Art by Jason Pedersen

I’d like to say that I had an easier time with the songs for Legends of Windemere: Sleeper of the Wildwood Fugue, but I’d be lying.  There were a lot of aspects that I had to choose from here.  This introduced Dariana, had a big evolution for Luke Callindor and Kira Grasdon, and gave a boost to Nyx.  Speaking of Nyx, I just realized that she’s on the cover and this thing was published in April of 2015.  Anyway, I ended up finding songs that worked better for other books than this one until I finally figured out 3 that really stood up.  It’s one for each of the key points too.

I was going to use ‘Hurt’ by Johnny Cash (a cover of Nine Inch Nails), but I put that somewhere else.  This one deals with the painful evolution of Kira Grasdon, Luke Callindor, and Sari.  It’s heart-wrenching in some aspects and still has this one spark of hope that I get from the tone.  The more I listened to this song, the more I felt that it worked in both words and tone.

Genuinely surprised that I forgot about this one, but I guess that comes from having finished Legends of Windemere a few years ago.  This was a song that I played a lot whenever Nyx was the focus.  We’re back to the fire theme for her, but that was really her thing.  At one point, this was being used as her battle theme and I played it on loop whenever she fought Queen Trinity.  Fits well for this story.

Now, the previous two took a while to get.  This is the one that snapped right into my head to represent Dariana.  We’re talking about a powerful psionic waking from a magical slumber.  In fact, she’s been awakened and put back to sleep for centuries.  The idea that she’s got these weird, strange dreams makes sense.  It isn’t digital or dealing with a computer program, but there’s also a storyline that somebody is threatening to put her away again.  Dariana is a character who fights for control at times even though it’s more subtle than her companions.