Lyrics Return to Hatheg-Kla - Bal-Sagoth

Return to Hatheg-Kla

Some would call it epiphany,
others would deem it the final descent into madness…
whatever the case, the last vestiges of those tenuous
palisades which had previously,
and blessedly, safeguarded my reason and prevented
my mind from accepting the full and staggering magnitude
of the naked truth then crumbled,
fading into nothingness like the dissolution of a night-mist.
At length, one oppressively miasmic night,
with such malefically portentous lore preying pitilessly
upon my sanity, I began to descend through a myriad
veils of sombre and swirling shades,
finally surrendering my grip on wakefulness.
And on that fitful, fateful eve, the last of the dreams came…
A waking dream?
I dare not speculate.
The vision was mine, the soul too.
.
but the time, the place,
the very flesh, all this and more was unknown to me.
I stood upon a nighted vista.
.
unfeasibly alien, and yet at once wholly, unnervingly familiar.
In my hand I grasped a glimmering crystal which although
beautiful in its shimmering radiance,
was as black as the impenetrable depths of the most stygian midnight sea.
As I gazed into the obsidian heart of the gem,
a needle of black light lanced forth from its multi-faceted
surface and filled my eyes with a panoply of fantastic
hues, revealing to me in between its pulses of massing
darkness certain fleeting glimpses of places and things
so fantastically terrifying that I could not faithfully
begin to recount their hideous and yet grimly compelling nature.
A terrible sound filled my ears.
.
an insidious resonance which sent waves of excruciating
pain coursing through my mind.
.
a sound which inexorably coalesced into a recognizable
but entirely inhuman voice,
a voice which slowly, inevitably,
formed approximations of words which I could discern…
Hearken, o' manling of the Tellurian orb… the Circle closes.
Perpare to embrace the agony of enlightenment.
Know you of the Six Cataclysms?
I do.
Six times has the world perished and been reborn!
You have discovered the true meaning of the six coruscating
rings of arcane power?
Praise Klatrymadon and Zuranthus!
The Six Keys!
Know you of the blackened orb which burned bright o’er ancient Lemuria?
Know you of the sidereal flame which engulfed the high
seat of power in Ultima Thule?
Know you of that martial sorcery woven in the pitiless
throng of epic battle?
Know you of the astral power permeating the multiverse
and the might of the cosmic codex?
Know you of the rise and fall of glorious Atlantis?
Know you the blasphemies contained within the Chthonic Chronicles?
I know all this, and more!
Have you, o' hybrid child of the cosmos,
gazed into the Great Eye of the Universe?
I have.
And what did you see there, young Xerxes?
I saw oblivion and damnation.
I saw truth, and enlightenment.
I saw the closure of the Great Circle Without End.
I saw the Sixth Great Cataclysm.
I saw the alpha and the omega, I saw the beginning… and I saw the end.
The end of all there is!