Songs get tied to characters and stories for me. It's the same for you, eh?
This one goes with a character I've had rolling around in my head for a couple years now. She's an archetype, for a game I've been writing on and off for years. Fantasy, roleplaying, tabletop. D&Dish, only not. The way the game is built, characters tend to fall into one of five archetypes: Warrior, Specialist, Investigator, Mage, or Leader.
The Maga I've had bouncing about in my head for this tale, her name is Anya. Call her Sister Anya. She was the only child of a doting, aging general in the old kingdom. He raised her without a mother around, and didn't much know how girls were normally brought up, so she was well on her way to being a tomboy. Then, out of the blue, he sent her away to a nunnery. Word came not long after that an accident had taken his life.
The sister superior at the nunnery can't abide by Anya. The going would be tougher for her, except that her education lands Anya a position assisting the nunnery's archivist & astronomer: Sister Carmine. Carmine takes a love of her young charge, and continues her education in things scandalous and improper. Except where her father saw his daughter educated in fitness and siege warfare, Carmine has a more dangerous legacy to pass on to her young charge.
The church hunts witches, sorcerers, warlocks, werebeasts, and any other threat. Any magic outside the miracles of the clergy is extinguished with its practitioner. Kings and princes stand aside to let the church inquisitors do their work in hunting these agents of The Enemy. Yet within the church, there are an unofficial order who study the looted lore of the witch-hunters. They clothe it in new rituals, and make it fit for the priests to perform as miracles for their flock. Carmine is an old woman now, and she sees in Anya a successor to carry on that work. And so Anya's education continues, now with the scripts of the ancients, the trails of demons long banished from the world, and a thousand more things heretical to her sisters in the nunnery.
This is where Anya is when the story finds her. This song clicked for Anya, for the witchy lyrics. Anya is a character thrust into the Church without warning or desire, a misfit at a moment when order of the old world is washed away to history.
What will happen with her? I barely know. Only that there was room for 5 archetypes at my table, so I'd always have a test that the game provided plenty to do for each. These five characters have been bouncing around in my head for years now, waiting for the chance to grow.
