r the nascent Gilles de Rais
A warrior and a scholar
He fought for Joan Of Arc
Before she met with martyrdom in flames

Far from fairytale
A deathshead on his sail
A light that would not fail
Beneath her spell
But the crucifix was veiled
When his decadence prevailed
In a drench of red regaled
He was shat out of Hell

Shat out of Hell

Frozen in iniquity
A passion for awe in an age of grief
His wealth and power led him on
To the tainted gates of Babylon

Born beneath the howling stars
In a shower of golden Lys
A wolf-cub with the world between his sabre teeth
Torn between extremes of faith
The pious and the priests
He fed the Devil children like he threw his mastiffs meat

Far from fairytale
The coffin and the nail
Descending to the pale
Under the spell
Of alchemists who failed
To clench the menstrual grail
In a drench of red regaled
He was shat out of Hell

Shat out of Hell

Grown so morbid without war
The wine corrupted, nightmares spored
His Lord's betrayal, played no more
He beat upon the Devil's door

Demanding pleasures to replace
Joan Of Arc, her epic grace
Had set aflame his wolfheart with her truth
And when she died, his life of pride
Was lost to God and in his crimes
He turned to raising Satan with the proof

Soon nightly, unsightly
Offerings were made on a vulgar altar
And slowly, but surely
The darkness answered like a falling star

Far from fairytale
Insanity exhaled
A full-blown winter gale
Under it's spell
Innocents assailed
Were entered and impaled
In a drench of red regaled
He was shat out of Hell

Shat out of Hell

Perverse, seductive, cruel as sin
An egotist, he mourned
Both war and glory, schooled to win
Whatever bored imagination spawned


3. The Death Of Love

[Narration by Doug Bradley:]
Her penultimate sighs
Called softy on the kindling wind
Her saintly eyes filling with tears, lifting with truth
And then a golden flash like the onset of Heaven
Leaving her screams breaking my heart
And in the grip of fire
I knew the death of love

Where will you be when they tense for warfare?
What will you see with your innocence there?
Where will you be my darling?
Where will you be when they tense for warfare?

Where will you be when God is glorifying?
There we will be between the dead and dying
Where will you be my darling?
Where will you be when God is glorifying?

Prophecies and glory forge a massive disdain
For lying passive in the shadows whilst the enemy reigns
Devoted to the votive, holy standard above
'By command of the king of Heaven'
Came the death of love

Where will you be when they're vilifying?
How will they see when the truth is blinding?
Where will you be my darling?
Where will you be when they're vilifying?

Where will you be when the dark is rising?
How will you keep from it's terrorizing?
Where will you be my darling?
Where will you be when the dark is rising?

Burning was the sunset like a portent of doom
On the saintly iron maiden as she fell from her wound

But visions and ambition
Never listened to submission
And she was on a mission from the highest above
To Lord upon the slaughter
Like a sword through hissing water
She arose where archers sought her
For the death of love

The righteous death of love

Gilles adored her drama
Her suit of pure white armour
Blazed against the English in a torrent of light

And as they rallied onto night
A cancer fled his soul
Dissolving...

Framed amid the thick of fire
Aflame, a Valkyrie
She made him click without desire
And in his eyes she swam a Goddess

And even when they caught her breath
Her words would leave a scar
'For only in the grip of darkness
Will we shine amidst the brightest stars'

How will you breathe when their wheels are turning?
How will you know if the sky is burning?
Where will you be my darling?
How will you breathe when their wheels are turning?

Where will you be when Babel builds my fire?
Will you not flee and label me pariah?
Where will you be my darling?
Where will you be when they light my pyre?

Aligned with Joan in all
That was enthroned and divine
He swore to score the crimes
Jackdaws poured on this dove
Crimes he knew alone
Derived from minds of the blind
The church unfurled for murder perched
Upon the death of love

Framed amid the thick of fire
Aflame, a Valkyrie
She claimed the skies were lit with spires
And in his eyes she swam a Goddess

And even when she fought for breath
Her words would leave a scar
'For only in the grip of darkness
Will we shine amidst the brightest stars'


4. The 13th Caesar

[Narration by Doug Bradley:]
Oh, how my rampant desire
Ripped from the presence of God
Now hungered like a beast
For the knowledge of evil

When Joan was burnt
He knew malevolence
At the heart of all
A cold and jagged abyss bled of sense
The throne he earned
Through God's benevolence
Started his own fall
Clothing ragged dogma in his own magnificence

Here the stench, the gold events
The bold inventions of the will
Luxuries and splendours past the ken of mortal men
Every wanton bent desire went fulfilled

A Daemon sat upon the top of the world
Like a Herod over Genesis
They sang hosannas as his banners unfurled
Kissing terrors with paralysis

His brash canvas insulted the view
moving heaven and earth to please the
Tumultitudes, whom his strange retinue drew
To assert the thirteenth Caesar

The thirteenth Caesar
Ichor kicked inside his veins
The thirteenth Caesar
War was licked, for shame
The thirteenth Caesar
Sicker, but just as vain
The thirteenth Caesar
Gilles De Rais

When Joan was burnt
He knew malevolence
At the heart of all
He swore henceforth he would serve evil alone

Here the stench, the gold events
The insurrection of his will
Theatre and feasts past the ken of mortal men
Every wanton bent desire went fulfilled

A Daemon sat upon the top of the world
Like a Herod over genesis
They sang hosannas as his banners unfurled
Striking terror intro menaces

Suetonius and Ovid
Filled the moonstruck dreams
With the purple of Rome

His Venus of arena-blood was dead
And he was storming home


5. Tiffauges

[Narration by:]
"God can deny nothing to a De Rais
And should He ever
There is always the Devil"


6. Tragic Kingdom

Here sat Babylon
Fattened by the purses of the worst and wrong
Where the decadent tastes of Hell grew strong
Like a curse upon
This tragic kingdom

Dusk descended like a final curtain
On this stage only death was certain
Singing through the turrets
Like a velvet serenade

Played near a grave

Sentries and gentry, afforded the bloom
Of a red setting sun and a bloodletting moon
Applauded, then accorded them
Portents of doom

Almost too soon...

They pissed upon the winds
That rocked the cradles
Laughing over those hovels grovelling to wolves
They kissed and sinned
Under overstocked tables
As the world outside grew sodden and mauled

Here sat Babylon
Fattened by the purses of the worst and wrong
Where the decadent tastes of Hell grew strong
Like a curse upon
This tragic kingdom

Gilles sat sipping damson absinthe
From a goblet made of bone
As lightning ripped and danced upon
The flagstones
Wayward fantasies marched on home

Now the treetops bowed to whisper
In a thin Disney veneer
They knew the howls so exquisitely honed
Were those of children, disappeared

They'd listened to the winds
Heard the murdered Abel
Re-christened in the stone jaws of Tiffauges

Where the list of sins
Grew beyond a fable
They now roared abroad, restless with debauch

Restless with debauch

Restless with debauch
This tragic kingdom
Would see God's angels walk
Away...

Satanic, enigmatic
His black magic was ecstatic
Megalomaniac in titanic displays
Dressed in the best
Wicked britches of the West
He cut a mourning figure in glorious swathe

But all his nightmares would come true
Drowning in a stream of unbounded pleasure

Here sat Babylon
Fattened by the purses of the worst and wrong
Where the decadent tastes of Hell grew strong
Like a curse upon
This tragic kingdom

Like a curse upon
This tragic kingdom

The moon bleared through the skeletal trees
Averting her face from congenital deeds

Thus eves grew murky, haunted, grieved
About this place laced with demon seed

Blanchet, a priest, his book of lies
Exonerated him from Gilles' crimes
Announced his fears, one night of sighs
A night for cursing nursery rhymes
In the light of the fire wrestling feckless shadows

(The track gets blacker for this tragic kingdom)

Gilles' frightening wealth, his tightening grip
On the weak and the rubies that his coffers let slip
Steered to near ruin in successive years
Of the most of excess and the best of it here
In the light of the fire wrestling reckless shadows


7. Sweetest Maleficia

[Narration:]
"I conjure you Barron, Satan, Beelzebub
By the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit
By the Virgin Mary and all the saints
To appear in person, so that you may speak to us
And fulfill our desires
Come at my bidding and I will grant you
Whatever you want, however vile
And the curtailing of my life"

He would rise triumphant
All done up
On a plume of raven wings
Trafficking with sycophants
Sharing his cup
Amidst other graver things

Alchemists and sorcerers stitched his head
With the stench of pitch and myrrh

The devout faded out but the pagan remained
The candles burnt low and still nothing came
Bearing golden secrets from a cold malevolent race

He would have his demon!
He would have his vice!
All save his soul was up for sacrifice!
Despite their raising not a single hair
Everything stank of witchcraft there

From the stained chapel to the statued lawn
In Caprineum on the lake
To the still lit crypts and the slit of dawn
Sliding down the towers, it all smelt fake

He needed answers not advice
Intending to devise
A lengthy train of torture for the fool
Who thought a seance would suffice
Or sighted, furred in dragonflies
The signature of Satan on a wall

Sweetest Maleficia

Planchette to Blanchet, from ghosts to a priest
Returning with a spider for the poisonous feast
The Italian astrologer Prelati, spinning sin

His fingertips were scented with
The tears from seraphim cheeks
Part glamour and a hammer
Cadaverous and glib
Commanding in a voice of frozen peaks

He would have his demon!
He would have his gold!
Out of control Gilles' soul was sold
Under mistletoe and the glistening snow
Kissing in the shadow of abandoned saviours

"So I shall conjure Thee demons of the Netherworld"

(From the banquet hall to the stable gates
A graveyard shift in tone
Sank upon the castle, like a papal weight
Or a deep philosophical stone)

The air was sick with trepidation
Despair and desperation
Then he fixed his covenant in blood
Now all was rich and tapestried
Fragrant wine to shitty mead
His new world opened with a claret flood

Time was right, this wretched night
To etch the circles clear again...

As a labyrinth of razors led a blind man to the stars
So too Prelati brought the dark
It's name was Barron, eyes like catastrophic tar
Imbibed with fire
They fed him shredded infants on an altar full of scars

Entangled in a dream
The mirrors full of steam
He scarce could see Joan's face reflecting through

His last attempt to grasp at God
Lay blackened in a holy fog
And now there were only devils to pursue

Gilles was wrapped in a velvet spell
Of Hell and her seductions

The assassinated days as a Caesar gone by
Barron, spitting acid, as his magical guide
Lit demonic pyres where once dying embers writhed

Sweetest Maleficia


8. Honey And Sulphur

[Narration:]
"So potent was the star under which I was born
That I have done no one in the world has done
Nor can ever do"

Praeclarum
Custodem
Ovium
Lupum

All Saints Day, the taint of rain
Blood and mud and thunder all the same
To those who close their ranks to Gille's men

Bricqueville, Prelati and De Sille
Creatures of the dark creeping up and down the countryside
Brittle angels out to pasture once again

Torture garden rules of thumb apply
To sacred flesh and the naked eye
Golgothic this erotica
Stinking of honey and worse, sulphur

So black was the magic in this tragical kingdom
That the superstitions grew
Wise to the wolves that surprised their children
Gagged in sacks and dragged back to

Tiffauges
It's roads now home to a beautiful stranger
Lifting her veil
Spinning her lies
Tender eyes, never-ending danger

It grows
A rose that chose death for it's bedmuck
Prickles in wait
Thanking her spies
Trickling thighs her only hiccup

And though she walks the forest trails
She's far from innocent or frail
She leads them down the path where darkness dwells

That night is rife with celebration
The tower sings
Where so much foul illumination
Strikes a lighthouse for the things
That slither and slather at the border of the pentagram
Mid sour dreams
A beauty pageant for the gathering damned
Of slaughtered lambs and tortured screams

Praeclarum
Custodem
Ovium
Lupum

Torture garden rules of thumb apply
To sacred flesh and the naked eye
Golgothic this erotica
Stinking of honey and worse, sulphur

So black was the magic in this tragical kingdom
In this castle of loup-garou
When moonstruck veins, inflamed, deranged on
A parcel of victims now tied to

Tiffauges
Engorged on the hordes of the anorexic
Cherubim forced
Naked and blind
A holocaust mind designed their exit

A libertine so grim
Sometimes tore them limb from limb
Slitting their throats
Pissing on graves
Jesus saved but the devil made him

Praeclarum
Custodem
Ovium
Lupum


9. Midnight Shadows Crawl To Darken Counsel With Life

[Narration:]
"Sometimes I beheaded them
with daggers, with poniards, with knives
Sometimes I suspended them in my room
from a pole or by a hook and chords and strangled them
And when they were languishing
I committed with them the evils of the flesh"

The evening air laps thick about
The stagnant moat that Tiffauges claims
As dusk now slips away
Where taught to run, the rotten tongue
Of a hotter Götterdämerung
Has started licking like a flame

Whispers in the dismal mist
Are full of crystal promises

Black rites begun in earnest
Ignite Hell's hungry furnace

Behold the bold inauguration of the darkside
Demonic passions climbing
Ill-fated stars aligning

Tonight these sights are guaranteed to feed the master
The tide of blood is rising
His gifts will be providing

Unmasked, the phantom lord De Rais
Haunts the furthest tower
Wherein death has sucked the hour

There, throttled gasps tantamount to foreplay
And drooling razors next to come
Unspool red secrets from the young

The moon grinned full, the games were chaste
When the children first arrived
Now midnight shadows crawl apace
To darken counsel with their lives

Flesh and ecstasy as sport
Are immortal vices of the highest order
Wherein devilry holds sway
Behind blind walls where these cockatrice squalled
Their songs of Necronomicon
Spoke out of Gilles De Rais

Each murdered son, each frozen rose
Handpicked, was gently fed
To the sumptuous one in black and those
Whose lives were thrown in with the dead

The candles lit, the stage was set
As it was in sainted days
When censers swung and banners hung
On the Siege of Orleans on the painted Seine

Now the castle floats in the drifting fog
Torn from it's moorings
Like a shipwreck dredged from Hell
As innocents entreat a shifting God
Their voices soaring
On a silver tide to heaven
On a knife edge as they fell

The blade would plunge in virulent arcs
Such wounds would stretch away
By the fireside, warmed to creative sparks
Of the monster Gilles De Rais

Gilded Gilles De Rais

Comets vomited
The restless bells of crime
Peeled back skin from broken bones
Of angels cut from the nicks of time

Festering faces with painted eyes
The prettiest kept to be thrust inside
Gaping necromantic from the mantle-side
Caked in kissed goodbyes

Days faded in decay
The stench of perfume lied
No horror in the glades of man
Was left for Barron to provide

So unique was the beat of his poisoned heart
And it's sordid, morbid crack
No further atrocity could possibly surpass
Unrewarded, bored, he turned his back


10. Darkness Incarnate

"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 helter-skelter
His bedchamber besieged
By phantoms who sheltered
In it's furs, remorse
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 tainted 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

"Death is only a matter of a little pain"

Beneath the sallow moonlight
In a wonderland of pain
Gilles fled back to 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

Madness clouded everything
Like a lycanthropic shroud
And through it's ghastly lineaments he saw
Hundreds of slain children
Some came crawling disembowelled
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?'

"Oh my dearest angels, go pray to God for me"


11. Ten Leagues Beneath Contempt

Awaking in a sweat
Forsaking pleasure for regret
Another night of blight had slowly passed
The morning skies once fresh and bright
Darkened down no near twilight
Once could smell the end of days were coming fast

Gilles wandered as in purgatory
Beyond the grave of his estate
Neither Heaven, Hell or peasantry
Were present save projected hatred

He knew suspicion, he felt derision
And grief like a sharpened stake
Pierce his heart, and now the start
Of his unknitting began to take

Vain glorious, a Lord, devout?
He thought his soul exempt
From guilt and doubt, there's no way out
Ten leagues beneath contempt

(He drank an ocean quoting Joan the maiden
A vampire's pious rant
His hot blood stank of devotion laden
With bias for love's covenant)

Awaking in a sweat
Forsaking pleasure for regret
His choired chapel sighed with his laments
As accusations reached a roar
Investigations breached the door
He put up nothing save his favours in defense

The Church stirred in it's Roman lair
The grease had long been spent
Now all tongues spat at Tiffauges there
Ten leagues beneath contempt

Just one falter
One misplaced deed
And Gilles would be undone
As he teetered on the verge of defeat

Profaning God's altar
Bursting in on evening Mass
He threatened there to crucify the priest

Drunk on fiery wine
With the storm lashing behind
He then threw this Philistine
To his foulest dungeon

And money owed or not
The Priest released or left to rot
His blatant sacrilege begot
A war machine of papal Rome

They came for him in mourning splendour
With the blessing of the Saints
His fawning grin in sweet surrender
A lesson in enforced restraint

He knew suspicion, he felt derision
And fear like a sharpened stake
Pierce his heart, and now the start
Of his unknitting began to take

He thought courts bought with golden crowns
Rich Bishops he could tempt
But traitor's gate was sought and found
Ten leagues beneath contempt

Ten leagues beneath contempt


12. Godspeed On The Devil's Thunder

"This is the moment I go to God"

Burning like derision on the prism of night
Still squirming from the sermon, those determined parasites
Meant to overpower and bedizen his light
He paced his tower prison with a dissonant appetite
The moon was black

Devil may care
Three times he'd glared before his judges
Darkening there
With a Wormwood mind
And a gullet of poison

Asked
He thought the court a farce
His tongue as sharp as glass
A bastard to the last
This truth assassin...

..tautened his claws at the ruinous cast
Flexing vexation at clerics aghast
In uproar he caused the cross to be masked
And the hex of exile from God's Kingdom passed

Back in the mirror, shattered vanity died
The curse even clearer on the sanity side
Banished from the lavish tracts of paradise
From Heaven's shored poured to the sore divide

The moon was black

Devil may care
Their thunder sundered all his veils
Thickening there
His beligerent pulse
To a sickening crawl

Yes
He'd fostered wickedness
Fed vipers at his breast
Inflicted death's caress
So now to suffer...

He'd burn, discern
That his second turn
Would last for eternity
In reckoning flames

That night his plight marched in demented Parades
O'er a rainbow of black magic scars
The blood ran to fear, turned to torment in spades
Deep in the sleep of this heretic, barred

The nightmares were livid, occultist, depraved
His epiphany struggled to come
But dawn found him there, redemptive, prepared
Like Christ to Golgotha, his face to the sun

All fears were smeared
When Joan had appeared
In a shower of tears
Last vestige of innocence

Yearning for her vision of divinity
Of her miracles and dreamt lyrical deeds

He would meet her at the pyre as the fire kissed
And together they'd climb to God, entwined in bliss

Devil may care
He awed the court with a sworn confession
Quickening there
His radiant death
And acute renewal

Thus
The end was glorious
He went like Jesus trussed
To shadow and to dust
At the stroke of seven

And
With thieves at both his hands
The Reaper of these lands
Wept with holy plans
As he choked to heaven


13. Corpseflower

"I have told you the truth and everything as it happened"

"All the evil that I could do has been accomplished
I am redeemable and I believe
The clemencies of God
And suffrages of the Holy Church
Have succoured me with much mercy
I have only ever wished to satisfy my desires"


14. Balsamic And Anathema

[Limited Edition bonus track]

"No human power can stop the will of heaven from being asserted."

Worming through the mark
Of Ezekiel and Mark
Through the chapters of Honorius
Gilles, as in a trance
Screwed the pages up and danced
Courting something vainly glorious

He walked he gravest night
That decrepit final juncture
Of doom and negativity
Reeking of death
And the gloom of Stygian light

When suddenly, the faintest whisper!
A curtain opened in a painted vista
Moonbeams swept into his dream...
Balsamic and anathema

Balsamic and anathema

Prelati full of stars
Magical, ecstatic stars
That sparkled, no debacle sought to douse
His fiery omnipresence
Hissed at heaven, evanescent
He was there to thwart the burning of his Faust

The gates were prised, the phantom horses
Snorted, restless to be gone
With enchantment's eyes upon the door, he cried-
'Come with me now!'

Gilles balked, the thought of life
Accused and pursued
And overridden by morbidity
Saddened his breath
For those destined for his knife

Then suddenly - the strangest feeling
One that left the angels reeling
Atonement crept into his midst
Balsamic and anathema

Balsamic and anathema

Prelati, full of stars
This abductor of his heart
Promised him horizons free of pain
But all the grand designs
Magic sings and midnight wines
In the dream-world couldn't hope to swerve his aim

He would stay and face his slayers
Cardinals and courtroom players
Whilst Prelati must now flee before
The pure and azure dawn...

The gates were wide, the phantom horses
Snorted, restless to be gone
With enchantment's eyes upon the door
Once more he cried
'Come with me now!'

Prelati full of stars
Tried to pull him from the dance
Summoning his Barron to perform
But as the Demon rose
In sweet miracles of prose
And propaganda, came a proper bible storm

Lightning - grinning, froze
On this murder-site of crows
And from the scattered ashes stepped a sylph
The maiden Joan of Arc
Crept more beautiful and dark
A paradise, a cradle free of filth

She was chaste beyond all graces
The face of faith illuminated
More precious than Prelati's spell
A Goddess in a dream...

And trembling in her arm
Her eyes a thousand golden psalms
That glittered as on Christmas night
He wept like Hallowe'en

He held the scene, the poignant gleam
Of peace and great serenity
Close to his heart, her parting kiss
He slept to wake released in bliss