Sympathy for the Devil: How Music Influences My Writing
A soft squall whistles through Avernus, a dirge for the fallen, a dark sun glowering through the ashen lenses of smoke clouds upon a battlefield. Zariel, archduke of this infernal realm, slumps onto a sandstone boulder amidst the blasted hellscape before her in the aftermath of a massive battle. Every muscle within her body aches with fatigue. Her obsidian black armour is stained with yellow demon ichor, and a fresh scar from a glabrezu’s claw mars her right cheek. She surveys the glassed fields before her, where lie thousands of dead fiends she’s just smashed into paste with her trophy hammer and torn to shreds with her flail.
A corvid feather floats to the ground, loosened from Zariel’s left wing, and is laid to rest upon the hot sand at the archdevil’s feet. Only now does she become aware of the pain coursing through her alabaster flesh like the chill of winter. The adrenaline rush she always craved through carnage is wearing off. Only her darkest thoughts still stand by her. She knows that despite her bloodlust and vigour, ultimately her crusade against the demonic hordes is utterly futile. For every demon she slaughters, the Abyss will cough forth ten more to take its place.
Dormant memories of her angelic days flicker before her like fireflies in the night. The voice of Lulu, once as mellifluous as birdsong, now buzzes through her psyche like static. The guttural resonance of a convoy of war machines thundering past reminds her of the dying screams of those she once held dear, fading into the distance. She begins to consider whether the heavenly host will ever take her back after all she’s done, all the horror and desolation she’s wrought upon mortal and immortal alike. All to perpetuate an endless war, with no glorious end nor even a true victor.
Such are the seeds of doubt in Zariel’s mind, having long blossomed into a forest of thorns. She sighs, knowing that all there is in damnation is to serve as the shield for Asmodeus’ kingdom. The fallen archangel made her choice. She grits her teeth and scowls, as resigned to her fate as she is resolute, picking herself up and marching back towards the safety of her blade-shaped battleship. The drumbeat of war will sound once again soon.
What you’ve just read is a short piece that, for all intends and purposes, amounts to a splerge I wrote down one night (yesterday, to be precise). I wrote it down on YouTube while listening to a soundtrack for Dungeons & Dragons video game, Neverwinter, a game I’ve been playing for just over three quarters of a year now. It’s a minute-long fragment of the most recent main menu theme: in sharp contrast to the mystical and powerful tracks of previous themes, this fragment is sorrowful and haunting.
The module that the soundtrack came with, Avernus, is themed around a fallen archangel (Zariel, if you’ve not worked it out yet) who abandons the heavenly host to join the forces of the Nine Hells in an eternal war against the greater threat: the demons of the Abyss. The module itself is conjoined to the latest D&D adventure book, Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, which follows the same storyline.
Now, villains in D&D official sourcebooks — in terms of depth — aren’t exactly the Marianas Trench. Nearly all of them basically amount to ‘do X evil thing to appease/release/otherwise assist Y evil deity/primordial/whatever’. Severin wants to release Tiamat into the world. The Cults of Elemental Evil want to unleash four primordial princes to destroy the world. Acererak wants to create a god of death for … reasons. And Halaster is … well, Halaster. Not much more needs to be said on him than that.
But Zariel is different. She’s not a bratty princess who gets her hands on an elemental air weapon and brings a cult together, nor is she a crazy undead wizard who builds a trap-filled dungeon to catch people’s souls and prolong her own life. The story of Zariel’s fall from grace begins with her being assigned to watch the ebbs and flows of the Blood War — the clash between devils and demons. But tired of standing by and watching these evildoers’ shenanigans, Zariel instead decides to lead a heavenly army straight into the battlefields of Avernus and end the war in one motion. Unfortunately, someone forgot to read up on their Clausewitz, and the heavenly army gets thoroughly pasted across the desert sand. Zariel lives long enough to be scraped off the battlefield and cared for by Asmodeus, supreme overlord of the Nine Hells, who admires her love of battle and offers her rulership of Avernus so she can keep fighting the demons. Zariel, knowing full well that punishment awaits her for deserting her post, accepts his offer, and now leads a massive army of devils in the defence of the first of the Nine Hells.
Basically, she’s the Forgotten Realms’ very own Darth Vader.
But Harry, what does any of this have to do with influencing your writing? And does it really justify such a lame pun in the title? To answer the latter question — yes. Yes it does. Because when am I ever going to get another chance to make as clever a callout to the Stones as that again?
Now for the former question. I draw a lot of energy from visual and audial media when it comes to my writing. Battle scenes are written to the mental spectacle of fighting in big blockbuster movies (John Wick and the Avengers films are my personal go-tos), and sometimes I refer to specific scenes to describe the moves just right. Tuning in and listening to certain musical tracks helps me set the scene — just as it did with the flash fanfic about Zariel above. Listening in and imagining the scenario lets me picture a character’s exact actions, their precise disposition and the atmosphere that rolls throughout. The mental image is converted to text upon my laptop screen, rendered with precision onto the page, to be shared with others who will read it. The music paints the image and the image fuels the prose.
In a mere few hundred words, I use the soundtrack I listened to as a means of presenting Zariel as a tragic villain who wants to vanquish the greater evil, but suffers from a sequence of terrible life choices. She is wracked with bitter self-loathing and she’s starting to forget those she once deeply cared for, yet she soldiers on, seeing no other option but to see the consequences of her decisions through to the end. It should leave the reader uncertain of any happy ending for her — or even if there is an ending for her.
Within the context of D&D, the potential such a backstory brings for Zariel could make for a truly memorable run of Descent into Avernus. It brings a great deal of depth to a character from a setting whose villains are notoriously lacking in such (with a choice few exceptions), making her feel more realistic and believable so that the players can fully immerse themselves into the roleplaying aspect.
I mention Zariel specifically because she may or may not become a minor baddie to encounter in the Draconomachy, the Theros-set D&D campaign I’m running through at the moment. Considering their next destination is the Theran underworld, in time, a cross-planar jaunt into Avernus might be in order…
Thank you all for reading, and I will see you again next week.
~ Harry