At The Gates The Nightmare of Being 1. Spectre of Extinction Our will, impersonal, blind A gulf at the heart of the world Dark as the absence of light Death as the absence of all life To touch the deepest depths Through the denial of the will The spectre of extinction Eternal in its rage The reverence and the fall The purity of our cage The black depths of the cosmos itself An impersonal nothing Demonic contagion Indifferent and immaterial To touch the deepest depths Through the denial of the will The spectre of extinction Eternal in its rage The reverence and the fall The purity of our cage The purity of our cage Contagious, in life, in death With cataclysmic force The abstract is now weaponized Into parasitic forms Amorphous and surreal As phantoms without face or shape The spectre of extinction Eternal in its rage The reverence and the fall The purity of our cage The purity of our cage 2. The Paradox Prodigious dreams, entangled and black Coiled in the corners of life Hallucinations, engraved in our bones Futile, monotonous lives The poison circle, eyes within eyes How black our madness to be Spectral salvation, unfurling itself Through labyrinthian nights To carry these dead notes As we stare into the abyss Our ruin, twisted and black Into the starving void Dehumanization of our art and culture Parent of horrors to be Mankind is nothing but self-conscious flesh The triumph of our own deceit The structures they now crumble The fevered liturgy Black with the scars of madness We hide within our crypts Through mad winds of terror Dreams are disturbed In pulse after heaven-wide pulse Older than darkness, colours unknown Within the pit of death Heroic dreams now trampled By figures in rust-coloured robes A region, illuminated Into the nuclear dawn The structures they now crumble The fevered liturgy Black with the scars of madness We hide within our crypts And as all hope turns to black Into the dreamless night As all hope turns to black Of pessimism and paradox No hope – all black No hope – all black And as all hope turns to black Into the dreamless night As all hope turns to black Of pessimism and paradox Of pessimism and paradox Of pessimism and paradox 3. The Nightmare of Being Within its black womb The edge of a dreamless void Into an abyss dead The primal chaos In its most naked form Submit to its blind laws The fragmentation of The starving universe Turn, black A life without world Into an abyss of Pure lucidity Pitch, black Our poisonous veil Upon the wheel of lies In morbid sleep of death To perpetuate Our impermanence Turn, black Our poisonous veil The negativity And the phenomena Pitch, black A life without world The parasites of the subconscious Our perception – From the arc of the skull The indifference illuminated And to nothingness we will return The swarming absence, in darkened minds Under a monochrome sky Our dimension – Under attack And now the beacon turns black The fragmentation of The starving universe Our poisonous veil Into an abyss Of pure lucidity Our poisonous veil Disintegration of our masters All of their radiance and their truth As we vanish into havoc And the unfathomable The nightmare of being Now our mutations roam blind The nightmare of being The nightmare of being Now our mutations roam blind The nightmare of being 4. Garden of Cyrus The nameless shapes That poison the world A chaos at feast In eternal return The vertigo of freedom That nests in the shadows The all-devouring dead In the fires of unbecoming Phosphorous Sculptured from dust Primal Unknown Into the silent Phosphorous void Sculptured from dust Profane Laid bare Into the silence Face white (Eyes of ash) Swallowed (White as salt) Move beyond, move beyond life Pattern (Luminous) Swarming (Nebulae) Instruments, instruments of tragedy Phosphorous Sculptured from dust Primal Unknown Into the silent Phosphorous void Sculptured from dust Profane Laid bare Into the silence Into the silence Garden of Cyrus 5. Touched by the White Hands of Death The worship of the immaterial The denial of death Boneless we crawl through the night The night without end The dead bones of your future self Touched by the white hands of death The contorted mutations The serpent dissolves As the light in your temples burn black In the dust of this planet The fall into time As the light in your temples burn black The dead bones of your future self Touched by the white hands of death Repressional mechanism Our ancestral curse Emptied of all the illusions Distorted since birth The ambient plague The sect of the last messiah The contorted mutations The serpent dissolves As the light in your temples burn black In the dust of this planet The fall into time As the light in your temples burn black The dead bones of your future self Touched by the white hands of death In the dust of this planet The fall into time Touched by the white hands of death Touched by the white hands of death 6. The Fall into Time Our curse The fall into time (Our curse) Now cross The threshold of death (Now cross) Through tempest and fire and a night without end Transcending all illusion With violent precision and destructive intent Into the pit of death To search for the answers – Outside of yourself A civilization of dreaming death To work among, your darkest of dreams The eternal wound of existence Bound to the horrors, the horrors of life This paranoia of the heart By trauma exhausted – Oblivion tamed Through fear and corruption – To deep to explain The hallucinations – Perverted through time Primordial nightmares – A horror divine Adoration of our primeval dread In the darkest of illusions dead These virgin sunsets This dimensional complex torn Through disintegration Now cross (Now cross) The threshold of death Our curse The fall into time (Our curse) To search for the answers Outside of yourself A civilization The Fall into time Adoration of our primeval dread In the darkest of illusions dead These virgin sunsets This dimensional complex torn Through disintegration Now cross (Now cross) The threshold of death Our curse The fall into time (Our curse) 7. Cult of Salvation Sculptured from dust, hallucinations Through nights of obsidian black The sacrificial city, illuminated Premonitions from the nuclear void Inter-dimensional incarcerations Invoking chaos and flame Upon the throne, the abomination Cerebral horror, cerebral horror profane Inherited strife and destitution Under a sky without stars In ecstasy blind, we tear through the night Dressed in our tears and our scars Inter-dimensional incarcerations Invoking chaos and flame Upon the throne, the abomination Cerebral horror, cerebral horror profane Our purgatorial glow The wasteland of unreasoning Desolate and perilous In dim transparency The magnetism of recoil And luminous duality As whispered pictures fall Through stratospheric purity Phenomena of suffering Through dreams of prophecy Cult of salvation, the end reborn Absence of color, void of form Inter-dimensional incarcerations Invoking chaos and flame Upon the throne, the abomination Cerebral horror, cerebral horror profane 8. The Abstract Enthroned Through distorted mutations The aberration born Crowned in madness perverted Piercing through our form Necropolis The scourge of dying worlds Through barren lands We march into oblivion The abstract enthroned Through the concept of death Resignation, voiceless deaths With graves that beat in empty chests Wretched, the ruins Polluted obsolete Primal, the hunger Eternal in our own defeat The repressional virus Our global blackened dawn All existence is futile Inhuman cosmicspawn Tragedy Coiling itself like smoke Pollute our minds We fall into oblivion The abstract enthroned Through the concept of death In our brilliant tombs Of destitution and wealth With graves that beat in empty chests 9. Cosmic Pessimism There's a ghost that grows inside of us, damaged in the making And there's a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought There's a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burned all the way down Arabesque ink wandering, winds itself around our ovate dreams We seem to speak only in the imprecise geometries of black volcanic sands Huge, impossibly regular shapes of rutted charcoal rocks hover above us As if waiting We do not live, we are lived Pessimism, the last refuge of hope From a blurred horizon, quiet black basalt pools Bore into the rocks and our own patiently withering bones Slumbering swells of a salt-borne amnesia course through our fibrous limbs Scorched, wandering Brine secretes from every pore The luminous point where logic becomes contemplation Lost in thought, dreamless sleep, adrift in deep space A black glow in the deepest sleepwalking seas We do not live, we are lived Pessimism, the last refuge of hope Around you this night, a thousand million firefly anatomies Breathe in and out in their slow burning, liturgical glow Impersonal sadness, to become overgrown, like a ruin We do not live, we are lived Pessimism, the last refuge of hope We do not live, we are lived Pessimism, the last refuge of hope We do not live, we are lived Cosmic pessimism, the last refuge of hope 10. Eternal Winter of Reason Primordial insignificance The inner presence of death Testimony to our futility Beyond the personal self From glacial silence deaf Baptized in the form of death Like the hunger of a tempest blind Like into open graves We keep falling The absolute, the phenomena Eternal winter of reason The emptiness, the indifference Eternal winter of reason Irrevocable, all-devouring Our lives inverted through time The cyclopean fabrications Our death it roars in our minds The hallucinations Preserve the illusion Disembodied, eternal We open to death Irrevocable, all-devouring The absolute, the phenomena Eternal winter of reason The emptiness, the indifference Eternal winter of reason