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Archspire - Relentless Mutation lyrics



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01. Involuntary Doppelganger

Dead lives rive
From my human hide

When the cult had come for me
I could have got away, but didn't
I couldn't be the one to cause this any longer

Had it been a day or a year inside this skin?
I could not tell, the faces I had captured over centuries took hold

I became a kind of hunter
Eating pelts of pleading meat to acquire their appearance
Taking their form with will alone

Alive and crawling out of me
To catch it's prey
Shed you foreign poison peltry
Take the rind you want

Seen to be a wicked omen
Despite attempts to hide my live birth mark
Crown of a dark demon tar
I'd taken back with me from the other side

There is no god
For if there was
Then how'd this evil take me?
It seeped and crawled it's way along my face
As mother wept

Stealing identities from every skin it sees
Growing with urgency

When he tried to cut it off
Many a time (To no avail)
It would take my livid father's manic features

Laughing at him as he tried to hack them off his son
Knowing that he could not end my life
He took his own

Mother mourned the death of him
And knew that many more would follow
If I didn't leave right then

Heading out into the woods
I promised I would never come back
I thank the dead that she knows not what I have become

Taking over adolescent tendencies
To feed
To hunt
To kill
To change

Decades take me deep into the curses endless undertow
There is no time or end behind this epidermal prison
My thread of youth imprisoned
Tortured by immortal victims

I am the Involuntary Doppelgänger
I can not stop it, my skin is alive

All of the time I've spent inside it
I never thought it could be calling out to any other
Involuntary Doppelgänger

Had it grown bored of it's feed?
Or gained knowledge with time?
Whatever the change had been
I felt it emanating information

Had it tried to send a beacon
Warning them to stay away?
I heard the voices calling back
Involuntary Doppelgänger
Involuntary Doppelgänger

One last face it had to acquire
Before it's caught
The menace cloak found her
Still alive and skinning bodies of her own

It appeared she had done the same as I
For all this time, to see her son again

And there I stood
The cloak of others made her impossible to recognize
She carved me like any other martyr of our curse
When the cult had breached our cabin
Taking me to be a random victim of the doppelgänger

Heading out into the woods
I promised I would never come back
I thank the dead that she knows not what I have become

Taking over adolescent tendencies
To feed
To hunt
To kill
To change

Decades take me deep into the curses endless undertow
My tongue speaks in a cadence that only A.U.M. can decipher
Void of bidding heading out a very inner wreathing
Of a demon with intent to animate and be gone

02. Human Murmuration

I was the first to discover what hid in those red windows.
The one I found there tried hard to survive.
A child riddled with teeth sprouting randomly
All over his body (except in his rotting mouth)
Was taken by us, to our lab.
Us meaning myself, as well as the assistants I had.
Instructing me of a mission through
A distant telepathic channel,
Running directly out from their compound and into my brain.
Referring to themselves as the A.U.M.
I was to bring the body back to my quarters
And await instruction.
Not an easy task, to transport it.
Strapping it down to a gurney I dragged it through the alley.
Unfortunate casualties noticed me.
An iron pipe. A broken bottle.
Or a jagged piece of brick or stone.
I should not continue to delineate this any longer.
At one point I had to fake my death
Until the witness made a close inquiry.
At that time I had to use the less effective
weapons that were born onto me.
With old teeth and leather hands,
I took an ear and then an eye.
I focused force around their skull
To keep the m mute during attempts
To yell for aid, until they fell.
A.U.M. made it painfully clear, I was to bring the body back
Or I would be forced to witness the drop of black again.
I cannot begin to describe
The horror of viewing this maddening drop.
For the memory bleeds to deep into my own
That the mere thought alone starts to unravel
My frayed reality.
Giving way to it's ominous ability to shape
And adapt my thought and vision.
It is beginning to happen now.
I finally have the body safe inside.

After the abduction, after the viewing of the drip,
A building had been left to me by relatives
Across the ocean that it overlooked.
Or so I was told.
Often I try to recall
What endeavors I pursued previous to this,
Yet to no avail.
That part of my memory blurs in my mind
Like a fresh painted canvas left out in a thunderstorm.
I watch through my window as it melts.
Fading all the memories I kept,
Only A.U.M. here.
They are conducting human murmuration.
From the liquid in his bones
They raise the dead to fly together.
I circle with them in the shroud.
The winged ones and I.
Falling off their wind, I waken
With unworldly castings burned into my eyes.
Intermittent logic in a daze of violent hyper gliding.
They are conducting human murmurations.
From the liquid in his bones
They raise the dead to fly together.
I woke from my dream on the floor of the factory,
In a nest made of black feathers that were alive.
Somehow every hollow quill had filled up
With the rotting child's living marrow.
Each one serving as a needle to inject in each new body.
In this nest A.U.M. made it clear,
I was to bring more corpses back to life
Or be forced to witness the drop of black again.
Every night while in fever I've taken
A new pallet of bone to vein to infect and release.

03. Remote Tumour Seeker

Half the brain renames itself "Remote Tumor Seeker"
After it viewed the timeless drip.

Manipulating hemispheric dominance.
Educated by injecting neo-neural integrators
Proved to work in making half the brain comply.
After activating vision it began the seeker killing.

A.U.M. documents the project
By implanting nano cameras in it's iris.
Live feed of the kills projects
On a massive screen of flesh behind a liquid
Looming black endless grotesque.
This drip, that invites itself.
Cautiously out from the ceilings center.
Elder than mankind's frail lineage.

Eating it's way down through my spine.
Replace and conquer.
Releasing it's ungodly ether into me.

Always keeping to one half and often having
A fetal-like tantrum under one eye;
Adding claim to my delusion of a living tumor growing in me.
It can look into you as you look into me looking for it.
Over riding half my body and my brain.
Though it came from me, it calls to you to come and cut it out.

Rapidly taking over my right hemisphere.

Allocating left to be the prey and right to be the hunter
Unknowingly, both documents for the A.U.M.
Unknowingly, both documents for the A.U.M.

I share my eyes with the seeker,
Investigating endless mile.
His trail built of barren heads.
His boundless quest ensures he'll kill
Until he is the last one left.

I watch him grin, shake the hand of the victim
Then frantically ransack each one of their skulls.

Half the brain renames itself "Remote Tumor Seeker"
After it viewed the timeless drip
After it viewed the timeless drip

Half the brain renames itself "Remote Tumor Seeker"
Half the brain renames itself "Remote Tumor Seeker"

Half the brain renames itself "Remote Tumor Seeker"
After it viewed the timeless drip
After it viewed the timeless drip

Half the brain renames itself "Remote Tumor Seeker"
Half the brain renames itself "Remote Tumor Seeker"

Remote tumor seeker
Remote tumor seeker
Remote tumor seeker
Remote tumor seeker

04. Relentless Mutation

Inhale.
No profits go to those who battle
To protect their kind from us.
And are they not better off
Beyond their mortal kingdom of overflown carrion?
Sate the acrid hunger in you as you gaze into the drip.
Stare into it's blackened film and do not take your eyes away.
The contents of our inverse alter
Will mutate your skin and your mind.
Breeding ample mental lucre,
Far exceeding any other oddity on this curetted old land.
Breathe in with your pupils.
Then expel the cadence that it gives you.
Cast your voice like line and hook,
Reeling out your deepest fears.
Inhale relentless mutation.
Eons rendered in one view.
Binding your sight to the evermore.
One second in it's void will evoke a phobia of time.
Inhale.
All the grim within each thought
Will echo all throughout the liquid.
It's current emanates repulsive imagery.
Ludic sanguine orb, heaving sable.
Incarnation of every witnesses hallucination
Raveling and breeding into it's hyper kinetic makeup.
Relentless mutation in the retinal burrow of A.U.M.
Relentless mutation of your mind.
Now describe what you see.

05. The Mimic Well

Before the sand around the well turned black,
There ran a water, clear. Forgiving. Serene.
Like that of any vein or artery, it pressed along its path,
Up Earth, in wait of wither.
What should have killed the growth at birth did not.
In the rushing river soon
To mimic those who dare engage it.
A human host removes the brood
Without material merit for her three stillborn litter.
Swelling and pounding it's way out her orifice,
The surrogate vacantly stabs at her skin pod of spawn.
The rivers thin surface, like porous blue fabric,
Absorbed the occurrence.
The fetuses carried below.
In the mimic well of siren triplets,
A crude onyx hatches.
In this tale of a godless odyssey.
The foreign force reflects the three dead born
Within its waters.
The mimic well of siren triplets
Feeds the spent young
That regrow inside it.
Filling, fueling. Nursing itself
Down the throats of the clones
Like a formula, living and black.
A maternal overseer
Training them to take the image of anyone.
Three augmenting in their pit.
A triad of ominous gestating replicates.
Born together, yet apart.
The fluid embedding itself in each one of them.
Allocating powers to each uniquely.
Making one of skin, one of mind, and one of marrow.
Teething on the brick in the well,
Until growing human bodies,
Silken, ripe and captivating.

When a hunter (thought to be dead) returned alive,
The widow knew it came back not a man.
Slick black tar spits from
Their three young tempting apertures.
Leaping from their lustful flesh to gorge
On the victim's appearance.
Eclipsing the prey's bleeding reflection.
Black engaging red,
On the furtive stage at the river's edge.
Forever burned in the eye of A.U.M.
They capture this display of the water born
Insatiable shifting hunger.
Then project this feeding process infinitely,
From that moment,
On to all those who show a willingness to view it,
During their gaze into the drip.
The siren's feast,
In its pure and ancient state,
Carries on in timeless Kairos.
The death and rebirth of the daughters of mutation,
Echo again and again in the mimic well.
The siren's feast,
Echo again and again in the mimic well.
Echo again and again in the mimic well.

06. Calamus Will Animate

Calamus
Taken to the pen to relive
Every identity we replicate

Without will they live again
Within our intimate collective
Animate
All the dead we bring into it

A burrow of human memory
The pen, the feather and the needle
Are alike in death and life

Looking back on what had happened
When the the feathers had arrived
I realize I was not alone
I can recall the men had got infected by it too
Having contact with the foreign components infected them

Before, the factory was known to make
The highest quality of bedding
Cutting, filling
Stitching fabric with the finest down
From all around the world
Yet this down flew through our dream barrier intact

Calamus will animate
It's contents are hostile
The A.U.M. will kill everybody not in this compound
The dead I bring to them awake,
And join in flight above my head

Calamus will animate
It's contents are hostile
The A.U.M. will kill everybody not in this compound
The dead I bring to them awake,
And join in flight above my head

When the ink coating the wings
Made contact with the workers skin
It crept into their blood
Turning them inhumanly violent
They grabbed and tore and bit and clawed
At one another and themselves

Gravity and death from loss of blood
Had no effect on any member of the crew
During their frantic battle to relief their bodies
From the ether lifting them into the air

Die then elevate

Fusing remnants of spent bodies
Weaving bones and organs
Into an inverted nest dug in the ceiling

The black sludge casting out from the center
As a starving bird of prey
I heard it's voice and felt it's need
To find the child made of teeth,
And begin the human murmuration

Calamus will animate
It's contents are hostile
The A.U.M. will kill everybody not in this compound
The dead I bring to them awake,
And join in flight above my head

Calamus will animate
It's contents are hostile
The A.U.M. will kill everybody not in this compound
The dead I bring to them awake,
And join in flight above my head

It's banshee wail demanding feed
I hear it's pain and become it's keeper
I rip the living from the night
Like pulling worms from soil

A.U.M
Watches these sky burials

Calamus will animate
Calamus will animate

The boy lay like a wet mound of dust on the rotting factory floor
I knew the black fluid hid itself in the deformed corpse of this child
Finally, after hours into cutting, lifting, pulling, sawing, crunching, clipping
I had found it

My crude autopsy revealed bounty
Nesting in replace of the marrow in the young ones bones
The second I saw it, it saw me
I knew it's face
Changing, relentlessly

It was the drip
I had it contained as instructed
Filling up many clusters of hypodermic needles with the matter
I administered it into a new subject each night
A new life
One with every full rotation of the clock
I've seen those hands meet, then disengage a thousand times

Calamus will animate
It's contents are hostile
The A.U.M. will kill everybody not in this compound
The dead I bring to them awake,
And join in flight above my head

Calamus will animate
It's contents are hostile
The A.U.M. will kill everybody not in this compound
The dead I bring to them awake,
And join in flight above my head
It's banshee wail demanding feed
I hear it's pain and become it's keeper

A.U.M allowed me to live off the organs once the people took flight
They do not keep me against my will, yet I refuse to run

Every day I climb the stairs outside this door
And view the horde of lifted dead
That they conduct behind the factory walls

I must hold on to the final tier of focus I still have
To scribe these happenings in hopes that someone
Will know what went on here
I can feel the pressure of their unified unscripted flight
Pounding air down on the floor board, just a plank's width above

I rip the living from the night
Like pulling worms from soil

07. A Dark Horizontal

The dark horizontal.
Ahead, a panting land approaches.
Flaring vibrant coastal glimmers
Mend the distant fraying seams
Of a violent waters restless bedding.
Panic indented in the floating web of wicked mental horrors.
Thought up by the crew's subconscious fears.
Come alive to haunt and drain us.

The sea is a man that's trying to kill me.
The wind is his repugnant voice
The air, his fouled breath.
A stench of salt of blood and rot.

The sky is his mouth, the stars his open sores.
The shoreline is his jaw, grinding for meat.
Time freezes death inside this altering dark horizontal.
Imaginable realities constructed out of fear.

Mountains unstable and hideous.
The guardians of a contorting dimensional paragon.
A.U.M. sent us to find and retrieve the artifact.
In the house of change,
Where the king came back
Through spontaneous regeneration.
Reliving Kairos in the king's hell.
Becoming the mimics from the triplets well.
Exhuming infinity to find a hand.
A child made out of teeth, feeding on blood and sand.

The sea is a man that's trying to kill me.
The air, his fouled breath.
A stench of salt, of blood and rot.
The sky, his mouth, the stars, open sores.
The shoreline is his jaw, grinding for meat.

The sea is a man that's trying to kill me
The sky is his mouth, the stars, open sores.
The shoreline is his jaw, grinding for...
Time freezes death inside this altering dark horizontal
Imaginable realities constructed out of fear.

A dark horizontal
Flooding the linear land with the sand of its own.
In the parallel dunes of its hourglass,
We are buried.
Mountains unstable and hideous.
The guardians of a contorting dimensional paragon.
Raised blades of land stab skyward through the oceans skin.
Storm winds true their edge to scalp the curve of earth.
Peeling off the rind, revealing a house made of living tissue.
Yelling out its mouth for me to regenerate, in it.

In dark horizontal.
Ahead, a panting land approaches
Flaring vibrant coastal glimmers
Mend the distant fraying seams.
Of a violent waters restless bedding.

In this house the disease of dream
Course in the veins and arteries of the walls.
Imagined infections thrive.
They blister and breed under the floor.
Their many roots are breaking through.
Saplings sprout and secure their place.
Growing into trunks of flesh and boil.
The pillars of man's deepest fears.
Enclosing me in a forest of unforgiving mental genesis.
I mold this house of clay bacterium.
Where I sculpt my own organ prison.
In this house beyond our time, this house at the end of the earth.
The artifacts resting place.

A dark horizontal fear, defying the linear
Lost in this storm and exhausted of options
I crawled to the bow of the boat and leaped off it.
The figure head came alive.
And it clawed and it grabbed at me.
Desperately wailing in agony.
Failing to capture my fall. Diving through the fog.
Through the grey and green.
My hands bound together as if in prayer.
I cut through the mesh of black liquid surrounding us.
Fighting against the live current of thousands of eyes and hands.
Miles I swam. Through skin and limb.

The sea is a man that's trying to kill me.
The air, his fouled breath. A stench of salt of blood and rot.
The sky, his mouth, the stars, his open sores.
The shoreline is his jaw grinding for meat.

The sea is a man that's trying to kill me.
The sky is his mouth, the stars, open sores.
The shoreline is his jaw, grinding for...
Time freezes death inside this altering dark horizontal
Imaginable realities constructed out of fear.