Beatrice woke up feeling distorted, not really remembering falling asleep. The last thing she had remembered was picking up the feather and transforming. The room she was in was cool, but slightly dark and as she looked around, she saw damp leaves and mud. She looked around the walls and saw .. bark? Was she in a tree?
One moment she had been in her apartment building and then she was here. And she remembered something else before that. She looked down at her hands and found them no longer hands. She looked down and saw her own black-and-white speckled beak.
“Aw darn it,” she thought to herself. “It’s happened. I'm a bird."
Suddenly she swiveled to hear what she had neglected to hear that morning, the gentle cooing or fluttering of wings. She didn’t know where she was, but she was pretty sure she knew what where all the birds had gone.
She began to hobble around on her new bird legs down the path of what she could only assume was a tree. At some points she tried flapping her wings to get over certain roots, but it was a bit of an awkward process, as Beatrice had never been a bird before. She understood the basics as humans would understand: flap wings, then fly. But it appeared to be a bit more complicated than that when it came to actual practice.
She eventually stumbled outside to a clearing of trees that loomed over her and stopped. The first thing she noticed up in the trees, on the ground, tucked into crevices on branches were hundreds, thousands of birds. And they were all standing there, anxiously looking this way and that as if they were waiting for someone.
There were two ravens stood a part on a branch nearby. They were surveying the other birds as if they were sentries or lieutenants.
“Thank you for coming tonight,” said a familiar voice from a form that was taking shape from behind a tree nearby. “It so great to finally meet you all.”
Beatrice felt shock then a general disappointment as a man in his late sixties with graying hair, stepped up beside the two ravens. But she knew exactly who he was, Blake, the crazy old man in 6S that knew everything about birds. And now, she had a suspicion why.
Slowly Beatrice nestled herself in the crowd between some outliers so that she wouldn’t look like she was any more abnormal than the scene before her.
“Tonight is a momentous occasion and I’m so happy for you all to be here. On Tuesday, Tyr’s day of all days. Today’s the day we are going to conquer this city.”
There was a great cooing and excited flapping, but Beatrice was in shock. She had known Blake was eccentric when she had offered to help him take care of his special birds for him, but she hadn’t known he was up to this.
“Oh no,” thought Beatrice, “What do I do?”
