Production Notes
All instruments by PS Perkins and R Thomas
Mixed and mastered by Mystic Tape Deck
A Mystic Tape Deck production ©2025
Lyric Sheet
Fare thee well, on a bell, may I spill you a tear?
See the storm clouds approaching?
Hear the riders drawing near?
The bishop has sent forth all their bloodthirsty pawns
To capture your head, and to cast it to bronze, on a bell
Were you healing the sick? Were you raising the dead?
Won't you tell me, on a bell, what they'd want with your head?
Did you fly like a bird? Did you buzz like a bee?
Did you frolic with the faeries and talk to the trees?
On a bell, on a bell, from the woods where you dwell
Can you heal me on a bell, put me under your spell
On a bell, on a bell, ringing through your shady dell
Can you tell me, on a bell, who they're sending to hell?
On a bell.
Can you heal me on a bell, gaze deep in my soul
As we follow three hares down their dark and twisted holes?
And so, on a bell, as we go around again
The ending is where all beginnings begin
On a bell, on a bell, from the woods where you dwell
Can you heal me on a bell, put me under your spell
On a bell, on a bell, ringing through your shady dell
Can you tell me, on a bell, who they're sending to hell?
On a bell.
Addendums
Lost to the mysteries of drifting continents and time
The ancient ones say this land was once covered with trees
These trees had voices, they whispered to each other
And to those who had tuned their ears to hear them
The roots entwining intimately beneath the cool earth
Blanketed with leaves, twigs, animal scat and mosses
Bashful fungi bursting through the crust and decay
Insects, bacterium and earthworms wriggle and writhe
Clutches of tangled limbs impenetrable and dense
A pasture, an opening, a sun soaked and verdurous knoll
Where a trinity of lagomorphs perch beside a sacred bell
And the forest witch upon her gnarled and woody throne
Presiding ungrudgingly over the precious pasturage
Beneath the sprawling canopy atremble in the dayspring dew
In a cloistered hermitage hidden from the eyes of the prying
Reached only through the careful divination of echoes
Clutching courtesies of berries and vernal roots for nibbling hares
And with a ring of the bell and a tumble down the well
All afflictions miraculously mended upon emerging into the glade
Sprouting madly into the loving embrace of the healing dowager
Who smiles benignly, gently gathering them beneath her boughs
Reclaimed in whole to never abandon this spiritual sanctum
For their shadows now were bound to the eldritch yew
Languishing eternally free from illness pain or death
Their ceaseless suffering at last entirely drained from them
With an impetuous clanging, banging and bumping
The sounds of sharpened spades splitting moist and mossy marl
Scraping at the argillaceous earthen epidermis
Setting stones amid rolling thunder of wagons
Turning upon the tempered terra
Axes set upon the trunks of timber
What could not be chopped or cleared was burned
Making way for the circumrotary engine of progress
Bearing the stone and timber torn asunder from their place of rest
The bedlam and ataxia of commerce and mobocracy
Bringing new healers who could no longer heal
Clinking coins clattering into their copper coffers
Unmindful of the susurrations of the soil and shrubbery
Which cower inculpable just beyond the mist
A tithing to the new gods sanctioned by empire
Erecting ivory towers, bells imprisoned in the spires
All to do their bidding, these usurpers of cultivation
Who rip from the roots the tender budding saplings
And plant instead their rigorous pestiferous flora
To proliferate among the plebeians caught daydreaming
Or perhaps napping by the stream
Dismissed as being merely bloated bletheration
Of those now deemed peasantry to be managed and saved
This strange provincial new and natty diaconate diaspora
Sensed itself threatened as it reclined upon its royal regency
Condemning rumors with demeaning language and myth
Behind canonicate curtains, foaming maws of seething beasties
Clandestine councils’ convocations, contriving cunning coordinations
Harvesting the professed fictions, armored upon their steeds
Weapons at the ready, galloping off to ring their bells in the mist
Vigorously listening for the telltale reverberations lofted on the breeze
To guide them through the shrouded maze of taught and tangled trees
Where once upon the meadow, with a zeal beyond lunacy
A swinging of swords and a tipping toward of the torches
The pastoral pastures set ablaze, without challenge conquered
And the eldritch yew devoured in a crackle of combustion
Reduced to a cinder of coals, leaving a pyre of charred embers
In triumph and celebration did the clergymen return
The forest witch was vanquished and the mighty woodlands burned
Vileness and venom seeping through the roots of the yew now poisoned
Their dominion furthermore asserted, the sole authority their own
The pearly tower grown another inch closer to heaven
And the clanging of the prisoner bell now heard across the hinterland
Calls them all to prayer and tithing, and for a bowl of rabbit stew
BARDS: Of The Shimmering Seraphs
Of The Shimmering Seraphs concerns itself with the interior landscape of the human spirit. Its twelve songs correspond to the opening sequence of the Nazilic Arcana, an initiatory collection of archetypes preserved throughout the Bell Archive.
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Annotation 03-08A: On the Forest Witch
The Forest Witch appears throughout Nazilic literature as one of the oldest and most enigmatic archetypal figures. While later traditions frequently depict her as a solitary healer or herbalist, the earliest references suggest a far broader symbolic function. In many surviving accounts, the Witch serves as a personification of the living landscape itself—particularly the interconnected relationships between forests, waterways, animals, fungi, and human communities. For this reason some scholars have argued that the title Forest Witch may be misleading, as the figure often behaves less like an individual and more like a localized expression of what several Nazilic sources call the Green Intelligence.
Particular attention has been given to the poem's repeated emphasis on roots, mycelial networks, echoes, and hidden pathways. These motifs occur with sufficient frequency throughout the broader corpus that some researchers regard them as evidence of an older cosmological tradition predating the formal emergence of the Cloak. According to this interpretation, the Forest Witch represents a surviving remnant of an ancestral worldview in which consciousness was understood as distributed throughout the living world rather than concentrated exclusively within human beings.
Annotation 03-08B: Concerning the Burning of the Yew
The destruction of the eldritch yew and the subsequent construction of bell towers appears in numerous regional variants of the Forest Witch cycle. Commonly interpreted as a mythological narrative, some historians propose the account preserves cultural memories of the gradual replacement of localized folk traditions by centralized religious and political institutions. The poem itself offers little certainty on the matter. The invading clergy are portrayed less as individuals than as embodiments of an organizing principle characterized by hierarchy, standardization, and sanctioned authority.
Several commentators note that the poem's most significant transformation is not the burning of the forest but the imprisonment of the bell. Earlier passages describe bells functioning as instruments of discovery, healing, and orientation. Following the destruction of the yew, the bell is relocated to the tower. There it becomes a mechanism of summons, obedience, and social control. Some Nazilic scholars have therefore argued that the bell serves as the poem's true central symbol. In this reading, the conflict concerns not who possesses power, but who possesses the authority to define what constitutes healing, truth, and belonging.
Annotation 03-08C: On the Rabbits Beneath the Bell
The recurring appearance of lagomorphs within Forest Witch traditions has generated considerable debate among Nazilic researchers. Three rabbits seated beside a bell appear in at least seven surviving fragments, though no consensus exists regarding their significance. Popular interpretations have associated them with memory, intuition, and renewal, while more esoteric schools identify them as symbolic custodians of the threshold separating cultivated reality from the deeper wilderness beyond it.