Destroyer

(Content note: Spoilers for Robin Hobb's Fitz and the Fool novels, particularly Assassin's Fate.)

I bounced off Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice a few times before I made it past the first chapter. Her books had been glowingly recommended to me by a close friend and I wanted to find out what he saw in them. So I stayed the course, and I'm glad I did. In fact, I eventually came to regard the almost claustrophobically tight first-person perspective that had initially thrown me for a loop as one of the books' strongest and most distinctive features. FitzChivalry Farseer is one of the least reliable narrators in all of epic fantasy, and utterly maddening as a protagonist: just aware enough of his flaws and shortcomings to angst about them in his internal monologue, but not quite aware enough of them to make good choices that aren't ruled by them in a crisis. Nobody refuses a call like Fitz. Nobody internalizes their self-loathing like Fitz. Nobody lies to himself and the people around him well past the point of oh my god ridiculous like Fitz. But at the same time, nobody is loyal like Fitz, or persistent like Fitz, and nobody loves as deeply and eternally as Fitz. By the time I'd spent 16 tomes of epic fantasy inhabiting Fitz's world, I'd come to care for him almost like a relative I'd grown up around, becoming intimately familiar with his whole self until even his faults were tempered with affection. I think he's one of the great achievements of characterization in the fantasy genre, and I know this because I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and scream at him multiple times a chapter.

As soon as I finished the "trilogy of trilogies" that made up the bulk of the Realm of the Elderlings series at the time I first read them, I knew I was going to make music about them. The result was the Fool's Trilogy of songs that appear on my Winter is Coming EP of songs inspired by fantasy literature: "Catalyst" for the Farseer trilogy, "Amber" for the Liveship Traders trilogy (which is still probably my favorite individual segment of the whole book series - unrelated sidebar, find me at a convention sometime and ask me to rant at you about how the treatment of liveships and dragons in these books is a perfect metaphor for racial justice and reparations, because I have really big feelings about how brilliant that whole subplot is), and "The Stone Game" for the Tawny Man trilogy. The Fool's Trilogy, in whole or in parts, remains a staple of the Player Characters' setlists and will likely always continue to be. ("The Stone Game" also holds an important place in PCs history as the song that convinced our violin player Elizabeth to join our band, as well as the title of "the song that's so hard to play that we've never all played it correctly together, all at the same time." Someday.)

When Fool's Assassin was released in 2014, inaugurating a new trilogy that hinted at an epic conclusion to Fitz's story, I had a feeling I would eventually end up adding a "coda" to my own trilogy in keeping with how Hobb's own stories seemed to be always expanding. (Sorry, Rain Wild Chronicles, you won't ever get your own song because unfortunately I thought you were pretty boring.) However, I also knew that I didn't dare to try to write it before the trilogy was completed (and besides, I was more than a little distracted by The Hero's Journey™ at that time). When Assassin's Fate finally arrived in 2017, I read it under what I truly believe to be the ideal circumstances: all in one uninterrupted chunk in the middle of the night while sitting in a chair with a colicky infant who refused to sleep anywhere that wasn't on my chest. "Destroyer" came not long after, just as I knew it would.

Musically, "Destroyer" is a bit of a genre departure for me, being probably the heaviest thing the Player Characters have ever recorded. Although the three parts of the Fool's Trilogy are already quite stylistically distinct from each other, "Destroyer" is on a completely different planet, having more in common with metal than my usual prog or folk influences. It's also notable for being the only song I've ever written where the verses have a grand total of one chord. At the time I wrote it I'd recently seen a discussion somewhere on the Internet about building tension in a song. One of the participants talked about how staying with a single chord or a single rhythm can be a useful tool for heightening suspense; the longer you hold on to it, the more exciting and dramatic the release of tension is when you finally shift to a different chord or a different rhythm. I wanted to play with that idea by writing a verse of entirely G minor and straight eighth notes, and then letting it explode at the beginning of the chorus.

"Destroyer" has always gotten played live a lot ever since I wrote it (my drummer Justin especially loves it, probably because he gets to howl like a wolf as much as he wants to in the choruses). There was never any doubt that it would be on Sisyphus, even as the rest of the album's track list evolved to bring in more philosophical and political material at the expense of more traditional filk-adjacent subjects - and really, it still fits the theme. The fictional event at the center of this song (Fitz's daughter Bee burning down the tower that contains the collected writings of countless White Prophets, using the broken candle that is the only thing she has left from her dead mother - an incredibly vivid image that has never left me from the moment I first read it, and probably never will) is in itself an act of radical hope. Wisdom and knowledge is lost, yes, but so are the prewritten destinies that limited and constrained not just Fitz and the Fool, but generations of catalysts and prophets who came before them. Even after everything she and her family went through, Bee had enough faith in people to trust them to choose their own way without a supernatural power to guide them. I struggle even more than the average person with the destruction/entropy phase of change (as my songwriting has probably revealed to you already), and singing this song a lot helps me remember that some institutions and ways of being need to be allowed to end once they have served their purpose. Sometimes the destroyer really does have to burn.