Land of Immortals

This is where the mythology begins, and the rawness of that origin is audible in the recording. The production is thinner, the budget clearly smaller, but the compositional ambition is fully formed from the start — the opening acoustic guitar figure has a genuine folk-ballad quality, something rooted in medieval European tradition, before the full band enters with electric guitars and orchestral keyboards filling in what would later be realized with actual orchestras. There's something touching about hearing the ideas in their less polished form: the choir is a keyboard patch rather than a real ensemble, the strings simulated, but the architecture of the song is already sophisticated, the transitions between sections considered and purposeful. The melody itself is one of the strongest in the catalog, a long-breathed theme that feels genuinely composed rather than assembled — it has the quality of something that could be sung around a fire or played in a great hall. The lyrics establish the world and the quest with the concentrated economy of someone who has thought deeply about their fiction, and the music treats those lyrics with the seriousness they ask for. Lione is younger here, the voice slightly less settled but already distinctive, and there's an earnestness in the performance that the band never entirely lost but that is most concentrated in these early recordings. You come to this song to understand where the whole elaborate edifice came from — to hear the seed of something before it became a monument.