Wanderings bring the fledgling through the wartorn depths to an unwalled hall. An immense cathedral’s vaulted ceiling houses disembodied figures of leering demons, righteous angels, and rotting gods. Pillars start near the ground as solid marble and fade into transparent glassy blues that disappear before reaching the heights they should uphold. Eviscerated corpses drip down every column and balcony, sprawl in alcoves and over altars half-hardened into reality, and form an immense ring of viscera and broken banners around the negative space of pale blue tiling where a black-clad figure stands.

The woman in the black dress turns smoothly and utters a single sharp challenge.

“Who are you?”

The seeker bristles, and steps forward to prove her courage. She makes herself see that the sick jitters spilling from her belly to her dizzy legs are just adrenaline. “I am Her servant!”

“Alright.” The human’s thumb shunts her long, wicked blade forward an inch from its scabbard. “If I cut Her down, who are you?”

“YOU?!” the seeker screams. “HA! AS IF YOU COULD! YOU’RE ONLY HUMAN–“

Her throat constricts. It’s full of a clawing heat-drinking unspeakable nothing.

The other's sonorous voice drifts through the rotten twilight to the seeker. “You’re nothing but the vessel of your mistress. Your mistress is nothing but the negation of your vessel’s emptiness. You’re mutual reflections of nothing–even less than empty.”

Her pale hand settles on the sword-grip of condensed shadows by her side. “I’ll ask again: who are you?”

“I…” Silence drags. The fledgling stands torn. She should invoke her mistress, call to Her strength, Her gifts, Her nature. But the challenger’s evil, emptying ideas burrow deeper even as the unspeakable nothing abandons her mouth. If she can’t speak about herself without mentioning her mistress… but what would she say… and the silence drags, and it’s turning into nothing, and her answer is about to be nothing. She gnashes her fangs and screams in rebellious rage. “I’m the one who’s going to kill you!”

A low gust stirs the human’s black gown. Her right foot glides forward. Its black boot kisses the blood-stained stonework beneath. Her pale hand settles on the sword-grip at her side, and her body’s coiling inward changes the play of light over the slayer’s features.

The seeker stands smitten by the terrible omen, the flash of an azure eye from the shadowed, sculpted contours under the human’s wind-surfing black hair. A glimpse at the pale, half-illuminated face with full rosebud lips painted black, and shadow-painted eyes, and such a razor-cold glare.

Then her right arm flashes forward. The blade howls free, her left settles to its place at the curving grip’s end, and she drops its point into line. Once more the shadows cloak her expression.

Until the blue-white crash of a lightning bolt nearby. Its evanescent light shines in teeth bared by such a hungry grin.

Oh… the seeker shouldn’t have said that.

She’s on the fledgling like a thunderstroke–a charge so swift it’s already a memory by the time it reaches the seeker's visual cortex.

“Seal your psyche!” the other hisses. The raw force of her intent gouges trenches into the metalloid and the corpses around them, unfurling streamers of unraveling atomic structure. “If your mind’s open to me, I’ll read it for my advantage with no remorse! Don’t you think for a second I’ll show you grace! If you can’t muster more for yourself than to be an empty vessel for someone better, I’m happy enough to break that shell you call a psyche!” Raging lightning explodes beneath the other andsends her skyward. “Open for me, emptiness–let me reunite you with the void!”

Her back leg kicks off from the blue-ripple launchpad of her own kinesis, and she explodes downward with the black streak of her sword whirling overhead and scything straight down at the fledgeling’s brow. The fledgling’s arms thrash up against her will. Horror, pain, helpless rage–they’re holding the sword her Mistress told her never to use until she was told, the broad stony blade with its heavy crystal edge.

Surely She’ll understand. Surely She’ll forgive.

Won’t she?

The umbral blade shears through with a high clear whistle. It traces a coldfire wake through the fledgling’s face, her right eye goes blind, her jaw goes half-slack. The frigid numbness bites deeper than any pain. The phase-duelist mocks her with a projected glimpse at herself: flesh leeched of all color fraying away from crumbling bone, and a desiccated eye like the breaking bristles of an ashen brush.

“Oh, that’d make a beautiful scar if only you lived long enough,” the phase-duelist grins. Her offhand catches the fledgling in the middle of her clumsy return stroke, palm crushing her elbow in until it caves. “This blade eats borrowed things. How is it that you come here with a sword pulled from your own soul, and yet it doesn’t belong to you?”

“This sword belongs to my mistress!” the fledgling screams, as much against the pain in her shattered arm and breaking heart as against her enemy. “How dare you break it?!”

“How dare you let me?” the phase-duelist counters.

She pirouettes away, feet dancing through one turn after another, the umbral blade drifting up to rest lightly over its wielder’s shoulder. When her spin carries her back around to face the fledgling for the third time she halts, snaps her blade out to the side in a one-handed salute, and licks her fangs–teeth? She has teeth. She’s human. Why did the fledgling think she had fangs?

“C’mon, cherry, it’s a duel to the death!” her nemesis crows. “Ideals, morals, hopes and dreams, the last little thing that gives you the comfort you need to justify hauling your wretched flesh out of bed in the morning… anything you bring before me, I’m going to take it away from you.” Her infuriating grin widens. She cocks her head up and back. “So if you love your secondhand mistress so much, why do you keep talking about her?”

“SHUT UP!” the fledgling screams.

She charges, a full-out sprint with her half of a sword already committed to a broad lateral swipe. It’d be easy to see coming even if wielding her sword one-handed didn’t force her to drag it along the ground most of the way just to get up enough speed to swing it.

The human in the black dress distorts underneath the swipe and snaps back to full-size inside the seeker's guard. Her elbow cracks the fledgling’s jaw in passing. A rustle, a rush of wind, the hiss of the shadow-blade crossing a second cut into her face to intersect the first.

“Do you understand yet?” the dark slayer urges. “My power’s source lies beyond its trappings! Come on, girl! You made this far, didn’t you? Ignite! Rage, rend, face me!”

She’s a maelstrom of black whirlwind and white lightning, and even the eye of the storm where the fledgling stands is no safe haven. Black slashes buzz inward, carving shoulders, hips, belly. Dried blood crumbles out of every cut–how many before her heart has nothing left to pump?

And the dark one’s voice joins every blow to words, cutting past flesh to soul. “No matter how many tails I grafted to you, how many swirls of meteoric iron and tentacular mutation I stitched into your flesh, no amount of matter I injected would make you matter! You matter because you exist, you have to see that! You already have meaning! You must find the way to become what you already are, you must find the way–“

The other’s will forces the fledgling’s arms into a clash, downstroke for downstroke. Azure eyes flare, glaring past the scraping edges of their swords at the seeker. “–to believe in yourself, and seek only your own permission to chase the dream in your mind’s eye!”

The cyclone seizes the fledgling. Wraps her in its winds, splays her limbs out, and hurls her into a blood-soaked pillar. She coughs blood and spittle out along with her breath.

“Nothing, huh?” the phase-duelist asks. “So I’m dealing with a mask. The more I weight it by trying to tear it away, the more of you I’ll force you to pour into it to keep it on...” She pauses, and the shadows upon her lessen. She is soft and beautiful, interwoven glows and shadow, and the yearning in her heart pours forth in her words, in her bearing, in the gentle smile on her lips. “C’mon, kid. I know there’s fire somewhere within.”

That smile strikes something. Those words spark something. Warmth, tears, confusion. People… people don’t just say things like this to her.

“I’m sorry for laying it on so heavy at the start,” the other adds. “It takes me longer than I’d like, sometimes, to phase shift within a Phase.”

She blends through the ember-choked air in a hail of blue striations. Her afterimages arrive behind her one after another: each striation bursts into a cone of million glittering hardlight vertices, each forming an effigy of the phase-duelist and each of those delivers a buzzing slash that blows right through the fledgling’s guard. Cut after cut after cut. Splitting flesh, drawing dark trickles of blood, and yet… painless.

“I see that no matter what you say, you haven’t given up on yourself, so I’m not gonna give up on you either!” her foe calls out from behind her. “Come on!”

The fledgling whirls to see the other standing on the roof of a swooping, many-winged building with eerie polyhedral buttresses. She tilts her head, clutching the silver amulet of a four-pointed star swaying from its chain around her neck. “Sweetheart, neither I nor your mistress brought you here. You chose. You clawed your way through the cosmos, you chased the signs, you made this meeting happen.”

The phase-duelist phases from her perch into a plummet from on high. In the crater-making instant of her landing she whips her long blade’s point back to the center, a shining arc of challenge with an edge like frosted snowdrifts jutting into the blue-black precipice of the flats and spine. Freezing winds carve past her, lashing her hair, blowing the hem of her gown forward around her silver-armored shins.

Successive gusts in quickening rhythm, each galeforce wave growing hotter and hotter and hotter as though the whole of Saingediir is caught in a vast superheated wind-tunnel.

“I want you to hit me with everything you’ve got,” the other says. “And if you don’t think you’ve got enough, well, I want it anyway.” A wink. “There’s more strength in your soul than you think. Takes real grit to admit you feel powerless.” Her eyes flash. “Now come on! Strike a spark with it! I want to see you burning like the sun!”

“Why are you being so nice to me? I-I thought you weren’t going to show me grace,” the fledgling manages.

The duelist quirks her lips. “Give me the choice between two battles and I usually pick the harder one. I’ve decided the real challenge here lies somewhere besides your skill.”

How can she possibly overcome someone so strong she tries to build her opponents up in the middle of a fight? The other is living art, geometric lines, the graceful quicksilver of her gown flowing in crescent trails to trace the path of her every stroke. The fledgling’s a quavering mess. Knees buckling. Tears in her eyes.

“Hey,” the phase-duelist interrupts, “I can see from your face that the way you think you look is nothing like what I see.”

The indelible image of her own face and form: a shuddering figure, wide-eyed, fearful, yet still standing. Tense, ready… her left arm isn’t as badly hurt as she thought. She can still grip her sword with it.

Is it true? Is it really possible…? Even as the fledgling thinks, the manifested tableau changes. It changes in synch with her right foot sliding further forward, her legs bending, her fingers shifting on the dim heavy sword she holds. She knows she’s only matching the long stance of the phase-duelist, but… but she’s choosing to match it. She drops the big blade’s point in line. It’s so much heavier in this position.

And the weight feels… good. It feels good to test her strength’s limits, and in doing it, know that she is strong.

“I still don’t know what I’m doing,” she admits, “so I’m going to copy your steps until I figure out how I want my own to look.”

“How do you think I got started?” her rival says. She gestures. “Pull your feet in a little closer together. This long stance of mine is a little punishing if you’re not trained up for it, and it encourages big moves–hard to control.”

She snaps her sword up beside her, flats facing herself and the neophyte. “Grip like this. Think talons of a prey-bird, not a closed fist, with the spine of the grip pressing into that big palm-bone your thumb comes off of. Loosen up a little in the fingers. Clasp, like you’re holding the stem of a wine-glass or a lover’s hand. You only want to grip tightly when your arms hit full extension–that’s the point where you have to decide whether to pull the strike, or commit. That’s when you squeeze.”

“I… I think I get it,” the neophyte says. “If I’m already gripping, I don’t have muscle power left to make that choice. Starting with a loose grip lets me tighten up so I can change direction–or move faster in the same one.”

“Exactly!” the phase-duelist says. “You’re a natural, kid! A born duelist!”

“You really think so?” she asks her teacher.

“Kid,” the woman in the black dress raises her sword on high. Her words come under the force of a psychic pressure-surge that raises ticklish, electrical roilings from something deep in the neophyte’s mind. “Criticism hurts a hell of a lot less than dying in a swordfight. If I say you’ve got talent, I truly, deeply mean it.”

The neophyte’s surviving eye widens. She wants to rush in, to show her stuff, to impress her mentor–no. Wait. That’s not the lesson. Her teacher just said not to lie, not to perform, to take the little emotional blows instead of getting cut in half. So she watches. Watches the slow, loping steps, the deft shifts of that sword from one guard to another.

“Don’t stare at any one part of me,” her teacher says. She steps in with a flowing lateral cut, pulls it just before it strikes the fledgling’s jumpy counter-cut, and whips her blade in at her student’s wrist. “Not my face, not my eyes, not my center. At this stage, you’re not going to be able to predict my moves enough to make specific counters. Think of me as a distant moon. Train your eyes to take in my body as a whole. Think about the geometry of your strikes. What cuts can I move into quickest from where I am right now? What cuts can you throw to threaten me while covering those lines?”

“You must’ve been the best swordswoman on your whole planet,” the neophyte breathes.

“I actually lost every sparring match I ever had, then gave up due to depression from feeling that my writing career was also a failure,” the phase-duelist laughs. “I didn’t really get good until my…” she trails off. “Until I left Earth behind,” she finishes.

“You’re a failure like me,” the neophyte says. Then she peeps. Grins in panic. “I-I mean–sorry, teacher, I–“

“No, you’re right,” the phase-duelist laughs. She laughs so often–so freely and easily. There’s so much joy in her, and it always feels like she’s inviting the fledgling to share in it. “I was. I failed at absolutely everything I ever tried. I just kept failing, until I didn’t.”

They close in for another exchange. A cut from the neophyte, more confident as she internalizes that her caution just leads to undercooked defenses, and undercooked defenses just get her hit anyway. An upsweep deflection from her mentor, who dashes in and snaps her blade’s back-edge up to kiss the neophyte’s throat.

“I’m not trying to kill you anymore,” her teacher laughs. “Hope you don’t feel coddled?”

The kid gulps, still feeling the memory of the frigid edge on her skin. “N-not at all!”

A thrust for her teacher’s shoulder provokes a binding counter-cut, then a whirling exchange. She backsteps frantically, swaying further and further to dodge brisk whirring slices from the umbral blade.

She grits her teeth, tries to rally with a charge, runs right into an overhead bind. Her teacher slips through, wraps her left arm down over the neophyte’s wrists, and disarms the younger woman while a sweep of one black-booted leg pulls the neophyte’s footing out. This duality: a gentle hand at her back to catch her, and a shadow-sword’s point at her throat while her own blade clashes to the ground many meters away.

“So… w-what changed?” the neophyte asks.

“I kept trying,” her teacher says, pulling her upright and darting back. She kicks twice, first up to send her student’s sword airborne and then a sidelong snap to launch it back to its bearer, who catches it with a hand swiftly growing steady. “I got more skilled. Bit by bit, I hit a point where more of the people I fought were worse than me than better.”

“Who the hell are you, anyway?” the neophyte asks.

The hypnotic delight in her teacher’s eyes, this strange hot endless swelling in the breast of the neophyte. “You still don’t know me?” she laughs. “I’m a true soldier of the Midnight Legions! And that intoxicating furnace filling your lungs, that’s pride! Seize it!”

“I…” the fledgling licks her fangs. They feel longer. Sharper. “H-Hey! I don’t need your permission!”

“You’re gods-damned right you don’t!” her opponent shouts. Her silhouette explodes with deep blue radiance and the faintest outlining of a white-fire core. “So how’s this–you worry about what you’re doing with your sword, and I’ll worry about what I’m doing with mine. I’m getting tired of saying come on–so show me who you are!”

“My pleasure!” the demon snarls. Heat billows in her lungs. It’s flowing out: into orange fire on her claws, into the empty socket of her lost eye, into burning blue-white at every tip of her red hair. Her tail lashes behind her, lengthening.

The black-clad zephyr watches, a satisfied smile on her lips, as a new eye grows in skin that’s once more a rich dark blue–and swiftly gain dark-iron growths like mace-flanges.

“I’m switching to this sword now,” the other says. “It’s time.” A cobalt ray shrieks from an unseen horizon past her hip, leaving behind a longer, heavier blade. Its grip is supple azure flesh under a silvery backstrap, swirled with strange patterns and hollows revealing snow-white chitin, and an eight-point guard bearing the six-horned Seal of Machrae Diir–the stylized skull-effigy of a leering devil with four-point shadow-stars for its eyes. She clasps the silver amulet. “Favor me, Haksaema.”

Blue gleams from above draw the neophyte’s eyes to the black aperture at the sky's apex, that truest umbra she’d all but forgotten. The edges of the shadow ignite in blue nova.

It spills down, washing the duelists and all their surroundings into outlines where the light pools impossibly. Glow-pulsations take them between two modes: solid shapes, then X-ray phantoms with radiant skeletons, veins, nerves–thundering hearts.

And her teacher sweeps the blue-hilted sword from its blue-metal scabbard in a torrent of screeching cobalt inferno and thundering umbral tides. The power-wake of its unsheathing washes layers of vaporized atoms from the tiles beneath her.

“I know that sword,” the neophyte breathes. Everyone knows that sword.

The Lady of Machrae Diir winks.