I Loved You First

[Title: I Loved You First] [Key: G minor] [Tempo: 70 BPM] [Time Signature: 6/8] [Intro] [glassy clean electric guitar, frozen piano notes, distant low swell, cold and suspended] [Verse 1] [close vocal, delicate, calm, almost inhumanly controlled] I knew your name in sheets of ice before the world could speak it free, saw your face in winter glass where the black tide dreamed of me. You were fire behind the frost, warm blood in a world gone still, and every frozen mile of dark bent softly to my will. [Verse 2] [bass enters, subtle drums, tension underneath] They pushed you out through iron light, through the pale and fractured sea, but I had felt you in the deep long before you drifted near me. The harbor cracked behind your wake, the gulls were lost in silver air, and all the cold I’d worn for ages woke because your heart was there. [Chorus] [wider, still restrained, cold certainty] I did not call you down in anger, I did not draw you down in spite. I only knew the world would break you in its brief and borrowed light. So come to me beneath the frostline, where no false dawn can make you flee. I loved you first, before the living. You were always meant for me. [Verse 3] [slightly darker, more shimmer, more pressure] You saw me rise through crystal black, through shattered blue and iron gleam, pale as frost on chapel stone, half remembered as a dream. And in your eyes I saw the fear men hand to anything unknown, but I was only winter’s daughter, only love with nowhere home. [Verse 4] [drums deepen, electric guitar thickens, metallic undertow begins] My halls are cut from buried light, from rings of ice and names gone dim, from prayers that froze on sailors’ mouths when the dark grew full of him. I would have laid the storm to sleep, I would have stilled the knives of spray, if you had only heard beneath your fear what fate had meant to say. [Chorus] [larger, more insistent, almost restrained metal] I did not call you down in anger, I did not pull you down in hate. I only knew no other ending for a heart already claimed. So come to me beneath the frostline, where no bright wound of morning sees. I loved you first, before the living. You were always meant for me. [Bridge] [quiet at first, then pressure builds, sharp emotional fracture] They teach your kind to fear the deep, to name the cold a faithless thing, to turn from any hand that glows with no soft human offering. So when you looked on me and trembled, all the ice in me rang through, and grief became a field of mirrors breaking silver over blue. [Extended Guitar Solo] [extended haunting crystalline electric guitar solo, bell-like high notes, icy sustain, slow melodic phrasing, gradually building into almost restrained metal, deep rolling bass and toms, frozen and beautiful, unsettling, like moonlight through broken ice, not flashy, no blues phrasing, no southern rock swagger] [Break] [band drops suddenly to sparse glassy piano, distant clean guitar, and soft bass swell, tension dissolves into longing, vocal returns exposed and intimate] [Verse 5] [aching, intimate, more human, less force] Then canvas split and rigging screamed, the masts turned black against the snow, and lantern light climbed up the storm like something trying not to go. When at last you fell through broken dark where all bright reckonings give way, I gathered you in crystal silence and the sea forgot the day. [Final Chorus] [longing replaces menace, fuller but more tender] I did not keep you out of cruelty, I did not keep you out of pride. I only could not lose the one the tide had written at my side. Now rest with me beneath the winter glass, where all hard longing turns to blue. I loved you first, through all the winter. And now I ache in keeping you. [Outro] [voice, glassy piano, and distant shimmering guitar, unresolved and sorrowful] Your face lies pale in frozen light, untouched by weather, grave, or years, and all the ice above your sleep is bright with what became of tears. Let them call me ruin, call me hunger, call me heartless, call me sea. I only kept the fate I was given. You were always meant for me. [Ending] [glassy piano and electric guitar fade into cold unresolved stillness] [Spoken Tagline] [very soft, intimate, cold, almost whispered, after the music nearly fades, with only faint glassy piano or icy guitar shimmer underneath] Sleep now. The world will never take you from me.