Training

"Why do you want to fight me?"

The Hero’s reflection in the mirror looked back at him scornfully.  He bore no armor, and carried no weapon, but the battle had already commenced, and it was fierce.

"If I am to conquer all that is around me, I must start with conquering myself."

"And you seriously believe you can do such a thing?  Defeat yourself?"

The Her shifted in his armor.  He was unaccustomed to wearing it.  After all the years of casting it aside, it felt cumbersome.  Foreign.  It was a feelng he knew he had to destroy.  He could continue hiding behind the Masquerade, but that method had gone to far.  He had instead become the Masquerade. 

"Yes."

The image in the mirror seemed undaunted by the determination of the reflection. 

"A silly notion.  Childish.  You cannot hope to destroy what you have become in order to become what you were."

The Hero drew his sword. 

"I don’t think you understand the meaning of what it is that I plan do to.  It is not regression that I seek, but a progression through the things that I knew, the things that I came to understand.  What good is knowledge if I cannot use it?  If I, instead, keep it on the inside and display my ignorance on the outside, I am not who I say I am.  I am who I say I would never be."

The reflection showed small signs of becoming nervous.  Open hands went to clenched fists, and then reverted back again.  He spoke not.  He couldn’t think of what to say, but the Hero had plenty.

"The first tihng I start with is you.  You, the commoner, the believer in all that is tangible and tastless.  The hedon of the spirit." 

"I will not fall easily."

"I will not fight half-heartedly."

"You will fail."

"Perhaps.  But I have already failed in doing what I came here to do.  You are a mere shadow of what the Darkness is, and I have beaten him before.  My sword may be rusty, its blade dulled, but you will be my whetting stone.  I will destroy you, and in doing so begin my life anew."

"Then make your strike, Hero, if you do indeed know how.  You may crack this mirror, you may shatter its glass, but it is not the physical realm in which you must fight.  I am everywhere.  I am in the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the people you communicate with.  I am no mere phantom, no figment of your imagination.  I am the virus which has infested your soul and embedded itself so deep that no amount of medicine will wrest it free from your cells.  I compose all that you are.  Everything you think you were is but a fleeting memory, a senseless dream of which you have no hope of attaining.  In attempting to destroy me you will destroy the last remaining bits of yourself, and instead of becoming great, you will become all that to which the Abyss beckconed you – nothing."

"Then so be it.  I cannot live this lie any longer.  I cannot drown myself in the charade of the mirror into which I now gaze.  If nothing is what I must start from again, then nothing it shall be.  And from that I will create something more powerful than the Darkness has ever seen, and you will be but a notch on my scabbard of all the evil I can vanquish.  I do not fear the consequences of my actions, but rather place hope in the idea that some day I can rise as the Hero once again."

"You fear more than you admit.  I know you, Hero.  I know your soul, and it is trembling with the cowardice you have tried to hide for so many years."

"Then let fear be my propellant.  And when I finally rid myself of it, my fear will become my strength.  For once I begin to ascend the staircase of my ambitions, each step brings me farther from the bottom.  With each move, I have longer to fall, and more to lose.  With your destruction, I bring the stakes to a new level.  Therefore, I will never, ever, accept defeat so calmly as I did before.  I will become alive again."

The Hero left no room for the reflection to respond.  Instead, he put his sword back into his scabbard, and turned away.  With the destruction of that mirror, another would emerge, perhaps more persistant than this one.  Beginning his journey meant turning away from all that. 

With his first step in the opposite direction, the reflection stumbled backwards, and fell.