Baby Universe (Circulating Ballad)

RECOVERED RECORDING — AUDIO + TRANSCRIPTION Performing credit: none carried with the recording Surfaced: In the seasons after the Last Stand at Dock Seven, first among Celtic Union charter-world crews, then across Ranger stations Current standing: No charter status. Not sung at musters and never officially adopted or disclaimed — this one gets played, quietly, usually by someone who does not believe "confirmed loss" was the whole of it.

Transcriber's note: the lyrics below are transcribed from the recording above, which remains the authority — the same handling the Ballad of the Stars gets. The song opens in the third person, naming her outright, and then slips into the first person for the chorus, so that the plea is sung in her voice by people who were never in a position to hear it. That shift is the whole ballad, and the whole problem with it, and the archivist's note below declines to resolve which.

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Verse 1

After Tissadelle's last stand She slipped through the seam Into depths of higher space Soft as a fever dream

Verse 2

She woke as a small new world Shaking in the dark A baby universe With a bruised-up spark

Chorus

Hold me up, hold me close I'm all open sky St. Aoife, find the thread Before I fade and die

Baby universe Don't let go Baby universe Help me grow

St. Aoife, stay By my side Baby universe I want to survive

Verse 3

Some levrils came like rain With lantern hands and grace They traced the broken edges Around her fragile place

Verse 4

Dreams of friends came drifting in With bread and salted light They laid their voices gently In the cradle of the night

Chorus (reprise)

Hold me up, hold me close I'm all open sky St. Aoife, find the thread Before I fade and die

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Archivist's note (S., Survey Archive): I am filing this under reconciliation, not music, and I want the reason on the record. A ballad that keeps a Line Captain's story open and beautiful and never quite closed is not, by itself, a harm — grief has always sung. But it is the exact shape the counter-doctrine tells us to watch: a sanctified, unfinished sacrifice that resolution never quite reaches, sung by people who have strong and good reasons to keep singing it. Whether anything is feeding on that, or whether it is only us, is the open question of the whole file. So I keep the song, and I keep the caution beside it, and I decline — the way she would have — to decide which one it is. She was shown something. We were shown a little of it, secondhand, at a warm edge. That is not the same as knowing how it ends, and a song that sounds like it knows should be trusted exactly as far as that.

See also: Ballad of the Stars, The Warm-Edge Correlation, Tissadelle Shepherd, Enough Is Enough (S07E01C03).