Everybody's Gone To The Rapture: Songs

[!!! TO GAMASUTRA EDITORS - CAN WE CHANGE THE AUTHOR'S NAME TO DAN PINCHBECK? ]

To mark the fifth anniversary of Everybody's Gone To The Rapture the developers of the game The Chinese Room are re-releasing some of the archived blog posts that coincided with the release of this award-winning title.

The following text was first published in summer 2015 on a now defunct gonetotherapture.playstation.com 


Authored by the Creative Director of The Chinese Room Dan Pinchbeck
 

WENDY

I passed the day at the mourning tree
Where the river sorrows free
And all at once a host of birds
Did settle and nest around me

In their song, I heard your song
I heard the bomber’s drone
Beneath the birds and swaying wheat
I heard you coming home

Oh my love, where did you fly?
After you came home to me?
Like the nightjar you left me here
To nest in the mourning tree
‘mongst the roots of the mourning tree

LIZZIE

Sleeping baby, darling child
Clouds and starlight, starlight, starlight
When you wake, you will be mine
Starlight, sleep and love. 

Sleeping baby, shadow dust
Clouds and starlight, numbered starlight
When we’re called to go we must
Into starlight sleep and love.
Sleeping baby, failing sun

Clouds and stardust, we are stardust
Birth and death will be as one
In starlight, sleep and love



 

FRANK

A-roving we went, my true love and I
Amongst the corn and the maize
When death leaned in with his sickle and clock
And swept my true love away

I have followed the nightjar home to her bed
I have followed the sound of her heart
Over field and valley I’ve counted them fly
And the seventh is always apart

So a-roving I’ll go through my fields once more
With my ear to the hedgerows and corn
And wait for the day that death comes for me
To carry me back to her arms
To her arms, boys,
To her arms
And a-roving I’ll go until death comes for me
To carry me back to her arms





STEPHEN

Underneath the butterfly gardens
Here I have buried all of my past
But the lost will come to remember; the sun
Will not cast its light

And the stars will fall around us
And the embers cast from our eyes
Binding us both to the end of all things
And the coming of the light

KATE

Now everything has come to rest
The end has come and I am not afraid
We travel on towards a new beginning
We slip away and we are unafraid

We’re born apart, and the waters carry us
An endless dark, the sovereign galaxies
The light we cast creates a bridge
And guides the way across the ageless deep

I see them all, I see them dancing
In the numbers of the light
I love you in the ebbing of the tide
I love you in the quiet immanence
I love you in the patterned butterflies