Songfacts®:

• American progressive metal band Dream Theater's 11th album, A Dramatic Turn Of Events marked the first time that guitarist John Petrucci contributed the bulk of the lyrics, following the departure of founding member Mike Portnoy. He told MusicRadar it was an opportunity he relished. "I've been wanting to write an entire album of lyrics for a long time now," he said. "The process of connecting music to a message is so gratifying, especially when I have a singer like James La Brie, who can make words come to life in ways that are spine-tingling."
• This song found Petrucci harping back to some of 1950s Hollywood's depictions of the ancient civilizations. Said Petrucci: "The mood of the song always reminded me of an old-time epic film like Ben-Hur. So I wrote lyrics that are somewhat historical about this ancient Persian elite fighting force that kind of died out. Again, a good example of my love for storytelling and linking music to words."
• Petrucci told MusicRadar that musically this track is one of the most technical songs on A Dramatic Turn Of Events. "It has a lot of twists and turns and some crazy ideas that were confusing to us as we were writing and recording. It took a while to get it all under our fingers," he said. The axe-man added: "Guitar-wise, it's the one song where I tune down to D. I thought it would sound heavier that way. And it does – I think the song kicks some serious ass!"
• The song features a diminished passage of unison playing. Said Petrucci: "I wrote it out and built it piece by piece, programming drums as I went. I showed it to Jordan (Rudess, keyboards), who said, 'That's crazy!' He learned it and put a harmony to it.
  
  We played it for some of the people from Roadrunner who came by as we were recording, and they went crazy. One of them remarked that the diminished section was like being tickled – that feeling you get where you're saying, 'Stop, stop!' but somebody keeps tickling you anyway. So we started referring to that part as 'The Tickle Section.'"