[Intro] Four hundred years are too many to still call it waiting. At some point it becomes hunger. At some point it becomes form. At some point you no longer know if you are searching for someone, or if you are searching for the part of yourself you lost with her. [Verse 1] They had called you prince, warrior, monster. But before anything else you were a man who had lost the only thing he did not know how to let go. You looked at God and handed the heavens back to Him. You said: if this is your order, I choose the dark. And the dark took you seriously. It gave you centuries, bodies, blood, rooms, names. It gave you everything. Except her. [Pre-Chorus] So you kept going. Because some absences become religions. And some religions need no altar. A memory is enough. [Chorus] You crossed four hundred years to return to her. But she was not the road. Love was. The thing you had lost along with your name. The thing you had hidden beneath your teeth, beneath the blood, beneath the hunger. You were not only searching for her. You were searching for yourself before the night. [Verse 2] Then you found her. Or maybe you found something that resembled her enough to make time tremble. A scent. A voice. A gesture. Memory entering the room before the body. And for a moment you became a man again. Not good. Not innocent. A man. Human enough to desire something again that was not merely possession. [Pre-Chorus] But love does not return the past. It looks at it. It passes through it. And then decides whether it can still remain. [Chorus] You crossed four hundred years to return to her. But she was not the road. Love was. The thing you had lost along with your name. The thing you had hidden beneath your teeth, beneath the blood, beneath the hunger. You were not only searching for her. You were searching for yourself before the night. [Bridge] Then the heart. Finally the heart. Not the bite. Not the blood. Not the eternal body. The heart. And when the iron passed through you, everything you had built began to fall away. The face. The strength. The youth. The legend. One after another. Until there was almost nothing left. Old. Fragile. Undone. And she held you anyway. [Build] Not the prince. Not the vampire. Not the man who had crossed four centuries to find her again. Only what was left. And maybe it was the first time someone had truly held you. [Final Chorus] For four hundred years you searched for love to return to her. In the end you discovered you needed it to return to yourself. When you had nothing left to show. Nothing left to seduce with. Nothing left to hold onto. When you were only a handful of dust in someone’s hands and they did not let you fall. Only then did the light recognize you. [Outro] The dust rose. Not toward her. Not toward the castle. Not toward the past. Toward something you had rejected four hundred years before. And maybe this is what love is. Not someone who saves us. Someone before whom we can finally stop being what we became. And return. To ourselves. [Outro] [End]
