1. |
Ersatz Soul
07:57
|
|||
|
Oh say
Beginning
They came so far to feed it
Feeling the buzzing ‘twixt the ears
And it pulls them closer
Losing sight
hearing the future when approaching
I may have faltered in my past life
Abstracted purpose, this age of Onw
Oh say I built this lovely ziggurat
Out of earthen stone
I have my ersatz soul
Gaining arc power Amulene, fragmented sovereignty
Bent Spark’s ashes float through my limbs
The scrypt they touch disappearing
Absorbing into me
I remember
I release everything
My skin betrays the concealed memories
My pain, my failure
What’s gained framed in amulene
Replaced by scryptic robes
Untethering the vassels from the land
I become Invisible
Free, while my squier is a world away
Never to create again
Nor to warm inside the cold
Not a mark left on this earth
None but ersatz soul
You cannot escape
Wandering in the mist
Directionless, what’s purpose without intersection?
Just ersatz soul in the pained reflection
Creating my ziggurat by dragging a sharp finger through the air
Manipulating the letters that rain down from a world line soon to die
The purple valleys
The vassels made their dens
And the ambling smoke from their hearths
It is all replaced
But I
Have my Ersatz Soul
Absorbing
I ask the bodies, for me did you depart?
As Ashayn said, there is no fate here
I have my Ersatz Soul
Hiding in the light
Hung in scryptic robes
I have my Ersatz Soul
Fragmented Sovereignty
|
||||
2. |
Mortality Ornament
05:57
|
|||
|
I can feel it
I can feel it ripping through me
It pulses and makes my body ache
Grown, in dark
Drawing life, a garden born of another world
A gift was given, a bloom born deep inside
Sapping life from Bent Spark’s soul
I can’t feel my blood, and I’ve lost the path inside
my heart
And my minds eye has been shut
Azur
Convened
Cherished by the Onw, grown by a creature stepped out of world line, tethered to Azyrian
The future of violent fog was revealed, and in the untethering, in an instant, the bulb was gone, and no light then shone
Oh god, what difference a circle can make
A few feather’s lighter
When you notice it’s gone
Your soul is broken and Azul is shut
And Mortality spurs
Bent Spark burns
Looking in their eyes
Failure wraps around the soul
Can you reach deep inside to remember
The loss
The undoing
This child
Ripped apart by shadowed beasts
Stolen and dashed on rocks in foreign seas
My vassel’s
Tethered to my being
Refracted through a mirror of death
Undoing
This eon
With the ornament lost, I know my future
Is to destroy my Onw
|
||||
3. |
Path of Grief
06:08
|
|||
|
Moved to vision
Vision carves the guilt
Cutting through agate, drawn from a blackening hilt
Fear through grief
Bound the knot in the line
Victims of closed Astral projection
How did it feel, the path of rejection?
Write it, how did it feel?
Will you allow guilt and shame to swallow you
Can you raise your sword and kill a piece of yourself, cleanly enough to march forward
Your sword found the line
Lifting a curse
While you hemorrhage
Crying in pain
No one calls for you
“I can’t give up, I can’t escape this place”
“You are forgiven, there would be death and joy all the same”
So you stand up, scrypt all around you, in searing pain
Walking through mirrors
Killing your image
The shield falls beside you
Approaching your birth
Path of grief
Crawling
At your own feet
Speaking to no one
Walking the
Path of grief
The text from this point on was too faded to read. The brushstrokes become illegible, dwindling as the scrypt withers into nothingness…
|
||||
4. |
East Corpse
03:39
|
|||
|
Crossing Rhyll’s stream
Old names flowing down the waterfall
I walk past shrines and corpses
Fallen in a world mirroring mine
Ringing the bell
By the highest pylon
It rings in my mind
A tree opens its damp chest
And shows me a corpse
For a moment
The ringing speaks in scrypt
But steeling myself, I feel Azur
And my hands grasp Azradin
The corpse turns east
The ringing speaks clearer
It reveals to me
The shapes, swirling names
Amongst them I recognize
Azyrian and another I’ve never met
Circling the world line
Pointing to my truth
With pain and death around me
I know what I need to find
Limping to World Line
|
||||
5. |
Den
01:20
|
|||
|
I know it now
I understand the pain
Inside the hearth
The heart will smolder
As a gift
Emrakh rolls over
In the Den
By the fire
You’re safe here
Moon’s scrypt cannot penetrate the window
The long arms of Fog
Profound Fear of God
Dry and warm at last
Read the letters in the brick
Help fetch the water
Mushroom and grain
It all makes you want to stay
But you know you can’t remain
In the den
By the fire
This chapter was originally blank, the pages weathered as if worked over and consulted many times before, but no scrypt shone. Then, for a time, it appeared and was transcribed, only before vanishing again. When, or for what, will it return?
|
||||
6. |
Fog
04:50
|
|||
|
Freezing bellows of earths breath
How long has it been waiting there
Its rotting face mixed with fog
Plucked from a shallow grave
No more blood inside
They kiss for the last time
Doomed to die
In Fear of God
Dragged past the altar
By Fear, of God
Crawling just below the light
It’s carving spells into the moon
Now with no sense of agency
They drag themselves east and west
How long has it been waiting there
Just inside the fog?
Just a moon before, safe and dry inside the Den
As your hearth burned
The moonlight wormed it’s way inside
The letters in the bricks changed
And you knew you could not stay
Oh god, it is an endless task
Why can’t you just show them? Lead them through the fog
Please moonlight, just show them
Eastwards
Show them fear of god
Choking, Farik wanders on
Sought out to slay it
Killing Fear of God
Why can’t you just show them?
|
||||
7. |
Death's Arc
06:25
|
|||
|
Blood pours out faster, alone
Maybe you can crawl to the water
Reading scrypt
Death’s arc
What’s that in the distance? A flash?
Fractured through the fog, coming out its mouth
A hatred pierced by loneliness
Red glow
I am crawling, heaving out of the dark
I seek agency and light
A shining just out of sight
Mimic God
Hiding in the caverns
Amongst mirrored pools
Trapped for so so long
I can rest now in the light
Crawling below
The death’s arc
My steps grow easy, pulled into the sky
Reaching the world line, revealed to me
I strip off my armor, it melts into Amulene
Here, Azur is my guide
And with so much pain and death around me
How can I not say I’ve failed it?
Death’s arc
Impaled as consequence
Of violence at Bent Spark
Out of sight above
Death’s arc
There is no absolution
While so much pain prevails
I am not but one being
I am bound to all that is
To shepard every Onw
But I faltered yet again
Without my weapon Azradin
I must have dropped it on the path
|
||||
8. |
Veridic Arc
04:38
|
|||
|
Veridic
The soul through the window
Stepping out
Welcome to our dying plane
Farik reached to draw
While an arc reached through time
“Why does this creature feel known to me, deeply?”
As they parry a blow, collapsing their weakest guard
I feel you
Azyrian
Bleeding
Fighting
Veridic Arc
Losing ground
Fighting my reflection, striking smoke
Every move
My masters form, twisted in suffering
Trying to kill me, but wanting to die
Find me
For your true soul I grieve
Amble, drag yourself here
Find your way back into the light
Collapse in dark
Veridic Arc
Please, by magic or heart
Let me kill you, rip you apart
I see now, shown by Azur
You destroyed so much life
Abandoned by soul, to seek refuge
And keep flame alight through the night
|
||||
9. |
Ressurection Sickness
07:37
|
|||
|
Seething
Crawling up to yore
My spirit
Waning
Beg the pain to stop, please
Why can I see myself?
Amulene
Is leaving
No Onw returned
My dissolved heart beating
Losing this new form
I see my reality in mirrored pools of blood
Horrified rejection of soul
Dissolving invisible body
Clawing at the carnal rot
I absorbed the vassels
Just to fail, alone
And destroyed my home
Vision leaves me completely
These rotting pieces of Azyrian, they wish to be struck down
Killed, by my squire
Dropped, by the hands of Fog
As flesh
Into the pit of mystic consequence
Azul, taken by my sickness
Ascension inverted into death
A screaming pile of rotted flesh
Swallowed by the night
Ersatz Soul has died
|
||||
10. |
Graveside
06:31
|
|||
|
Where have all the heroes gone?
The world is pale and silent ash
I could sit here, on the cliff
Surrounded by swords until my body falls into yours
The grass grows through my fingers
I taste salt of Ablazuli and hear the scrypt of grave
The Sun rising to meet me
Abandoning darkness in a scorching rage
Graveside
If I had an Onw
If I had a father to see standing, smiling
My tether is unraveling now
While my lungs are heaving
Graveside
I realize I’ve been sitting here for at day come past
Hoping you will come back, rising gasping out of the dirt
Where have all the heroes gone?
I guess we have exactly what we deserve
Surrounded by all the swords, above you, Graveside, I cry; “How can I go on?”
But then, as a gift. I see it,
Azradin
Graveside
I feel you here
|
||||
If you like Onw, you may also like:
supported by 46 fans who also own “Ersatz Soul”
You are the flame that never goes out Irjala 0:47 As Death Comes Reaping 3:25 / 5:50 / 7:32
go to album
supported by 46 fans who also own “Ersatz Soul”
This was my AOTY for 2025. The guitars and synths tie into each other so perfectly to create a sound I’ve really never heard before. The listening experience is nothing short of a journey.
go to album
supported by 45 fans who also own “Ersatz Soul”
first time i couldn’t pick a favorite track. the whole album’s *that* killer.
go to album
From Italy comes this black metal monster—ghoulish choral vocals soaring ghostly over blistering riffs.
go to album
Morte(s) Née(s) - (REMIXED & REMASTERED)
by CELESTE
The songs on the remixed and remastered edition of Celeste’s Morte(s) Née(s) come rolling in like gathering storm clouds, bleak & thick.
go to album
Violinist, composer, and Panopticon member imbues progressive black metal with all the brutality and beauty of a record-setting blizzard.
go to album
Moon of Foul Magics
by Autonoesis
supported by 45 fans who also own “Ersatz Soul”
kind of crazy that i overlooked this album because of the “thrash” tag, but now i must say i am only disappointed with myself. what a masterful blend of genre influences. soaring and powerful
go to album
