Rise of the Cephalopods

I. Mantle Ghosts

Beneath the sunken deeps
Frigid waters tip the plates
A claw of magma sweeps
Rends the crust to giant slates

Convection slowly creeps
Sends new mountains through the gates
An ancient psyche seeps
Mends helices towards new fates

Nothing stays entombed forever
A dying gravestone weeps
Blends the waters, carves, awaits
Sows the lakes the ice had severed
The tomb no longer sleeps
Fed by fire it stirs, creates

Buried worlds shall rise up, rise up
Buried worlds shall rise up high
Thaw and rise up, rise up, rise up
Thaw and rise up, rise up high

Where Skaði's shadow falls
Life grinds to an icy halt
Where Vulcan's boiling crawls
Oceans burn and heave and fault

But where they meet and kiss and jostle
A chthonic tendril sprawls
Cathedrals rise of pure basalt
Mantle ghosts, tectonic fossils
A hellish glow illuminates the glacial vault

More than rock shall rise up, rise up
More than rock shall rise up high
Race to rise up, rise up, rise up
Race to rise up, rise up high

[Solo - Danny Tunker]

II. The Building of R'lyeh

Virgin channels draw in, breathe out
Gnawing through the cryosphere
Stygian mollusks swarm and reach out
Life explodes the hydrosphere

Bioluminescent cities light up
Underneath a frozen sky
Sing and light the austral night up
Rise to scrape the ice up high

Eldritch valleys rise up
Eldritch valleys rebound
And rise up, rise up high

Nautilus delves, clad in crystal
Sepia and urchin breed
Teuthis' hunger grows, abyssal
Octopods on dendrites feed

Bioluminescent cities light up
Underneath a frozen sky
Sing and light the austral night up
Rise to break the ice up high

And something wakes in the deep...

[Solo - Christian Muenzner]

III. Pangea Proxima

Landmasses coalesce
Long gone the holocene extinction
As hypercanes ravage and bless
The coastal swamps with biomass
The benthos' grand egress
Towards terrestrial distinction

A postdiluvian octopia
Invertebrate cornucopia
Arachnoid bodies rise
Infest their telluric new utopia

IV. Metamorphogenesis

As lichens rise to giant woods
Octopus take to the trees
As overlords of lands and seas
Symbionts inside their hoods

Nine brains fire, reboot their neurons
Spectral eyes and thinking skin
Revel in new-found endurance
Cogitate and join their kin

An empire shall rise up, rise up
Shape-shifting hives that never die
Masters of the new earth rise up
From abyss to open sky

Kraken and Leviathan
Evolve to polypotency
Molecular their mimicry
Bulging tools from myosin

Tardigrades conjoin the membranes
Polypoid biotechnology
Medusoid immortality
The dermis cast in chloroplasts

Ancient, sapient, scintillating cephalopods, cephalopods
Transdifferentiating cephalopods, cephalopods

From bleeding crust to canopy
From crudest ooze to the sublime
Invisibly, unseizably
Unstoppably the masters climb

Where instinct ends
Where schemes emerge
Where hunger goes
The masters surge

[Solo - Christian Muenzner]

Ancient, sapient, scintillating cephalopods, cephalopods
Transdifferentiating cephalopods, cephalopods

Like a tide they rise up, rise up
Like a tide they rise up high
On piles of bones they rise up, rise up
On piles of bones they rise up high

On primate fossils they rise up
On our remains they rise up high
With a vengeance they rise up
With a vengeance rise up high

[Solo - Danny Tunker]

V. Octragon

Tentacles spread
Cilia flare
The octopus take to the air

As overlords of earth and sky
The elders glide
The young ones fly

As polyp seeds
They pair and tear
As fleshy leaves
They soar up high

Find burning needs
In starry skies
Where novae glare
And planets die

This world won't last forever
In time, the only way is up
Illuminating silent winds
The coleoidea dream of nebulae

Billowing iridescence
Brings a thousand maws with fangs

Staring lanterns light the night
Fleshy domes float to the sky
Leathery bells chime in the dark
The dragons of their aeon

The dragons of their aeon

VI. Star Spawn

Coral spires rise up, rise up
Stratospheric colonies
Make the waters rise up, rise up
Shun the earth, escape and freeze

Winged ammonites from the dawn of time
Launch ships of ice to rise up high
Primeval aliens in their prime
To conquer worlds beyond the sky

[Solo - Christian Muenzner]