ETHER DRIFT
The Story – Last Cry Before I Fade
He walks alone.
His shadow stretches long in the crimson twilight, spilling over rolling fields that seem to have no end. Each step stirs the dust from the ground, as if waking something ancient and forgotten. In the distance, the mountains glow like burning embers – yet he knows it isn’t the sun’s warmth that lights them. It’s something else. Something older than himself. Something that has been waiting for him for a long time.
He no longer remembers when the journey began. Perhaps it started the day his voice went silent – the day he stopped calling out and simply began to walk. Or perhaps it began before that, in a time he no longer dares to recall. All he carries now is the cloak draped across his shoulders, the boots worn thin, and the memories clawing at his heart. Some still whisper to him at night, soft but insistent. Others cry out, afraid of being forgotten. None of them let go.
The wind carries echoes of faces he once loved.
The one who lit a spark in him, only to let it burn to ash.
Those who vanished before he was ready to release them.
Voices that once filled the room with life, now only pale shadows in his mind. He tries to answer, but the words sink into the suffocating silence.
He has learned that love can be a chain. That loyalty can be a poison. That dreams can die before they ever draw breath. He feels the weight of all of it in his body, like a scar that will never fade. Still, he moves forward. One more step. Always one more step. For he knows that if he stands still too long, the memories will close in, and he will sink into them like deep sand.
Sometimes, he still looks back over his shoulder. The landscape behind him is always the same – empty, endless, as if the world erases itself with every step he takes. No paths. No traces. He knows the road goes only one way. He also knows where it ends. But he walks anyway. Because it is not in the destination that he seeks his answers. It is in the walking itself.
He remembers nights when the cold crawled beneath his skin and stayed there even when the sun rose. He remembers warm nights when the stars seemed close enough to touch, yet the silence still felt suffocating. He has seen rain fall so heavy that the ground turned to mirrors, and he could see his own face in them – warped and unfamiliar.
Once, long ago, he met a stranger by a fire. The stranger’s face was hidden in shadow, but the voice was clear.
“What are you looking for?” the stranger asked.
“Something I can carry without it breaking me,” he replied.
The stranger’s laughter was low and joyless. “What you’re looking for does not exist.”
By morning, the fire was cold, and the stranger’s place was empty.
The mountains ahead grow larger each day. The shadows deepen. The air thickens, as if the world itself is holding its breath. At times, he feels the ground beneath him breathing too — as if the earth knows he is drawing near to something that matters.
Far ahead, he glimpses a place where the silence is complete – not the crushing silence he knows, but another. A silence that does not weigh him down but lifts him up. A silence that wraps around him like an embrace. There, he will set down his burden. There, he will finally rest.
But the road there is not free. Before he can leave it all behind, he must let it out. The words. The tremble in his voice. All that he has carried in silence for so many years. One last time, he must cry out. One last time, he must break the silence. Not to be heard – but to be free.
Breaking the Silence: The Truth Behind the Album
For many years, I walked with a shadow I couldn’t name.
It followed me through childhood and into adulthood – a constant, heavy presence that shaped how I saw the world and how I saw myself. In 2017, it was given a name: PTSD.
It didn’t come from war, but from the silent battles of growing up in a world that was never safe.
I was born the last child – loved fiercely by my father, but so much that it bred envy and danger. My siblings tried to erase me before I had even begun.
When I was nine, my father fell ill with cancer, and half a year later, my mother too. For five years, sickness was the air we breathed.
When her treatment began, I was sent to live with my aunt and uncle, because even a common cold could have taken her from me. I didn’t know then how deeply that separation would carve itself into me.
At fourteen, the bottom fell out: my father died – and six months later, so did my mother.
It was then I built the figure you see on the album cover – the one who can handle anything, who keeps walking no matter the storm – while inside I was screaming without words. My mind became a place of endless conversations and restless thoughts, not just noise, but a constant flood of ideas and opinions pulling in every direction.
My mother’s last years were shadowed by a man she married – a drunk who lived in a haze of cruelty. I tried to save her from him, but she always took him back. In choosing him, she also unchose me. His brutality was relentless, and her betrayal cut deeper than I could admit.
Years later, I met my wife, and we built a family. But the nightmares came back. I feared losing them the way I had lost everything before. Like the wanderer, I showed nothing, carrying it all inside.
In 2013, on my way home from work, I came upon an accident – a mother and her two children had collided with a truck. She was crushed against the steering wheel, still moving but unreachable. That moment became the breaking point. The man who kept walking, no matter what, could no longer carry the weight. My shield, my wandering shield, shattered, and I was exposed to a world I hadn’t been part of for so many years. After some time, the wanderer managed to gather himself, and I found peace again – but only on borrowed time. The shield was broken; I had felt the world outside once again.
It was in 2017 that I finally sat across from a psychologist who named it: PTSD. Two years later, I was declared free – but freedom doesn’t erase the scars.
For decades, I carried the weight quietly. I didn’t talk about it – not because there were no words, but because the words felt too sharp to touch.
Instead, I wrote them down, piece by piece, never knowing if they would see the light.
That is where Last Cry Before I Fade began to take shape. This album is my journey told as both truth and myth. In the cover image, the lone figure walking into the crimson horizon is me – but also not me. He is every step I have taken away from the life I was given and toward the life I chose.
His road is mine: marked by loss, silence, broken promises, and the kind of love that both heals and wounds.
Each song is a piece of that path:
The first great love that burned to ash.
The voices of those who left too soon.
To be trapped in one's own mind, screaming.
When everything around is quiet, but a storm rages inside the mind.
The weight of loyalty that turns into chains.
The dreams that never breathed.
With every scar as proof, you can’t kill the will to rise.
The moment you stop fighting to survive and start deciding how your story ends.
I created every note, every word, every image as a way to release what I could not say out loud for so many years.
The music moves between raw rock and fragile ballads because life has been both – loud and violent, quiet and unbearably still.
When you listen to this album, you’re walking the same road the figure on the cover walks.
You’ll pass through the storms, the nights of endless silence, and the fire that refuses to go out.
And maybe, at the end, you’ll hear what I heard when I finally let go...
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It’s not about giving up – it’s about choosing how it ends.
