### Lore
The Queen approached you three weeks ago asking you for an immense favor: she wants you to use your wizardry and arcane knowledge to stop the unprecedented heatwave that has been overwhelming the Kingdom and its crops. Some have already failed and, if this temperature continues, so will all the others, giving way to an era of scarcity that even those highest up in The Court will feel. She told you the King was too proud to come to you after the disrespect you showed him last time, but she knows this matter is much bigger than any kind of petty squabbles. You're impressed she has this amount of trust in your abilities. Maybe she doesn't and is just desperate. Either way, you dutifully accept the mission and get to work studying the massive star, its cosmic trajectory, and what might be the cause of this particular heatwave. After fitting your telescope with a dark tinted glass, you aim it directly towards the sun and notice its edges look bigger than in any of your old records and archives. Your heart sinks. The sun is falling! You immediately get to work on a spell that will push the sun back. You pore over your books and find multiple versions of Mage Hand, Bigby's Hand, Move Earth, Mold Earth, Wall of Stone, trying to glean something you can use to make these spells bigger and more powerful. You even study an old instruction manual on how to build an Immovable Rod, but all of these routes pose way too many limitations. Your worst suspicions are confirmed. Nothing that exists today will be able to help you. You're going to have to go down to the fundamentals of magic and deal with something very dangerous: the arcane weave itself. You know of so, so, so many tales of wizards who thought themselves clever enough to handle the weave and who ended up as nothing but a splatter. Given the situation, you weigh your options: dying in a quick fiery explosion sounds better than the slow agony of starvation. That being decided, you get down to work. You approach the weave carefully and ever so slowly. It takes you a few hours, but after some practice, you're able find a way to make just a tiny little corner of it visible to you. You tug on it gently, study its reaction, and take notes. You keep at this, studying how different minor manipulations of the weave yield tiny effects, but all of them wildly different from each other. At this point, it's been at least two weeks since the Queen had come to ask you for help. This time, it's the King, who finally swallowed his pride and has come to ask for help. You barely remember what your issue with him was in the first place. It probably wasn't very important, right? You assure the King you're already working on it and he asks if he can watch. You don't care to explain much of what you're doing, but you've always liked an audience, so you let him stay. It helps he brings fancy food and drink with him, which he somewhat begrudgingly shares with you in the few moments you stop to eat. Days pass and you're making good progress. You start to feel like you're understanding the weave and its effects on the material world! The spells you spent so much time practicing and memorizing, they feel somewhat silly and byzantine. Your old magic scrolls now feel like they were written by someone in a foreign language without ever having read a single word of that language. You're still being careful, though. If you get too arrogant and move too quickly, you'll face grievous consequences. So you keep moving slowly, but the adrenaline is starting to become addictive. You feel like you understand so much, even though you're just in the beginning. You start allowing yourself to get more adventurous, and after a big breakthrough, you find how to use the weave to move objects at a distance. This is it! All you have to do is now make it bigger and more powerful. You start making drawings of a massive structure - levers, pulleys and ropes used to drag the sun back, all powered by your pull of the weave. You start constructing this edifice, its scale incomprehensible to anyone. The King who has spent the last two weeks with you, says he can't understand a word you're saying, You shoo him away and continue working. You start bending the weave to make yourself move faster and continue your construction. When was the last time you slept? Bah, who cares, you'll sleep when you're dead. Another week goes by, and the spectral rig is ready! Your skin has shifted to a pale silver-white. How long have you looked like this? No matter, you'll deal with it later. The weave is behaving so nicely, bending to your command and will. You draw the ethereal ropes around the sun and, sitting firmly on your chair, your arms are stretched out in front of you as you start tightening your grip using both arms. You pull back and you feel the cosmic pulley system starting to do its work. The ropes draw a net between the sun and the earth and, as you pull the ropes back, the sun gets pushed away. The first draws were easy, the rope was slack. But you soon start coming up against the enormous mass of the sun. Your two arms pulling back as strong as they can, you conjure the weave to magnify your strength hundreds of trillions of times, and slowly, but surely, you feel the sun yield. You're sweating almost as much as you would if you were inches away from the sun. You keep going, drawing the rope in and thus pushing the sun further and further away. The plan is working! Until... Wait... Something is wrong. You feel a ripple in the weave. What is that? You've never felt that before! You try to keep steady, but the ripple makes your ethereal ropes vibrate wildly. And then... SNAP.

### Production Details
This one started off outside of the Dirtywave M8! A while ago I got myself a Roland Aira J-6 but never really got around to using it much. This week, since I was feeling kinda drained from a lot of life things, I decided to reach for it since it's a relatively easy box to get something fun and musical out of. After fiddling with it for a bit, I found an arpeggiating chord progression that I loved and which I used as the backbone of the song. I connected it to the M8 to get all the MIDI information and then sat down with the M8 to make some competing and harmonizing melodies and was super, duper happy with what came out. I purposefully set out to make something that sounded kind of gothic and arcane, and feel like I really hit the target of what I was going for. However, I then noticed I needed to tie this into the M8 Community Jam's theme, which was "Heatwave". After panicking a bit, I figured I could have the thematic tie in be mostly lore-based, so I spent a little over an hour writing up the lore section.

It's also worth noting that, as many of my recent M8 tracks, this doesn't use any samples. All of the sounds are coming from the M8's WAVSYNTH engines.

### Diary and Chatter
Again, apologies for the absolute absence in the comment section this past week. As I alluded to in the comment section, life has just sucked a bit this past week and I was super drained - couldn't even find almost any energy to sit down and play with anything musical until late Friday evening. I'm thankful I did, because it helped raise my spirits a lot! But there was part of me that purposefully didn't want to give myself the chance to have fun, you know? Almost like I was avoiding the thing that would make me feel better because then I'd have an excuse to continue to feel shitty. Anyways, things are getting better, but still dealing with some stuff. I can't say much about what's going on right now (will probably be able to do so later), but all I will say is: being car-less in Houston blows.

Anyways, I reiterate my apologies for my lack of participation in the community this last week. Hopefully I'll be able to be more present this coming week!

Wishing you all a fantastic week, friends!

Cheers!

Link to M8 Bundle

Tags: arcane, baroque, dirtywavem8tracker, experimental, gothic, m8tracker, magic, week 24 2026, View by:jegasus