Year 2 - God Song by James Lancaster

We were raised on the plains, and we rest in the mountains

Ranging from the ice wastes to the desert fountains

My pack lives in the cold lands in the shadow of peaks

Criss-crossed by caves, and sheltered by titanic trees

The scars of our lives are written on our faces

Jaws broken through combat, fly-bitten in forgotten places

Legend tells that the thing you see before your demise

Are sharp teeth, crests, feathers and orange eyes.

To the animals, sky and earth we were known

But the evidence of our rule lay in the stone

Our legend was unwritten, until you came

A tremor in history that would never be the same

Without the strength to claim territory

Your kind wandered migratory

Over time they followed us and one fateful trek

We saw they wore our faces around their necks

Painted on their backs, as a sign of respect

To a king this meant nothing, but to a believer

A God's gaze brought strength to the receiver

On mountainsides and forests you drew power

From the sight of my pack and carvings on stone towers

But time brought a problem with greatness

Is its never forgotten, domination makes aimless

Even the mightiest monsters in creation
And the weakness of an empire is the strength of a Nation

Bringing down prey and leaving bones with no meat

Bring home broken viscera, leaving scars from three-toed feet

I become legend by dragging bodies into trees

Built by cave paintings that make children believe

They worship gods that chase them from their kills

They carry my totem, to protect their tribe from ill

But as they walked past, we paid them no attention.

We practiced what was laid down before their ascension

But as seasons passed and winters blow, i see your number

It grows, and it grows, and when we awake from slumber

Each day a missing beast on the plains isn't seen or learned

Until the hunger sets in from the missing herds

But as we travel through abandoned caves and crevices

The image of beasts real and fantastic, scream reddish

On rocks that last summer were brown and pale

Deep in the chamber embers flicker and animals wail

We ignore and press on, even we feature on this scarred gallery

And the youngest look in awe at their future immortality

But the old teach lessons the young soon forget

Yet as they hurried us home, our future was set

As we outlasted a rugged winter we saw

Plants and trees shake off of the snowy draw

As the spring turned dead soil multiflorous

For the hungry teeth of hadrosaurs and Titanosaurus

After weeks surviving on bones and morsels

We waited to sever their tendons and dorsals

But our prey was big enough for the Gods to feel small

You can't teach courage at the sound of their call

We set out with the young who hoped to learn

And knew that death was the price of what they couldn't earn

And for years we held the secret to bring their end

But something came from which we couldn't defend

Cultivating strong chi from years of hunger

We crept upon them while they lumbered

As they littered the ground with wasted branches

We cut them off at every pass to better our chances

The die was cast and and we called our brothers

the survival of all was dependent on the others

And as we stepped up to flash our fangs

The call of an almighty prey sang

When you can't out fight you outrun

We weaved between legs massing ten tons

As the bushes and shrubs were torn and smashed

Claws and teeth flowed poetically and slashed

The Titan stood full of thunder and torn asunder

Its limbs crushed the chest of the bravest hunter

As our bellows echoed from a dozen sources

It refused to die without dropping some corpses

The sun passed the horizons once or twice

And when all of us had paid our price

As we all bled together into the creeks

We knew soon we'd be fed for weeks

The greatest of all to walk the land still held breath

And we readied ourselves to bring death

We knew we were secure and that its fate was clear

When the neck of the titan was split by a succesion of tiny spears

The blood flow carved a river like we'd never seen

This instrument of death must've belonged to a mighty being

How do you think we felt, dealing with this fallout

From the trees it was your kind who walked out

The same necklaces and tattoos still decorated their frames

Headdresses and torches bearing flickering flames

The same eyes that once beheld us, held us in shame

Though they carried the same sticks that once seemed so meagre

for after many years of work they'd made them pierce deeper

As both tribes sat in awe we both learned a lesson we never forgot

Men had powers that their Gods did not.