Ride The Wings Of Pestilence

Prologue: By the winter of 1350

It swept the land in an uncontrolled

outburst

Famine, cold and pestilential misery

Surely this must be a divine damnation

Punishment from below

Be it devil or demon that reaps this

cursed nation

No one of us deserves suffering thus

Oh lord, what have we done

Oh God, have you forsaken us?

I ride the night air

On pestilential wings

I am the nightmare

That slays your kith and kin

I ride your bed at night

An incubus so vile

My work is seen throughout

The smoke of funeral pyres

Black rats do my work

Punishment begins

Cover your face, everyone has heard

Here is payment for your sins

This epoch you won't forget

You're burning from inside

In the final throes of horrid death

The proudest men forget their pride

They cry in pain immense

Praying to be spared

But your god seems not to care

Mothers, daughters, fathers, sons

All are prey alike

Twitching in rotten bowel runs

I crave a heavy toll

The deadringers sound the bell

For all of you who fell

I reap the field in rage

You scream in mindless fear

When gripped in my embrace

I purify, you putrefy, the end I provide

For your blasphemy, I bring you

disease, a funeral feast

I take the helm and steer you into, a

hellish domain

You fall in the streets, succumb in

your sheets, diabolic disease

And you don't know why

Why your children die

And you won't know why

On winds of death I ride

Now summer has come over

the city

Midday heat is low

The surviving few bring out

their dead

A neverending flow...

I am the death, upon your black

breath, I am black death

I am the reason, that children lie

crying, watching their parents

dying

And I am formless, always

relentless, something you

cannot see

And I am evil, I am disaster, I am

catastrophe

By the end of 1352, two thirds

are gone

A horrible tale of pestilence and

plague, darkness and woe

Now I subside, slowly die out,

yet I have won

But I will return, in futures to

come, in different forms

Philip von Segebaden

Stockholm, '97