The Sounds of Drearburh

Over the past few years, my partners and I have developed a full-blown obsession with Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s the best way I can describe it:

Lesbian necromancers in space—but make it goth, snarky, and full of murder puzzles.

Gideon, a sword-wielding himbo with zero patience for skeleton nonsense, is dragged into a deadly competition by her lifelong nemesis, Harrow, a terrifying goth girl who can raise the dead but refuses to raise her social skills. Together, they must survive a haunted space mansion, solve ancient bone magic riddles, and not get brutally murdered (spoiler: a lot of people get brutally murdered).

It’s locked-room mystery meets sci-fi horror meets sarcastic disaster gays—and it’s amazing.

I’ve spent way too much time daydreaming about The Locked Tomb as a video game, so I decided to score the imaginary adaptation myself. This track is my vision for the opening cinematic of Gideon the Ninth:

It begins outside Castle Drearburh, where skeletons labor until the tolling bells summon them. The camera moves inward—past a chapel where nuns pray over strings of knuckle bones—then deeper, through the ancient, clattering lift that descends into the bowels of the castle. Finally, it reaches the tomb that must never be opened.

The rock is rolled away. Water flows with a tide that should not exist. And at the center, on an altar of ice and chains, rests something—or someone—who should never wake.

You can listen to the track with and without the accompanying soundscape below. And for fellow Locked Tomb fans, more musical fan fiction for Harrow and Nona is coming later this year.