Tyan-Shan / Batyr - Kashgar

Blistering white, the frost cracks his face

Knife blades of wind cut him down

Gusting in clouds, a cold death awaits

A frost-caked burial shroud

Cruel black walls, impossibly high

Rending the sky in a rift

Nothing else moves as the blizzard shifts

White claws of pain is all that exists

Terrifying peaks surround him

Black on white on grey

The path winds e’er before him

Billowing storms swallow the day

Struggle to live, yet life’s caving in

A cruel joke incised by the ice

Blind in the white, grope ever on

Black flesh crying out to die

Death stalks his path, frost slows his blood

Altitude, torment of pace

To cease is to freeze, to movement a slave

These crags are his life, these cliffs are his

Grave

The blizzard whirls around him

The ground drops off below his feet

Spinning, gazing into the chasm

Into the sickening vortex

Down

The howl draws him to his senses

A wolf?

The wind?

His mind?

The horrors of war lie before him

But he may fall before the fight

To live impossible to fathom

Fathoms below this white night

Dawn, the break, that pass, it comes at last

Down, below, the armies, swell and mass

Batyr:

Centuries lived out in an instant

Atrocities a function of existence

Horror, upon horror

And all an empty dream

One moment of glory

For a life of pain

Arrows like rain cleansing more

Wiping out the sickening parasites

Who shall live, and who shall die?

Fighting for the tribal chief’s ideal

Inflated by dogma, lies and steel

The froth of the steed, sweat in his eyes

And if you live, what then?

Filth