A Trip Inside a Separate Mind

##The Story of “The Final Day/Into the Great Beyond/Orbis Tertius”

The sun rises on the field of battle as L__’s army is gathered on one side and the legions of Light on the other…

At the dawn's first light
Of the day that ends their reign
All stand ready for the fight
We now ascend, the light's bane

Our eyes scan the horizon for the foe
They line up on afar, steel to steel
Wretched weaklings try to block my goal
Foolish mortals, death they'll feel

All destined to die on their last day

They watch each other across the field, waiting for the sign to begin…

Our steeds stamp and snort before the charge
My lungs let loose a battle cry
Onward my armies run, a deadly surge
Only purpose to slay and kill and die

Blood lust flows through my veins
Each swing of my blade brings death
I am filled with the power of those I slay
I trample the broken bodies that souls have left

My rule now begins on their last day

Finally, the battle is joined. Blood, screams, pain, and death flow from all. L__ fights as a man possessed, exterminating everyone in his wake. He is unstoppable, until…

I fight and fight, fury fills me
I kill and kill, the dead surround me
Possessed from above, I strike
Stricken from behind I fall

The ignoble blow from behind has broken his back. Paralyzed, he can do nothing but lay in the field of battle atop the mountains of dead, staring up at the sky, the beauty which inspired him to all of this…

Still I lay as I stare into my sky
My armies dead, only I remain
I am neither dead nor alive
Frozen, trapped in fields of death and pain

Paralyzed I wait to die
I die on my last day

And with his last breath the night falls.

However, that night, a third moon rises to join Phalarei and Celaeni over the field of battle.

And the night never ends…

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##Writing “The Final Day/Into the Great Beyond/Orbis Tertius”

First, parsing the song title. The song proper is actually titled “Into the Great Beyond”. Because it had an extended intro, I did the Sabbath trick again of naming the intro and called it “The Final Day”. That is the form in which it was originally recorded, with just the intro and song. Later, when the outro was added, I decided to name it “Orbis Tertius” to illustrate a little better that, rather than losing, he actually won because he did achieve his goal of ascending to the heavens, and so three moons rise that night. But I get ahead of myself.

The first piece of this ever written was the intro. It all stems from the two main bass riffs, which I came up with sometime in 1995 or early 96 when I was still in Skiptoe. One of the bands opening for us one night played a song where the bassist was doing some kind of simple arpeggio like that and I liked that idea, so I wrote something similar. I also came up with some good ideas for what would be guitar parts for it. I showed it to the Skiptoe guys with the intention of creating something that could function either as a short instrumental or an intro we could tack onto any song we wanted. We spent an afternoon working on it, but it really didn’t click with them so we let it drop.

Again, in mid-to-late 1996, while I was creating the idea of Bellum Infinitum, I knew it had to have a big, long battle epic as the closer. I was just getting big into that viking-era of Bathory, and thought that songs like “Blood Fire Death” and “A Fine Day to Die” were perfect blueprints for the type of thing I wanted. I thought about that intro and thought it would be perfect for this since it was in triplet meter and triplets are a must for Bathory-esque battle epics. Since recording was just me and Paul, with only one guitar, I just adapted the bass line for guitar, and then got to work on the song.

The verses and between-verse melodies came pretty easily just from concentrating on that rhythm and sticking to a basic I-vi chord sequence with a few frills. The interlude part, where it changes to the “I fight and fight…” part came from a riff I threw away when working on Bloody Leg. I knew it didn’t fit that song at all, but the triumphant feel of it worked well here. That connection is probably why the chorus’ ringing chords are the same as part of the intro to Bloody Leg. The solo, of course, has a big nod to the song “Blood Fire Death” with the big unison bends in chromatic order. I had all the basic pieces, so I just started writing lyrics, figuring that I could just use the building blocks to build it out to proper length. Paul loves those triplet beats, so he had a lot of fun recording this one, and many of the fills and beat-change-ups were so good I tried to preserve them when programming this one for real.

In preproduction for the studio recording of Bellum I knew I wanted some kind of a keyboard outro for it, and by listening to a lot of Graveland at the time (mainly Celtic Winter and Carpathian Wolves) I had a basic feel I wanted. That’s also what inspired the keyboards over the middle part, of course, but I digress. When programming reached the end of the song, I thought I would let the guitars ring out, then start with something sounding like tribal percussion, then start swelling keyboards to bring in the outro. I found a few of Darken’s favorite patches and used them, recapping some of the main melodies of the song in a different context. The outro is in straight 4/4, not triplet meter, so they seem a bit different but still familiar. There really wasn’t much to it - I’d get a part I wanted, program it out for a minute or two, then play the ending, let it continue, and just think about what would ‘sound right’ to add in, and so the layers just kept adding until it was done.

The intro was a bit more problematic, since I had basically forgotten the guitar parts from when I showed the song to Skiptoe. I started writing in my head, hearing the counter-melody, the creating the idea of trading the leading line back and forth between the bass and the guitars. I sketched it out in MIDI, tweaked it, then started recording and noticed what a bitch some of the parts I programmed were. Making it workable only entailed minor tweaking, and then adding rhythms under it to fatten it up a bit, which made that one of my most elaborate recording arrangements to date - two harmony lead guitars, two rhythm guitars, the bass and drums. Fortunately, my archaic PC at the time handled it all swimmingly. And there you have it, in a nutshell. A BIG nutshell.

(The only regret I have with this song is that I wish I’d titled it more simply. I still think of all 14 minutes as just “The Final Day”. I guess I had my reasons for wanting to underline that he died, but calling the intro “Into the Great Beyond”, when that is before he died in the narrative, seemed silly. I was also dead-set on naming the outro Orbis Tertius - not just because it fit the two moons-to-three moons storyline, but I just liked the sound of the phrase after I was assigned to read the Jorge Luis Borges story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in one of my literature classes. Funny how all of these little things from one part of my life bleed over into others. And then I think about musicians I listen to, and I think they have to have similar bleed-overs, and as I listen I wonder what parts of their other selves they’re showing, and how can I decode them?

But the artist in the work is a topic I could go on all day about, and is far outside of the scope of this little addendum, except to show everyone else where one of my little threads is woven.)