[Intro - slow building instrumental, darkness dripping with beauty, 16-32 bars, no vocals] [Verse 1] Stars named like children, as if the dark were ours Fingers spread against the vacuum, reaching 'cross the night Every greeting written down, yet never learned to wait Faces traced in random scan, patterns built from light The boundless pulled around us like a cloak we think we own Falling into love with stars long dead, and faded into silence [Chorus] The void returns us wonders, and the wonders keep us blind We build our towers higher, pressing through the thinning veil Ten thousand years of listening to the echo of our need And every tower, every dish, every prayer — to no avail [Verse 2] A visitor passed through, tumbling strange against the void And all our hunger turned to meet it, burning bright with hope Its shape unlike the dark's own making, angles carved too clean And all our models broke apart attempting to discern It made no sign, it shed no light, it simply carried on And breathed the silence back in slow, and felt it newly worn [Chorus] The void returns us wonders, and the wonders keep us blind We build our towers higher, pressing through the thinning veil Ten thousand years of listening to the echo of our need And every tower, every dish, every prayer — to no avail [Bridge] Such beacons in the black, such hard won points of light Such capacity for wonder, reaching past its own despair Set against the vast of everything it looked away from Eyes fixed on something distant while the near things learned to drown We built our towers skyward while the foundations learned to rust Still climbing on our waxen wings and proud of every rung [Final Chorus] Stare into the empty long enough and find the reason Evidence has always been here, written in the dawn So much of what was needed, present, squandered, left to fade No answer ever coming — invitation withdrawn [Outro - no vocals, instrumentation drops piece by piece over 60 seconds, single sustained sine tone, mathematically regular, pulsar frequency, cold and indifferent, tone continues alone for 30 seconds, fades to complete silence, do not resolve, do not comfort]
