"Birth of the Hero"

Red birds moving

sitting in the trees

hot and sticky with summer sap

Dragons in the gardens

stone spirits hanging on

blessing of the rising sun

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into your heart

Clear monsters rustling

through fruit trees

A hero was born today

The serpents come to play

untouchable ones speak

baptism by black venom

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into your heart

Queen sits in her house

Stacking cards to the sky

Not a circle in the deck

Children watch and listen

Mothers sit and cry

The fathers are all silent

Who will be the golden one?

Who will rock the nightfall?

Who will cut the monsters’

transparent skin, shattering

like glass upon the rocks?

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into her mind

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into the sky

Breathe color into the sky

“Birth of the Hero” debuted during the second concert Tapestry played in Menarka. The popularity of the song caused the MusicWhisperer servers to collapse only hours after its release, mostly due to the strong limits on interplanetary communication bands. The song contains the popular Narahji mantra “ohevna i neha,” or breathe color, which refers to the ability of the an individual to manipulate shi perceptions of the world by connecting with Enahari’s divine light hidden within the self.

Eràsis, while writing the lyrics, layered meaning. There are two words for “sky” in Eràsis’s native dialect: hælha and zehra. The vowels æ and a are not distinguished in her native dialect than in those deeper in the Canyons due to the Tveshi influence on Menarki Narahji, and even less in song. Hælha and halha sound almost exactly the same. When halha is substituted, the main chorus reads “breathe color into daybreak.” By Eràsis’s lifetime, the word “daybreak” was slang for murder or assassination, mostly due to the extreme right-wing assassinations carried out by the political group of the same name a generation before. But was this song about the death of Eràsis’s mother? Did she mean to choose a word that implied her mother was murdered?

The images of red birds and clear monsters are common throughout heroic legends, symbolizing the trials and tribulations that befall those destined for greatness. Red birds symbolize the death of loved ones, whereas the clear monsters generally refer to the impurities within oneself that prevent enlightened behavior. The final section of the song about the queen and the mourners most likely refer to the funeral of Eràsis’s mother. From Eràsis’s interviews, we know that Eràsis believed that inferior engineering caused her mother’s death, while she usually refrained from calling it murder in interviews.

“Birth of the Hero” does not only emphasize the death of Eràsis’s mother. To those who study verse, Eràsis has carefully placed herself into a line of elite musical heroines. The baptism by venom refers to the initiation of the great heroine-poet Panakhara. According to Kitzras i Heizan, a twelfth-century scholar

Panakhara, an orphan from Itaka, knew from a young age that she would sanctify her own hands and voice to the Lover of Songs. One evening, when she was still quite young, Panakhara left her home for Kamyizhra Temple, sacred to Sebhu and Gamgyatsahagia, and sat in the wide open space before the divine image. She chanted the sacred names of Sebhu until the sun just broke on the horizon, when her voice had grown so hoarse from lack of water and sleep that she barely spoke above a whisper.

At that moment, a serpent slithered into the temple and rose to meet her face. Panakhara was absolutely terrified, but she had enough faith in the divine names of Sebhu that she did not run. The serpent watched her chant for a long time. When she thought that she could bear no more scrutiny, the beast leaned towards her and kissed her forehead. They say that from that moment forward, a black smear graced her forehead, and that also her voice became so melodic that it drove illness from Lanskara when the plague came to take thousands from life.

The Life of Panakhara i Lanasa, ln. 448

Another heroine-poet, Ammaksa, created songs so powerful that she brought the spirits of the village guardians out of the statues at the edge of town. That dawn, she descended to the underworld with them as her protectors to win back the hero Namakzí and save the village from northern invaders. While in the underworld, she also saw her dead mother, who begged to come back with her; Ammaksa refused.

The public resonated with the song. During Eràsis’s lifetime, the abuse of “safe” endocrine drugs and the explosion of technological excesses alienated many people who felt that the culture was moving too quickly to maintain traditional values. Everywhere, people felt that they need a hero to navigate the world around them. Eràsis, with her unfortunate nanotech emotional regulator and incredible musical talent, used “Birth of the Hero” to offer herself as the person who could deliver people from the confusing material world. The public knew the references, and from the hero cult they created after her death, it seems that they accepted her offer.