The desert sun is blazing in a cloudless sky, turning your heavy breastplate into a furnace and boiling your brain in the heated metal confines of your helmet. Your coarse woolen tunic tears at your flesh while you struggle to keep your spear steady and your aim true. You drop the encumbering weight of your shield but your cape still tugs at your neck, belabouring your breath and making your fear of heights all the more unbearable as you stand atop a cliffside wondering whether the tiny holes dotting the landscape really are home to poisonous snakes.
It’s only noon, but your head screams with pain as you contemplate whether pounding over a dozen shots of Crown Royal whiskey and Jägermeister until 6am this morning was such a good idea. You smile faintly at a couple of joggers who wave as they pass by. They might just be wondering whether you’re the first human being in the 15 million year history of Phoenix, Arizona’s Papago Park to turn up dressed like a Spartan warrior.
You’re , 20-year-old frontman of Trivium, and for you, life has just gotten seriously weird. If you were one of the thousands of metalheads on hand to witness Trivium’s slot at Download 2005, you might have some idea why. Just a few weeks before, the Floridian upstarts’ rapturously received UK tour was enough to propel a last minute change from a tent show to Donington’s centre stage.
And it was also enough to make many believe that Trivium, this previously unknown dynamo of the live circuit, .