Cradle Of Filth - Dusk And Her Embrace

CRADLE OF FILTH

DUSK AND HER EMBRACE (1996)

  1. Humana Inspired To Nightmare
  2. Heaven Torn Asunder
  3. Funeral In Carpathia
  4. A Gothic Romance
  5. Malice Through The Looking Glass
  6. Dusk And Her Embrace
  7. The Graveyard By Moonlight
  8. Beauty Slept In Sodom
  9. Haunted Shores

CRADLE OF FILTH

DUSK AND HER EMBRACE

1. HUMANA INSPIRED TO NIGHTMARE
Instrumental

2. HEAVEN TORN ASUNDER

Rise, ablaze, libidinous
Devildom voyeurs
Ascend to smother the light
Nascent aeons confer...

Chaos is spat
From the black eternal sea
Serrated mountains of mad shadows
Carving towards misdeed

Stormchoirs gather
A pestilential hiss
Sunset evokes Luciferian fire
The skies are ruptured like a knifed orifice
Supernal vestments hang tattered
Cathedrals shriek to pulpit oratory
Invasions scale Babel's ivory towers
Poised to sodomise a world upon it's knees

Victory spent
Breathe deep benighted scent

We are as a flame born unto the darkness
Desires burning in palatial glades
And virtues once aloof, now worming beneath us
Shalt see their children, pleasuring as slaves...

Attack!

Wreak atrocities on those we have despised
Judgements be riven, from the skies
Darkness empower let us master prophecy
Fulfilling destiny - the promised fever
Bedizens eyes paralysed with blasphemy
Written in flesh across the howling ether

Artemis spread the bliss of this Lupercalia

With stars erased, throw wide the gates
The infidel soon unmasks her face
Neath silken shroud she waxes horn
Sharpened to skewer dawn...

I am as a plague, born to the priestess
The secret amour of her archangelic rape
Jaded-eyed when my lovers, possessed
Screamed out their agonies, upon the stake

Wreak atrocities on those we have despised
Judgements be riven, from the skies
Darkness empower let us master prophecy
Fulfilling destiny - the promised fever
Bedizens eyes paralysed with blasphemy
Written in flesh across the howling ether

"The most August sorcerers of Hades
Darkly seized for me a throne
And the upraised scythe so terribly scribed
Vengeance in Jesuit blood on stone
From this ransacked celestial temple
I hold the prophet's severed head unto all nations"

Tremble before us
Lords of the star-veiled red sepulchres
Rushing deathwards, our Tartarean fires
Kindle pandemonia to furnace the earth

"Our voices are opened graves
Through which the never-dead escape"

From dank, abyssic dream
Pursuing ascendancy...

The enemy has held three seasons
Imparadised, whilst we writhed
To psycho-dramas penned by aerial decree
Now freed to plunder...
Heaven torn asunder.

3. FUNERAL IN CARPATHIA

Candelabra snuffed, prey silhouette wedded
Nightfall take my hand
Seduce me with silky timbred limbs
Grant me thy dark command
Over the peaks framing tapestries
Of thick forest, dusk has filled
With Lucifugous kisses enwreathed in mist
Creeping like violations from the shadows
To kill

Lucretia
Is my love in vein
When thy tears bleed sweeter
Than the midsummer rain?
Bewinged, infested belfries
Toll o'er the sobbing throng
A writhe of lethargic, terrored nudes
Whipped and welted 'neath the barbed windsong...

(In sadean paradise
Ancestral legacies linger on...)

I am He
The crowned and conquering darkness
Satan robed in ecumenical filth
Livid Bacchus sustained by bridal echelons of sylph

This wintry eve when the snow glistens deep
And sharpened turrets wed the jewelless skies
I shrug off the shroud of preternatural sleep
Embroided by these words Malaresia scribed...

"Beauty slept and angels wept
For her immortal soul
In this repose, all evil chose
To claim her for their very own"

Carpathia
The pleasured dead speak of her
In necromantic tongue
When ambered daylights are done
Masturbating in their graves
On her zenith to come...

Never leave me

This catafalque night when awed stars report
Their absence from the heavenly brow
Grippled seraph shalt cower in illustrious courts
Whilst the cloaked maelstrom resounds throughout

"How the storm it fulfills
My heart, though unhealed
Celestial knives ebonied
And wild woods thrill
Yet far fiercer still
Her lustre eviscerates me"

Carpathia
Priapic lovers twist in concert with her
Covenants are struck, jagged lightning fellates
The path towards the castle weary innocence takes

I rule as Master here
Where feral hordes impart my temper
Love sank wounded when I, betrayed
Saw death etch cruelly, upon my lineage

"Usher the spite seething Draconist
And commit this world to thy ancient sovereignty"

This wintry eve when the snow glistens deep
And sharpened turrets wed the jewelless skies
I shrug off the shroud of preternatural sleep
Embroided by these words Malaresia scribed...

"Beauty slept and angels wept
For her immortal soul
In this repose, all evil chose
To claim her for their very own"

Candelabra snuffed, prey - silhouette wedded
Nightfall take my hand
Seduce me with silky timbred limbs
Grant me thy dark command
Over the peaks framing tapestries
Of thick forest, dusk has filled
With Lucifugous kisses enwreathed in mist
Creeping like violations from the shadows

To kill.

4. A GOTHIC ROMANCE
(RED ROSES FOR THE DEVIL'S WHORE)

Evening minuetto in a castle by the sea
A jewel more radiant than the moon
Lowered Her mask to me
The sublimest creature the Gods, full of fire
Would marvel at making their Queen
Infusing the air with Her fragant desire
And my heart reeled with grave poetry...

From grace I fell in love with Her
Scent and feline lure
And jade woodland eyes that ushered in the impurest
"Erotic, laden fantasies amid this warm Autumn night
She lulled me away from the rich masquerade
And together we clung in the bloodletting moonlight"
Pearled luna, what spell didst thou cast on me?
Her icy kiss fervoured my neck
Like whispering waves 'pon Acheron's beach
In a wirl of sweet voices and statues
That phantomed the dying trees
This debauched seductress in black, took me...

In the pale azured dawn like Ligeia reborn
I tore free of my sleep sepulchre
On the sea misted lawn where stone figures, forlorn
Lamented the spectre of Her
Bewildered and weak, yet with passion replete
I hungered for past overtures
The curse of unrest and her ardent caress
Came much more than my soul could endure...

I, at once endeavoured to see Her again
Stirring from midnight's inertia
Knowing not even her name
On a thin precipice over carnal abyss
I danced like a blind acolyte
Drunk on red wine, her dead lips on mine
Suffused with the perfume of night

For hours I scoured the surrounding grounds
In vain that we might meet
When storm clouds broke, ashened, fatigued
I sought refuge in a cemetery

Sleep, usher dreams
Taint to nightmares from a sunless nether

Mistress of the dark
I now know what thou art

Screams haunt my sleep
Dragged from nightmares thou hast wed together

Lamia and Lemures
Spawned thee leche
To snare my flesh

Portrait of The Dead Countess

Deep stained pain that I had dreamt
Flaunted demise, life's punishment
Leaving little strenght to seal this wretched tomb...

But poisoned nectar within me stirs
Up feverous desire and morbid purpose to search
Through cobwebbed drapery to where she swoons
Goddess of the graveyard, of the tempest and moon
In flawless fatal beauty her very visage compels
Glimpses of a heaven where ghost companies fell
To mourning the loss of god in blackest velvet
Enrobed in their downfall like a swift silhouette

"Fleeting, enshadowed
Thou art privy to my sin
Secrets dead, wouldst thou inflict
The cruell daylights upon my skin?
Dost thou not want to worship me
With crimson sacrifice
So my cunt may twitch against thy kiss
And weep with new-found life?"

Red roses for the Devil's whore...

Dark angels taste my tears
And whisper haunting requiems
Softly to mine ear
Need-fires have lured abominations here...

Nocturnal pulse
My veins spill forth their waters
Rent by lips I cherish most

Awash on her perfidious shores
Where drowning umbra o'er the stars
Ebons graves where lovers whore
Like seraphim and Nahemah

"Nahemah"

Pluck out mine eyes, hasten, attest
Blind reason against thee, Enchantress
For I must know, art thou not death?
My heart echoes bloodless and incensed...

Doth temptation prowl night in vulvic revelry
Did not the Queen of Heaven come as Devil to me?
On that fatal Hallow's Eve when we fled company
As the music swept around us in the crisp, fated leaves
Under horned Diana where her bloodline was sewn
In a graveyard of Angels rent in cool marbled stone
I am grieving the loss of life in sombre velvet
Enrobed in Death's shadow like a swifter
Silhouette...

5. MALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Take away the wine
For restlessness plagues me...
I am assailed by a spectre profounder
Than hatred and grief or the sum of their hideous crime

I shalt suffer this confessional mime

Awaiting the sun to set, crimsoning seas
Only once it is dark doth my misery cease

She died to a sky dressed in flame
Eyes full of curses for her killers by choice
Who fell to their god o'er her vision and voice

"I am as dusk come to ravish the light"
Steal me from their stares and mute christ into night
"I will answer the prayers"
If thou Wouldst drink of my life...

6. DUSK AND HER EMBRACE

When the sun has wept upon the waveless lake
And the mists steal in with ease
Covened wolves arc their eerie dissonant napes
In adoration of the moon and thee

"They call as I to thee..."

And I will come, as if in dream
My languid, dark and lustrous Malaresian Queen
Of vengeful, ancient breed
Gilded with the pelts of many enemies
Erishkigal, raven-haired
Thy seduction haunts the castle in erotic despair
I can taste thy scent by candlelight
Legs of porcelain traced and laced to their lair
Appease the beast on spattered sheets
Dyed unearthly red as sobriety weeps

Nocternity...
She shall come for me

A black velvet painting sprung to elegant life
Like a poignant Madonna perverted to night
And I have ridden from the westerning light
To expend my lust
Tear away the funeral dress
Know that I will escape from my death
Surrendered to the splendour of her sharpened caress

Lo! The pale moonlight
Weaves a poetic spell of vital death and decline
Of mist and moth and the hunger inside
Kisses took to fever and the fever, demise

"Through twilight, darkness and moonrise
My scarlet tears will run
As stolen blood and whispered love
Of fantasies undone"

Countess swathed in ebony
And snow-white balletic grace
Rouge-filmed lips procure the wish
For lust and her disgrace

Dusk and her embrace

We shall flit through the shadows
Like a dream of (were)wolves in the snow
Under deadly nightshade
Still warmed with the kill's afterglow

Beneath the stars thy flesh bedevils me
Beneath the stars taste the death in me
Bequeath to me thy fiery kiss
To sever thin mortality

Elizabeth
My heart is thine
Thy fragant words
Warm within like wine...

"Let me come to thee
With eyes like Asphodel
Moon-glancing, loose desires free
To writhe under my spell"

Ereshkigal, raven-haired
Thy seduction haunts the castle in erotic despair
I know they scent by candlelight
Immortal flesh I yearn to share
Appease the beast on spattered sheets
Dyed malefic red as sobriety weeps
Nocturnity
She shall come for me...

Unfurl thy limbs breathless sucubus
How the full embosomed fog
Imparts the night to us...

7. THE GRAVEYARD BY MOONLIGHT
Instrumental

8. BEAUTY SLEPT IN SODOM

Death, spirit me away
My anguished soul doth strain
On taut and twisted reins
Yet, insatiate I still remain
Like a proud, unfallen star
That dares thee from afar
To calm my thund'rous heart
Else... rend it's knots apart
So I may never sing

Of jewelled skies o'er my strings
And love, a wanton thing
Can plunge on burnt, black wings
To hang amid the thorns
In scarlet, like velvet worn
About the clouded moon
Who wanes in solitude...

I am alone
Thirsting for the dark
That lurks beneath marbled stone
What black witchcraft
Shalt prise thee from thy dreams
And what perverse world-strategy
Will wend it's way with thee from sleep?

"Rouse my disease
And with cadent naked dance I shalt teach
Thee wisdom of darkness
From earth and red sea
Lightbearing Samael
Coalesce with me..."

Twilight
Through pagan city gates
Bred shadows play like twining snake
By candlelight
Thanateros rites
Death seduced and chaos wakes...

Obsession grips, blindragon fever
In throes of scythed orgasm, Eros dies
And Saturn rapes faith's lovelorn Diva
Upon a cyprean altar, stripped bare for sacrifice
Virtue births a demon
Pandora's box, unhinged, sets loose the night
Winged lilith born for want of Eden
Fanning plumes of harlotry
Like pearls before the desert swine

The skies, they darken
And the oceans part
Storm forth indignant Kraken
Reborn Venus as thou art
Feasting at my banquet
Of Saturnalia
I call thee having wrestled
The tides from lonely Diana

"For thee Endymion
I forsake the cerements of this star-flung tomb"

Be-with-us come
Unveil the ancient flame
Throw the cats our enemies
Desire's menstrual stain
Eastern Devil eyes
A cruel erotic plague
The Shekhina is in exile
And the Israelites enslaved to shame

Midnight
Jerusalem
A tenebrous phantasy
Revelates to men
Their celestial walls crumble
When walks the Xul
Born to the scarlet whore in Babylon

The centuries of wait have all but gone
Behold dark beauty stirs to conquer on and on

Now worship Everything.

9. HAUNTED SHORES

Herodias and I have led a phantom cavalcade
Through veiled and pagan history where superstitions reigned
And Christendom sought to pervet but poets of my name
Sang of penumbral victories that sorcery had claimed
The Graal and mighty Caliburn as votive offerings
To an England rearisen under vast majestic wings

These are the shores whereto my soul
Blood drenched and unredeemed
Shalt seek solace in secrets told
Through the whispers of a dream

From the woods Pendragon-born, I rose Arcturius
A proud, audacious King mantled in the vehemence of lust
Death and destiny undaunted me, I drew a throne divided
In awe of the glorious battles won, my dark Goddess provided
Then treachery a wingless beast, came crawling to my court
And now I lie at cursed Camlann, from wounds a traitor wrought

I fear the Augean light is sweeping through Camelot
How bittersweet my triumphs seem, now Autumnal leaves succumb to frost
Morganna art thou near me?
Languid I wend my path to grave
Cast my sword to the sulphyd grasp
Of the naiad neath the silvered lake
When waters stirred lay silent
Mistress let the mists descend
Thy tears cannot thaw Death's cold heart
His sombre gaze defies legend
More so than thine, else thy dew-lidded eyes
Art for the Banshees song
Or our souls entwined like vein upon
The haunted shores of Avalon

The haunted shores of Avalon

Bury me in velvet dream
Lest I unduly wake
And seek to reconcile my thirst
With the cowardly tailors of my fate
Unleash mastiffs of snarling night
To overthrow, plague and burn
As slumber lures me 'mongst the dead
To scheme of my return

Archaic ghostly echoes breathe like thunder of the storm
A tempest fools miscall divine as they crouch awaiting dawn
Their ignorance has forged for me over centuries a sword
Burnished to flash like lightning on the precipice of war
The wolfs are dead in Albion whilst the passive flocks roam free
This my penetrant spearhead shalt pierce these foul, trespassing breeds

These are the shores whereto my soul
Blood drenched and unredeemed
Shalt seek solace in secrets told
Through the whispers of a dream.

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