The Last in Line

There's something cinematically inevitable about this opening — the deliberate buildup, the sense of a gathering rather than an arrival. The song earns its chorus through patience, constructing the image of souls lined up on some metaphysical shore, waiting for a fate they haven't been told about yet. It's both more foreboding and more tender than much of the album, Dio's vocal carrying genuine compassion for the figures in the song rather than his more customary heroic detachment. The guitar work has the Sabbath influence more openly than elsewhere — slower passages that generate dread rather than excitement, power in restraint. The middle section opens up dramatically, a release after the accumulated tension of the verses, and then returns to the procession-like theme with even greater weight. Lyrically this is Dio at his most philosophically earnest — questions about fate and agency and what constitutes being ready for whatever the last line actually means. The song closes an album that collectively built one of the great arguments that heavy metal could be emotionally serious. It's a song for the particular melancholy of transitions, of standing at the edge of something large and uncertain. It sounds like what you'd want playing if you were genuinely unafraid.