Coat of Arms: From iron — a heart.
Phantasmagoria.
The night was so black that it felt less like the absence of light and more like a force of nature unto itself.
Torrential rain, carrying the scent of ozone and scorched copper, crashed down from the sky in an unbroken wall, turning the plateau before the ancient Temple into a sea of icy water and liquid mud.
The drops hammered against the domes of Sanctum Ferrum with the fury of machine-gun fire. It was as if the heavens themselves were trying to crush the monolith, yet the granite walls, weathered by centuries, answered only with blue flashes of lightning. The thunder did not roll outside.
It vibrated within.
In the bones.
A bolt of lightning tore open the sky.
For one blinding instant, the granite walls of the Iron Cathedral blazed into view, revealing an immense shadow.
High upon the façade stood the figure of a winged knight. His visor was lowered, and a massive sword pointed toward the boiling clouds above. The vision lasted only a heartbeat before vanishing back into darkness, yet the feeling remained—a silent, eternal vigil.
Before the Cathedral, a war seemed to be unfolding.
Yet beside it, the war looked small. Meaningless.
Heavy military helicopters circled above the plateau. Their searchlights fought to pierce the curtain of rain, but the beams became tangled in the sheets of water, creating only the illusion of order within chaos. Mud erupted beneath the soldiers’ boots.
A tank ground its tracks across the rain-soaked rock, turning its turret toward the Temple.
It was impossible to tell where the lightning ended and the artillery bursts began.
The world had become a concussed blur of fire, water, and screams drowning beneath the roar of engines.
We were leaving.
The convoy surged forward. The tires of the off-road vehicles screamed against the stone.
In the rear-view mirror, Sanctum Ferrum had already vanished into the rain.
Where its silhouette should have stood, there was only a solid wall of water.
But I knew this was not the end.
And then, at the very place where the Iron Cathedral should have disappeared forever, it appeared.
From the very heart of the Temple, a pillar of blinding blue light erupted into the clouds.
It was not lightning.
The beam was solid. Focused.
Seemingly infinite.
And then the sound changed.
The helicopters vanished.
The tanks vanished.
The rain vanished.
Only the Hum remained.
A low-frequency, cavernous, unbearable resonance.
It was not the sound of water.
It belonged neither to the storm, nor to the machines, nor to the mountains.
And that made it truly terrifying.
I shut my eyes, trying to silence the pulse.
But the Hum was already inside me.
It passed through bone, through ribcage, through thought itself.
A second later I realized I could still hear it.
The Hum had not disappeared.
It had merely changed its form.
***
The next impact came not from the depths of the mountain, but from the concert subwoofers.
Above the stage rises a massive structure resembling the frame of an Iron Cathedral. Steel trusses arc together to form a vault too precise to be accidental.
A blue spotlight beam cuts through the darkness, revealing a crest bearing the name Metallherz. On either side of the composition stand two demonic figures holding electric guitars like medieval shield-bearers. At the center, a ruby heart slowly begins to glow, enclosed within a steel frame of gears and cables. Above it, dark metallic wings unfold, transforming the emblem into a relic of some unknown order, where Gothic grandeur has somehow merged with industrial machinery.
“EX FERRO — COR”.
From Iron — a Heart.
The inscription below we had first seen there, on the mountaintop, inside a medieval temple perched at the edge of the abyss.
Back then, we thought it was a motto.
We were wrong.
It was a name.
When metal begins to remember the sky.
There is
music you listen to.
There is music you analyze.
And there is music that returns you to a place you have already been — in
memories, dreams, or sleep.
Metallherz
is not about industrial coldness.
It is about the inner state of the soul.
About the place inside a person where, despite wind, fear, and height, a small
flame of love remains.
We use
heavy instruments, dense sound, powerful rhythm.
But all of this is only a shell.
Steel resonates not because it is hard, but because tension lives inside it.
So does a human being.
Live Concert.
The Valkyrie Tour & Album is not about war or myth.
It is about the moment of choice: rise above your own darkness or remain within
it.
It is about moving upward — even when there is an abyss beneath your feet.
If there is
strength in our music, it does not come from loudness.
It comes from the belief that inside everyone there is a light that cannot be
silenced.
Once, everything was different.
We learned
to create pressure. We could build heavy constructions from riffs and rhythm.
We knew how to make a hall tremble — but we did not yet know how to make it
freeze.
Our early
music was industrial metal in its pure form: mass, impulse, impact.
It was honest. And yet something was missing — the depth from which sound must
be born.
We searched
for that “something” without naming it.
Only later did we realize: what we lacked was silence.
Not the
pause between notes.
But the space that holds sound.
It took
years, adventures, and journeys to places where even a step sounds different
from breath to understand a simple truth:
strength is born not where sound becomes louder,
but where it emerges from silence and returns to it.
Valkyrie differs from conventional symphonic
metal.
There is no decorative orchestral background. No theatrical grandeur for the
sake of effect.
Here, orchestral elements are not decoration — they are architecture. They do
not envelop; they reveal.
The sound
is built differently: not from density toward climax, but from silence toward
ignition.
Each composition is an ascent.
Each finale is a ridge from which the next horizon is already visible.
And this path — from impact to space, from mechanism to heart — began long before the stage, lights, and crowd.
Backstage.
Behind the
stage it is always darker than it seems from the outside.
Stage light does not fade — it breaks off at the boundary like a wave hitting a
cliff.
I stand in this darkness and watch them.
At first,
you hear not music — but the breathing of the hall.
Thousands of people are not yet screaming. They are waiting.
And this anticipation sounds louder than any amplifier.
Somewhere ahead, Clara stands in the glare of spotlights. I cannot see her face — only a silhouette and a dress made of a thousand crystals.
The first
sound appears almost unnoticed.
Not a chord. Not a melody.
Emptiness, in which an orchestral part is born.
Clara’s voice rises from the darkness—as if space itself decided to speak Latin. It resembles Gregorian chant, yet Clara leads it.
The
audience does not understand the words — but freezes instantly.
I feel it physically. Like the pressure drop before a storm.
The sound
grows, filling the air with something ancient and immovable.
For a second, it seems the ceiling disappears, replaced by darkness stretching
upward.
And in that moment, the Machine awakens.
Hans gives a subtle nod — and the world splits wide with thunderous rhythm and a powerful growl. Viktor’s and Jürgen’s guitars crash over the hall as if the pressure of a straining cable broke free. At the same moment, Konrad’s synthesizer raises a cold industrial noise — as if a giant mechanism begins to move beneath the stage. Lights strike in white flashes, and the stage becomes a blazing factory floor.
The compositions follow one another, rising higher and higher, lifting the hall with them.
The music reaches its limit — and suddenly stops.
The crowd explodes.
But within this noise, I hear something else.
Something I once heard in absolute silence.
The lights go out so abruptly that the hall ceases to exist for a second.
Only one
spotlight remains.
And the cold reflection of light on a polished piano lid.
This
instrument should not be here — among trusses, cables, and rigging.
But it stands there.
And feels like the only thing on stage that knows why all of this exists.
Clara plays
quietly.
So quietly the hall freezes again — not from anticipation, but from the
inability to move.
Viktor’s voice sounds muffled and calm — as if not from the stage, but from memory.
And in that moment I understand: the path here began long before this night, whose price no one yet knew.
I watch them from the darkness behind the stage.
And it seems that this is where I must speak about myself.
I am the Shadow, the Echo, the Phantom. And this is my project.
I witnessed
the birth of Metallherz.
Its cause, its participant — or simply the one who happened to be nearby when
music first began searching for form.
In this story I will remain off-screen. As a witness to these events, I have always stayed in the shadows.
But I will tell it — through photographs, Viktor Stahl’s voice, his diary entries, and drawings.
They say a human is flesh and blood. I have seen people become steel—and steel begin to feel pain.
This story
is not about concerts.
It begins long before the stage, lights, and crowd.
It begins
with silence.
With a place that knows how to hold sound.
***
The final
note fades into the darkness of a hall full of people.
And for the first time all evening, silence becomes audible.
The red metal heart above the stage is the last to fade. For a second it seems to keep pulsing and glowing.
But this is
no longer the stage.
This is the light of industrial windows.
Cold. Morning. Dusty.
And instead
of a stage — an abandoned factory hall with too much space for a single
instrument.
And a sound heard by only one person. A sound that will one day become the
project Metallherz.
The sound of a piano key pressed in an empty room.
Sergey Yurchenko.