Darkness Incarnate lyrics

"Something thicker than despair

Rides upon the midnight air

The smell of blood, the taste of prey

We spy you hiding, Gilles de Rais"

Under August swelter

After banquet and soiree

When spiced wine and song

Have further heated veins

To the ninth degree as tenacula

Hold another body in their sway

Gilles retires from the grasping fires

That will ashen the remains

Darkness incarnate

Demons in his semen

That once clung about the throats

Of children dragged from cellars to his rooms

Now permeate the castle

All who sleep dream of the goat

That dark eclectic harbinger of doom

Nightingales sang of tragedy

Whispers were made of blasphemy

Vain, insane, this brute aloof

Drew tainted veils over bitter truth

The stairs ran helterskelter

His bedchamber besieged

By phantoms who sheltered

In it's furs, remorse

They sought to overwhelm him

Like a lantern of disease

That shone on rotten faces

Of those murdered out in force

Darkness incarnate

Fleeing ghosts so indisposed

To his Satanic love

Of children dragged from cellars to his feast

He rose, a carnal wind opposed

To those that sat above

Tearing out into the forest like a beast

The night wind sang of tragedy

Whispers were made of blasphemy

Vain, insane, this brute aloof

Drew painted sails over naked truth

Madness clouded everything

Like a lycanthropic shroud

And through it's ghastly lineaments he saw

The trees become obscenities

Semen drip from every bough

As if he rooted Nature like a whore

Dryads tongued under skirts of leaves

Surrendering branches that slenderly pleased

The mocking orifices and the forest on her knees

Then once besotted, knotted trunks now grew

Rotten, venereal, cancerous, blue

The clotting of his heart to a rank cantankerous tune

[Gilles de Rais:]

Death is only a matter of a little pain

Beneath the sallow moonlight

In a wonderland of pain

Gilles fled back through the castle

Terrified and drained

He sought his deep red velvet bed

And the sleep it preordained

Exhausted, forced into the dead

The creep of nightmares came again

Sadness clouded everything

Like a lycanthropic shroud

And through it's ghastly lineaments he saw

Hundreds of slain children

Some came crawling disemboweled

To where he stretched out howling on all fours

Corpses tore at his legs and knees

As he clawed to the cross, begging reprieve

From a Lord that soared above the awful scene

He sobbed and wept, no voice was left

To scream, the dream was not drubbed yet

He heard the horrors hiss beside him,

'Herod, you'll regret...'

'Who hears the tears of nightfall?

Who steers the spears so spiteful?'

[Gilles de Rais:]

Oh my dearest angels

Go pray to God for me