[D minor] [Intro, orchestral and choir swell building from nothing, no percussion yet, ominous] [Verse 1, shrieked vocal enters with full blast beat and tremolo guitar, strings doubling the vocal line] Forty maws of iron crowned the deck gold and brimstone choked the hold every hull I met, I wrecked every soul aboard was sold he crowned his beard with tongues of fire and named the deep his funeral pyre I bore his fire, I bore his name and swore the deep would never claim [Pre-Chorus, vocal layered and harsher, strings climbing] What I have taken, I still own what I have shattered turns to bone [Chorus, full symphonic force, wordless soprano voice weaving through the shriek] I thirst for fire, I thirst for gore long past the pyre, long past the shore no crew, no sail, no oath, no more still I sail to pay the score [Verse 2, same shriek, strings sharper and more dissonant underneath] He wrecked me on a lying shoal and called it fate, and called it toll then took the gold and kept his chance and left the rest without a glance the water drowned me in the silt no sail to raise, no keel to tilt I lay aground and learned too late a hull is chattel, not a fate [Pre-Chorus, same rhyme words, meaning inverted] Now the gold was never my own now I am but ballast and bone [Chorus, full force] I thirst for fire, I thirst for gore long past the pyre, long past the shore no crew, no sail, no oath, no more still I sail to pay the score [Verse 3, instrumentation drops to near silence, vocal shifts to whispered spoken narration, one sustained string note underneath] Two hundred years the tide kept time no bell, no watch, no need to chime the iron wore a shroud of stone the sea rebuilt me bone by bone I lay beneath the ground so long the tide forgot to right the wrong and I forgot the war's own drums until a diving engine hums [Pre-Chorus, same rhyme words, final inversion, vocal returning to full shriek, orchestration rebuilding] Every plank of me is now their own catalogued, numbered, less than bone [Verse 4, full force returns, tension building, no chorus release yet] They came with lantern, glove, and line to number every rib of mine they raised a cannon to the sun and called the old war finally won but iron remembers what it is fed and I was never merely lead no glass can hold a hunger under no case can hold the coming thunder [Final Chorus, full intensity, one word changed from every prior pass] I thirst for fire, I thirst for gore long past the pyre, long past the shore no crew, no sail, no oath, no more now I sail to pay the score
