Today's prompt is "wisdom." Now too often, whenever I think of that word, I think of wizardly themes that have tremolo strings and beautiful magical-sounding chimes and glockenspiel play.

Not this time. This time, I decided to depart from all that, and borrow a bit of my own ancestral culture. I'm doing a number of things in this piece for the first time -- much of this is semi-unknown territory, as I'm generally reticent to borrow from my own culture for many things.

I took a Hindustani sargam that was familiar to me (a.k.a. the Phrygian mode), and then only used minimal instrumentation that had to do with Hindustani music -- there is only a sitar, and only for the one glissando that happens in this piece. The rest was done with orchestration and synths.

I imagined an otherworldly judge, a Lawful Neutral eldritch abomination that would come at night-time from outer space to preside over matters of life and death. There is also a great deal of unknowing and fear that I injected into this piece -- not just the fear of the matters being brought to trial and the penalties handed down, but also the fear of looking at this eldritch creature's form, and the fear of what they have seen.

Otherwise, we often say that one needs wisdom to be a judge -- a quality perhaps occasionally seen, but not often present. I don't exactly consider myself "wise" by any stretch, but I tried to channel what that quality might entail.

For, you see, I know someone whose Sanskrit middle name translates to "light / intelligence." That's quite a tall order of a name, and one that carries a lot of weight with it. I thought of that name as I wrote this.