[Intro]
[Instrumental Intro: Frame drums and muted guitars move in a circling 6/8 pattern like water beneath ice.]

[Verse 1]
From VAIR-gel-meer’s throat we slid,
Under every frozen lid.
SVUHL and GOON-thraw, cold and clear,
Carried poison, year by year.
No moon counted where we ran,
No bank divided span from span.
We gnawed the hollow, vein by vein,
A buried flood without a plain.

[Chorus]
We are the rivers under rime,
Black beneath the teeth of time.
Fire above and venom below,
Cracking the silence wherever we flow.
Rivers under rime, run deep, run dire—
Carry the cold to the mouth of the fire.

[Verse 2]
Then MOOS-pel cast a copper rain,
Each ember struck our glassy chain.
The upper crust began to groan,
A steaming skin on frozen stone.
We tasted heat and turned to breath,
Half alive and armed with death.
From every drop the vapors curled,
Measuring bones for an unborn world.

[Post-Chorus]
Flow beneath, burn above.
Neither mercy, neither love.
Flow beneath, embers fall.
In the middle, shape them all.

[Verse 3]
The venom climbed in ropes of white,
The fire bent its blades of light.
Where sparks sank through the thawing sheet,
Red and blue at last could meet.
The void convulsed from rim to rim,
Its empty boundaries growing dim.
A weight assembled in the steam,
Too vast for beast, too raw for dream.

[Bridge]
We did not choose the thing we fed,
The swelling limb, the lifting head.
A river knows no guilt or grace;
It only cuts the given place.
Yet every current, cold and blind,
Left something irreversible behind.

[Instrumental]
[Instrumental Direction: Tagelharpa and guitars trade the river motif while toms accelerate beneath sustained low notes.]

[Break]
The ice split wide.
The sparks sank through.
The waters recoiled—
And something drew

[Break - Response]
Its first black breath,
Its first low cry.
The rivers heard it.
The rivers ran dry.

[Final Chorus]
We are the rivers under rime,
We carried poison into time.
Fire above and venom below
Made blood from the place where no blood should flow.
Rivers under rime, our work is done—
We loosened the frost, though there was no sun.

[Coda]
Run deep, run dark, through the newborn frame;
Every river remembers the giant’s name.

[Outro]
Under the flesh, our currents stay.
Under the worlds, we find our way.
Beneath every sea the old streams climb—
The buried rivers under rime.
