The Waking

Album: The Cosmos and the Heart

Stone and silence, cold as doctrine
Centuries pressed into my hands
I taste the old blood on the mortar
The dark remembers where it stands
Something hums beyond the darkness
Not the old song — something new
The air is full of what I've missed
And she is breathing through it too

I reach for what I knew before the fire
Before the church, before the ash, before the end
The world has moved — I feel it like a splinter
A pulse beneath the skin of everything

We are awake
And the world has grown strange without us
We are awake
We can hear what the ages have sewn
Into the blood of the living
Into the hum of the stone
We are awake
And we do not know what we've become

She is already moving through the shadows
Reading signals like they're written for her name
I was always slower — more deliberate
She was always hunger, I was always flame
The light outside tears through me like a question
A thousand years of sound compressed to now
She turns and finds my eyes before I'm ready
Ancient things between us, undefined

I reach for what I knew before the fire
Before the church, before the ash, before the end
The world has moved — I feel it like a splinter
A pulse beneath the skin of everything

We are awake
And the world has grown strange without us
We are awake
We can hear what the ages have sewn
Into the blood of the living
Into the hum of the stone
We are awake
And we do not know what we've become

She hears every heartbeat in the building
Every warm thing moving through the dark
The Signal's changed — it's woven into them now
She feels it like she never lost her mark
I chose nothing — I was called back by the burning
I was ash, I was stone, I was gone
And the world that lived without us kept on turning
Now I stand here watching her carry on
Do we carry what we were, or rise from dust?
Do I trust what I created, or the rust?
We were enemies before the world forgot us
And I don't know what we are now

She doesn't need my blessing or my caution
She never did — I made her to surpass
And somewhere in the church that still surrounds us
I smell the ruin of a world that couldn't last
But this is not that world
This is not that fire
She is not what I tried to make her be
And I am not the man who tried to take her
We are older than the choice
We are finally free

We are awake
And the world has grown strange without us
We are awake
We can hear what the ages have sewn
Into the blood of the living
Into the hum of the stone
We are awake
And we do not know what we've become

We do not know…
We do not know…
…what comes next…