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Tonight, that will change. The pain lingers in my shaking hand, trying to distract me from my task. I focus my mind as best I can, closing my useless eyes to the darkness surrounding primarily out of habit, reaching deep inside for the part of my soul through which the magic around me echoes. Ancient powers flood my spirit as I open it to outside energies, obscuring the more subtle resonance that I seek, as though a too-bright light were shining in my eyes. The spectral sword finds me again and again. All I can do now is raise my arms protectively before me, diverting the excruciating strikes away from my face and neck. Pain explodes behind my eyes, filling my vision with splashes of impossible colors that threaten to draw my attention away from the ripples of eldritch might flowing through my essence. Almost without realizing it, I am on my knees, helpless before the raw intensity of the assault. The sound of my own screams seems somehow distant, as if my head were underwater, a similar sensation robbing me of any true equilibrium while I sway aimlessly in place. As my concentration breaks the impressions of the magic around me begin to bleed over into physical sensations assailing my mind, merging into such a purgatorial delirium that I cannot say for certain whether I am alive and feeling or dead and dreaming… There, in the depths of that unreal pandemonium, I began to hear it, a soft rhythm, steady and strong and altogether perfect when everything else has become so horribly wrong. Even without any notion of time or space, without sight or sound or direction, it remains with me, reminding me that I am still alive, guiding me back toward reality. My pulse synchronizes with the beat without any conscious effort on my part. At that moment, the world suddenly becomes clear to me, as if I have become one with the cadence of the universe. Attuned to the waves of arcane power that resonate in this place, I am easily able to discern the single source of dissonance within the song… The descending blade meets my own in a spray of sparks between the metal and immaterial energy. Despite my flagging strength, I struggle to press upward against the sword, to hold it there until I have seen the face of the wielder. From the well of resonance deep within me, the bodiless voice issues forth again. "What lies beyond my blade?" The darkness is irrelevant now. For the first time I see the face of my attacker: the unblemished obsidian skin stretched across delicately sculpted features, the angular lines of the high cheekbones and aquiline nose, the lavender tiers pressed into an unfeeling grimace, the unseeing ruby orbs whose depths seemed impenetrable to light and hope. For the first time, I understand the nature of my shadow foe. "Myself," I whisper in a voice caught between anger and wonderment. The phantom pain has vanished, returning the strength to my limbs that I need to dive to one side, escaping the abbreviated arc of the falling blade even as I release it. I hit the ground with my shoulders, rolling off them to come up in a battle-ready crouch before my immaterial doppelganger.
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