"Darkness Incarnate" lyrics - CRADLE OF FILTH

'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:]
Oh my dearest angels
Go pray to God for me