Previously, whenever I’ve posted a string of my Music to Write Realmgard to Posts, I’ve tried to post something that’s at least tangentially related to my main chapter or scene for that day.
This time around, I’m just going to start with the first and go from there…
Funnily enough, researching the original version of this post was how I initial found out that one of my favourite bands, The Sword, broke up in 2022. They have since announced an at least temporary reunion end of 2024/start of 2025. Depending on how exactly that plays out, I may just decided to stop updating the band’s current status whenever I revisit this post…
But, anyway, here’s a song about witches — though, admittedly, it’s less like scary Halloween/cartoon witches and more like Fantasy novel, quest-giver witches.
Cf., for example, the witch Ziroonderel — whose name, for all intents and purposes actually is “the witch Ziroonderel” from The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
But, like, there’s three of her…
“Three witches you shall meet
Along the road to your fate:
The first at twilight, the second at night,
And the third at the coming of day.”Lyrics via Genius.
The Sword has had a following, but never been a commercial powerhouse, though all but one of their albums did manage to chart on the Billboard 200.
I think my quick pitch for their music would be “Conan stories set to music — in some cases literally; a few of their songs are directly based on Conan stories, along with other Fantasy series.
Today’s chosen song, Tres Brujas (Spanish for, as you may glean from the lyrics, “three witches”) is from their 2010 concept album Warp Riders.
In brief, it’s a Science Fantasy about a planet tidally-locked to its three suns so that one side is always day and one side is always night.
And unto this (see what I did there?), an archer named Ereth who finds a magic orb, travels across the planet and into space and ends up fighting some sort of evil space god. Admittedly, it’s not entirely clear and The Sword clearly focused more on making good music than laying out the story in clear, concise prose.
Also, most of the supplementary material is apparently in the liner notes of the physical album, and I’ve only ever streamed it…
Tres Brujas is both the album’s lead single and the story’s opening, telling of Ereth’s discovery of the the aforementioned orb, vision quest, and subsequent need to find the three witches mentioned in the title.
Take a listen here:
The full Music to Write Realmgard to Playlist is here:
To keep up with everything I’m doing, follow along here:
If you’ve enjoyed my content, please consider supporting me through Ko-fi or Patreon, or through Paypal by scanning the QR code below:
Follow Realmgard and other publications of Emona Literary Services™ below:
Subscribe to the Emona Literary Services™ Substack newsletter here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The author prohibits the use of content published on this website for the purposes of training Artificial Intelligence technologies, including but not limited to Large Language Models, without express written permission.
All stories published on this website are works of fiction. Characters are products of the author’s imagination and do not represent any individual, living or dead.
The realmgard.com Privacy Policy can be viewed here.
Realmgard is published by Emona Literary ServicesTM
