. You jump into the air, flapping wildly.

While most pass you by in a blur, two dig into your flesh; one on your shoulder, and one at the base of your tail. The humans' cheering escalates greatly, muffling your (growl/hiss/bark/scream/yowl) of frustration at yourself. Pain, over the years, had become dull to you, and the regeneration powers of a demon were far greater than most species.

You dive down at him, your wings carrying you with ease. You dart away as quills come flying up at you, swerving left and right to dance around them. You manage to miss them, looking over your shoulder to examine the demon.

You can see quills just beginning to poke through again, beginning to regenerate.

His attack has a cooldown time, just as you'd expected.

A plan came to mind. Hopefully, it would work.

You flew up as far as you could, feeling the buzz of the invisible shield that kept demons and audience members separate. You flapped up to it before leaning back, folding your wings at your sides and diving down towards him. Air rushes past your face, making your eyes water and your surroundings blur. You continue to plummet down at breakneck speed. Right as he throws his quills at you, you force yourself to the left, narrowly missing the quills-

One shoots overhead and tears a hole in your ear. You wince as you feel the sharp sting, but you continue.

You fly over the demon as if on a swing, your wings growing tired as you continue to draw out his quills. More hit you, one on your side, just below the skin of your neck, but you know you must keep going.

The demon growls with frustration before letting out a roar and arching his back, sending the last of his quills in every direction. You dive down through a hole in the wave of little daggers, one's sharp edge grazing along your wing but not quite hitting you. He hisses and arches his back again.

To his surprise, there are no quills left to be shot.

Panic pales his visage just as you slam into his side, knocking him right off his talons. Your theory was proven correct; as your (claws/talons dig into his flesh) (hooves strike his body) you find that his back is indeed covered in thick, leathery armor, and his underside is soft. Before you can act on your discovery, his back feet kick you off of him, and hard. You roll along the sand, struggling to regain your footing. A spray of sand jumps out from under you as you slide onto your feet, sending sandy dust into the air before you (hiss/yowl/bark/nicker/growl) at your opponent. You go off at a sprint, but he's ready for you. He leaps at you, his quills not yet regenerated, and almost knocks you over. You duck under his dark body and jump up into him, the collision knocking you both off balance. You grip onto him as his back hits the arena floor.

Before his talons can shred your body to pieces, you (grab onto his legs with your claws/talons) (bite his leg) and tug as hard as you can. You hear a pop come from his leg as it becomes limp, and he screams in pain.

Cheering and booing grow louder from the crowd, his fans crying out with disappointment and your fans yelling victoriously. He's lashing out with his talons now, wiggling to try and get away from you.

"No!" he screams. "No, no, please! Just knock me out, please, just knock me ou-"

You snarl viciously, and you end the fight with a swift kick to the head. He yelps, blood seeping out from his mouth. He's bitten his tongue. You continue to kick him until his body goes limp.

Dead? No. Just unconscious.

"And Y/N wins the fight!"

You look up into the crowd as cries of disdain become louder than cheers. They wanted a brutal slaughter, not a knock-out. Guilt plagues you; you know that he will face forty-eight hours of punishment for the loss, but the fewer that die the fewer demons the humans above you require for battle, and more demons can live free, happy lives outside the colosseum.

/_-|-_

You spit the last quill you can reach out of your mouth, letting it fly to the foot of a cell gate. You're close to your cell now. You do and don't look forward to the extra plate of food you might be given, or the higher 'quality meat' it would be. You do look forward to, however, what might be the upgrading of your cell.

If you recall, you are a two-star fighter. It means you're not too bad, but you're definitely not the audience's first pick. You've been winning many battles for the past few months, and you've been expecting an upgrade to three-stars lately. That means you'll be given a larger, better cell on a higher floor. You were sure that it would still be made of the same frustratingly and unbelievably indestructible, dry-mud material. These walls could be scratched, cracked, carved into, anything. But they would never break. You remember how hard you'd tried to take down the whole floor on your first day, and you only ended up hurting yourself.

As one of the servants leave your platform to open your cell, you hear the door of the cell behind you suddenly being pound against.

It was the one that was empty. You turn your head, looking into the cell.

A demon stands there, looking enraged. It appears to be male. He is about ten feet tall, give or take a few inches, and the left half of his body is white while the other is black. On the black side of his face, his eye is a striking shade of blue, and on the white side, he has a fire-red eye. His tail, which is a swirl of the two colors, is long and silky, like a horse's tail that has a bit more movement. His long ears, which are tipped with purple, are pressed against the back of his head as he pounds against the cell with his black and pink bird-like feet. His body is that of a canine, like a wolf.

When he turns away, dismayed by his futile attempts to break down the door, you can see that on the black half of his body there are glowing blue dapple-markings along his back that are tinted green, like ice with a greenish glow under it, and on his white half there are red dapple-markings that glow like fire. His dapples light up his dark cell. On his back legs, which are normal wolf legs, there are also glowing markings that are instead curved stripes, like splashes of water. You can see the glowing purple tips of the hairs on his tail giving off a fainter glow, as well.

You watch him indifferently; you've seen more exciting-looking demons in your lifetime at the colosseum; the red and white, black and blue of his coat wasn't an uncommon coloration. But, to give him some credit, his glowing markings were pretty cool.

As he paces around his cell, looking more angry than afraid, you see that he has tufts of fur behind his paws and claws, like the feathers of a horse. They, too, are silky like his tail and glow with purple-tipped hairs.

But, you are pulled away from the sight, taken into your cramped cell. Your platform is set down in the middle of the sandy, dirty floor before the metal servants scurry away. Your chains connected to the platform melt back into the shackles, but new ones begin to materialize, your fetters (and shackles) tethered together by these new chains. The fetters (and shackles) themselves grow thinner again as their own material is used to make the new chain. You shake yourself and stay on your platform; there's nothing worth standing for.

"Hey!"

The voice is distorted but obviously male. It sounds as though it's been split up, and it's echoing strangely. You don't quite care; it doesn't concern you.

"Hey! The whatever-you-are with the wings!"

Well. Apparently, it did concern you.

You crane your neck to look over your shoulder, your eyes resting on the multicolored eyes of the demon across from you.

"Where am I?" he asked.

You sighed and stood, hopping off your platform. "You're in an underground colosseum."

"Okay," he said. "Now, what am I?"

You frown. "What do you mean, 'what am I'? You're a demon like the rest of us."

"Well, I wasn't a demon before!" he hisses, sitting in front of the door to his cell. You sit a few feet away from your gate, looking at him with a slightly cocked head.

"So, you're a shifter?" you ask.

"What do you mean?" he asked slowly.

"A shifter," you repeat, waiting for him to catch on. He doesn't. "You know. A demon who can shapeshift into a human."

"I am human," he tells you. "Maybe not a normal one, but I am still human."

"You don't look like a human to me," you say, amused.

"Listen," he growls impatiently. "I was human. I had my own business to tend to. Then, I wake up with shackles over my wrists in a room. They changed my body."

Your raise your eyebrow, but it's more disbelieving than confused. "They... changed you."

"Yes," he says irritably. "It was agonizing. It took... I don't know, possibly hours?"

If they changed him... did that mean they were changing others, too? Were they forcing the shift between human and demon? Or, was he just messing with her? Was he delusional? You had many, many questions.

"Do you remember anything before that?" you ask.

"No," he says. "No, I don't remember anything before that. I... I don't even remember what I was doing when I was taken."

You stare down at your feet for a second, thinking deeply. What could this mean?

"What's your name?"

You are pulled from your thoughts by his voice, and you tilt your head back up to look at him.

"Y/N," you reply. "You?"

He sighs, shifting his feet. "Darkiplier. My name is Darkiplier."