A Melancholy Tale From The Icy Lands

"A Melancholy Tale from The Icy Lands" is the eleventh and final track from Cthulhu: The Funksical and the third side-story track from the album.

## Performers

Paul Shapera as "Michael (Narrator)" and "The Boy"

Kerttu Aarnipuu as "The Ice Queen" (Added to album in 2019)

## Lyrics

[MICHAEL:]

Once upon a time there was a little girl and her brother. Their mother had left them years before so they lived with their father. As a young man, their father had beautiful dreams for his life, but as the years passed, their realization grew further and further away. The mother leaving made him sad, the years of fruitless struggle made him frustrated, so he drank to take away the pain. But the drink made him tired and lazy and as the years made him older he couldn’t tell if the failure of his dreams was due to life’s cruelty or his own inadequacies.

As his dreams grew more and more distant, he grew more and more angry, and so he took out his anger on the little girl. Her face reminded him of his lost wife and her innocence reminded him of his lost potential, so he would look for excuses to beat her. The little boy would always try to protect her but he was too young and too little and too easily thrown aside, so all he could do was try to comfort his sister.

The little girl would lie in her bed at night and call out in her mind for someone to take her far, far away. One night her call was heard by the Ice Queen.

From the tundra of The Icy Lands, past the Shadow Mountains, she sent a long, great bridge of ice to the little girl’s window. And so, on that night, the little girl opened her window and beneath the shimmering constellations crossed the bridge to the Icy Lands of the Great North.

The little boy saw his sister crossing the bridge of ice and climbed out after her, but the bridge melted behind her and halfway across he fell to the strange countryside below.

As the stars began to fade before the approaching dawn, the little girl saw a great castle of ice standing in the wide, desolate tundra and made her descent to the beckoning Ice Queen.

[ICE QUEEN:]

Here, here where the skies bend

Here where the world ends

Come and escape the fate you fear

Far from the world’s stains

Far from the fire’s pain

Let ice entice and wipe your tears

Here beyond time’s reach

Candles of ice gleam

Soon they will sooth your frail young years

Years that desert you

Here time will not hurt you

Sheltered away from all life’s...

Take my hand and leave the world

Worlds that brandish little girls

We will feast upon your dreams

Live in safe and sleepless peace

Where, where is a warm hand

Here in the Ice Lands

Here we’ll dissolve and dry your tears

No one will find you

My love will bind you

Time will be kind to your sweet years

[MICHAEL:]

The Ice Queen gave the little girl a magnificent room atop her great castle where the little girl could gaze upon the wide tundra surrounding them. Every evening they would feast in the shimmering banquet hall, decorated with ornaments of intricate, glistening crystal, and every night the Ice Queen would gently feed off of the little girl’s dreams, slowly over time devouring them one by one, The little boy, meanwhile, found himself deposited in a strange, humid land, where he stood himself up and began the long, long arduous trek to the Icy Lands of the Great North.

[THE BOY:]

Run from the mark and the memory

Run from the dust and the sand

Run from the men with the ropes and the pens who will barter you off if they can

Run from the smiles in the alley

Hide in the cracks and the crowd

Run from the fight with the blades and the knife ‘til you learn how to stand your own ground

Run from the men who approach you

With promises, presents and praise

And women who wrap writhing arms round your back and encase you in thin, silver cages

Run from the mouths of the eyeless

Who writhe in the piles of red

Run from the stalls with the dry, crusted walls where you can barter your body for bread

Run from the edge of their reasons

The quiet entice of the damned

And always you run from the things you have done and the blood that won’t wash from your hands

Run from the call of your conscience

Run from the ghosts that you bred

The sacrificed lives you put down to survive and just hope that redemption’s ahead

Run to the girl in the memory

You may not remember at all

The voice you could hear you forgot through the years and whose face you can now not recall

Run from the race that pursues you

The miles and trials and tests

For when all is said and done, all you know is how to run and just pray that one day you can rest

Run from the edge of their reasons

The quiet entice of the damned

And always you run from the things you have done and the blood that won’t wash from your hands

Run from the call of your conscience

Run from the ghosts that you bred

The sacrificed lives you put down to survive and just hope that redemption’s ahead

[MICHAEL:]

As the years passed, the little girl realized the Ice Queen was slowly devouring her dreams, and so she cried until one of her dreams dripped out of her eye, encased in a tear. As the tear trickled down it froze into a shard of fine crystal. The little girl, knowing her dreams were almost gone, took the shard and for safe keeping threw it out into the icy tundra. One day a gypsy woman passing by the castle found the shard and picked it up to sell at the Apocryphal Bazaar far to the South. Eventually the boy, now a man, reached the Ice Palace. He saw his sister’s silhouette in the window and when the Ice Queen denied him entry, he slew her. He found his burnt out shell of his sister sitting gazing out her window at the tower’s peak, and in a dull, monotone remnant of a voice she told him of what had happened. As so he set off again, leaving his sister in her ice perch, in search of her lost dream.

[THE BOY:]

The shadows in the starlight

Where lost things go to sleep

The memories and intentions

The tears you’re too tired to weep

Please lead her back from coldness

And hold us both from rage

Please bring a lost dream back here

And any love that might remain

The shadows in the starlight

The worlds we used to make

Of firebirds and dragons

Before time made them all fade

Please lead me back from nowhere

From roads that go askew

Into a heart of sunrise

To the girl that I once knew

The shadows in the starlight

Where dreams rest when they’re old

The memories of each other

Before our hearts turned cold

Please lead me through the darkness

Please lead me past the shore

Through storms that condescend us

Please let her smile at me once more

The shadows in the starlight

That hide the scant remains

The broken, scattered pieces

When all that you love has changed

And when the tale is over

Please let us both recall

The dream of how we once were

And please let us not have changed at all

[MICHAEL:]

Once upon a time there was a dreamless woman sitting high atop a palace of ice, and a man who roamed the Great Northern Lands in search of a crystal shard within which was contained her last, lost dream.