Death, The Great Adventure (Deluxe Edition Bonus Track)

(album: The Manticore And Other Horrors - 2012)

Sometimes red curtains fall
Before the act has headed for the wings
As on that night disaster crawled out from the stalls...

Suddenly the dark, the thickest Stygian dark
Pressing on all sides with vertigo
Running from the quickest in the sickest abyss
My spirit's lifted by an angel of woe

A dredged up dreadful past
Drags discordant thoughts my way
Unforgiven and driven to despair
I sense the mordant wraith Azazel
Standing there

Now the vision simmers
I spy a distant gleam
Racing ever closer
Through this persistent dream

And by its welcome glimmer
Writhing into sight
The brutish groping nightmares
That hide beside the light

Then a roar
And a voice like a pride of lions
Thunders from the maw
In a blackened mass
The creatures flee
Screaming bloody murder as
A shining gateway opens for me

Death, the great adventure

At the peril of my soul
I welcome death, the great avenger

Spared this awful realm
Where those who stalk the living haunt the murk
Untethered pleasures keep them tied to flawed
Humana

Floating upward still, to where the tunnel mouth reveals
Two manticores that ward an ebon door
I muster lean resolve, as the luminance dissolves
And I am thrust headlong before their venomous jaws

I am in darkness again
But here accursedness is vastly deeper
Unforgiven and given to torment
I am nothing
Grotesque, grotesque bereft of judgement

This abyss, a void
Where stripped of all but self
One must wish to be destroyed
To pass on somewhere else

Beyond this pit of wicked shouts
I madness and fallacies
Aeons I failed to rail my doubts
Before fear left love saving me

Then a roar
And a voice like the clash or titans
Thunders from the maw
In a seething mass
The horrors flee
Screaming bloody murder as
A shrouded sky opens immensely

Listen!
What eden shall arise
Abundant from the cliefs that stunt hell's
Redundant cries?

A view of breathtaking beauty
Unveils, as the sun disperses
Perversities

Death, the great adventure

For the glory of my soul
I welcome death, the great avenger

The damaged man revives
With dawning truth, this morning suits
The world I left abruptly
In exaltation, I find myself alive
Near death to steer a life longed corruptly

The sweet silver chord that keeps me more
I know that heaven sent her
From the cold to hold her face again
I rose from death, the great adventure