Rise of the Cephalopods - Alkaloid

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

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…

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

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

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