The Great Dying

Vires Volo Ergo Sum!

Conglomerated kingdoms
The lands inhale as one realm
And sing in verdant din of the will to hunger
Roaring proud against a cruel, volcanic age
The cold-blooded strength of the scaled ones
Brings a torrid earth alive
The growing things and the molten earth
As a kraken's arms, grasp, pull, and own
With the beasts they dance for life and death
In primo aeon vitae
The whispers of hell from the mountains
In our hearts the smoking secrets of ancient end.

The greatest force is but frailty to celestial overlords
A missile from the void descends to crack the earth
The tolling of the bell.

Shot in the back—the mother chokes in agony
Gasping, spews her sulfur breath
Bleeding profuse, the plume of her mantle to hemorrhage for millennia
And bathe her children clean in molten blood.

Round we go, on the orb of decay—an oven baking death
Pressed into the book of life and ground gained and lost
Library record of the undertow of time.

We find ourselves among a field of graves, a vast and ancient cemetery
Approach the tombs, read the names carved for them by the mother
Translate and recite: ordovician, devonian, permian, triassic, cretaceous
But never a grave of our own
And we may design the nature of our end, but she will deal the final blow.

A grave of our own.

So it says in the book: The Great Dying
That the injured mother shed her lining
Beginning the game anew
Great crimson pillars of lava
Form the courthouse of the times
And condemns an emerald world
The cataclysmic palace shines
And smothers the opposition
Bowing, lowing to the sky
For mercy from a queen
Who was resolved for them to die
Help would never come
Their execution set in stone
Caustic, toxic shadows
Had made hell their fertile home
Their neighborhoods now flames
Their peers a living ash
Expunging into flames and vapor
Inhaled as a flash of night
A black and billowing dragon
Stretches its wings across the heavens
Bloating, glutting its hunger on life
Swooping its ebon span into the lungs of time
To extinguish the clock—the mother's work of art undone
This demon from within her comes to purify with fire
Her own bereaved hands bring the very oceans to a boil
And in the darkest age, hell so wrapped the earth
In that black embrace that life would never see the sun again
Until the dreaded hunger quenched grew weary and retired once more.

This is the dance of an eternal reign
The rise and fall of myriad empires
Our whole existence of this giving fire
Our every profit from a past disaster's pain!

Dancing upon the unfathomable ruin
O cry out in rapture to honor the halls of the dead!