Odonata: Raise Your Banners (Slipwave Recording)

RECOVERED RECORDING — VIDEOCAST + CAPTIONED LINES Performing credit: Slipwave Pictures: uncredited. Laid over the recording after the fact; not a record of any room the band played in. Recorded: not stated on the recording. The Archive has not established which of the band's sessions it belongs to, and has not been asked to. Current standing: No charter status, like everything else the band made. Circulates in the habitat-circuit stock beside the Ballad; not sung at musters.

Transcriber's note: this recording reached the Archive as a videocast, and the videocast carries its own text — nine lines, one to a section, each set over the pictures for the length of its section. Those nine are confirmed, because they are the recording's own captions and not anyone's hearing of it. No lyric sheet has reached the Archive, and nothing beyond the captioned lines has been transcribed. What follows is the recording's captions in order; it is not the song, and the gaps between the lines are gaps. They stay gaps until a sheet turns up.

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(captioned, in order)

Dawn, the bronze gates open wide

Glasswing couriers streak away

Raise your banners high

Golden eyes, bright and bold

A tiny pilot, jade and red

Every wing remembers spring

We'll turn the storm to summer rain

Where dragon wings redraw the sky

The wings keep watch. We are not alone.

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On the pictures: a gated city at first light with boats on the water before it; a tower with dragonflies passing it; one dragonfly seen close, gold-eyed; lanterns on a river at night, a dragonfly rider among them; a terrace of old stone and a harbour under a sky the wings are drawn across. It is a painted world, and the painting is the maker's. Odonata is the order of the dragonflies and the damselflies in the old Terran taxonomy, which the song uses as a title and the pictures use as a cast; whether the band had a habitat's garden tier in mind, or a world, or nothing but the insects, the recording does not say. The Archive files the pictures as the recording's carrier and as nobody's witness to anything.

Archivist's note (S., Survey Archive): I file this beside Protectors of the Fold and I want the two titles read together once, so that nobody writes to us about it. That later recording says no throne, no claim, no banner*; this one says* raise your banners high. The banners here are wings. Nothing in the song is anyone's flag, and nothing in it asks the Corps to carry one. The last line is the kind of sentence this desk grades when it appears in a report and leaves alone when it appears in a song; I leave it alone.

See also: Slipwave, The Star Rangers Anthem, Ballad of the Stars, Borrow the Angle, Performers and Generated Work.