Uve Uve Mara – The Lotus Eaters OST
A lot of stuff has happened in Warframe lately, and it’s all coming to a head in Warframe 1999, which comes in December. And no, I still haven’t worked out how to tastefully discuss what happened in Jade Shadows. But one thing has stuck out to me lately, and it’s the soundtrack from the Lotus Eaters update. While yes, the Lotus Eaters ‘quest’ was more akin to the three mini quests before the New War (and only takes like 2 minutes to complete, excluding loading times), there’s something about the login screen music that tells far, far more than the quest does.
The quest itself is pretty self-explanatory. Lotus/Natah/Margulis/whoever you picked at the end of the New War is in the Entrati labs, staring out into the Void, humming to herself. We greet her, she says that we have to send the Drifter back in time to make contact, she holds out a pager and the Drifter follows Kalymos, Albrecht Entrati’s cat, around the Hollvania mall (the one we all visited at Tennocon) to a workbench, where we steal Arthur Nightingale’s pager and return to reality. It’s mostly just an explanation as to why Drifter has to go and not the Operator, because Drifter’s already a paradox and thus kinda immune to time travel bullshit. Afterwards, we get the pager we can place it on our ship as an interactive decoration – we’ve actually seen a few messages appear on it, mostly Arthur asking who stole his shit.
However, the real juicy stuff is the message Loid sends after we finish the miniquest. He states that the Lotus is holding back the Man in the Wall somehow, and it’s trying to tempt her to join the Indifference. In order to combat it, the Lotus has been singing to herself. It’s a battle of two different voices. And the soundtrack that goes alongside this is mesmerizing.
It’s mostly a play on This Is What You Are, one of Warframe’s main musical pieces, but there is a STORY in there. It starts off with the rumbling chants of the Indifference, which is cut off by Lotus’s singing. But this is quickly backed up by some Voidtongue lyrics that we don’t really know yet. The first verse and the second verse are the same, but the Indifference’s beckons are oddly stronger and more pushy the second time round, they want the Lotus to give in, but she continues to sing, and in fact sings more strongly, as if she’s pushing them back.
In fact, the Lotus seems to win out somewhat, but not only that, but towards the end, she is joined by more voices, singing alongside her, more powerful but not quite as harmoniously. We also hear the Rap Tap Tap heavy beats of the Man in the Wall trying to drown them out, and the song ends in a sudden and harsh silence. The voices singing along with the Lotus are either her other personalities (Natah and Margulis) or the voices belong to us, her adopted children, singing alongside their mother to stop the tide of the Indifference.
Whether we succeed or not, we don’t know yet, but it’s clear that the Lotus is fighting her own battle against the lures of the Man in the Wall.
I’m also curious about the lyrics though. We don’t have many translated Voidtongue words yet, outside of the Requiem Mods. From what people can tell, the Voidtongue lyrics are:
Uve Uve Mara,
Utri Fami Yatra
Hamare Jelira
Utu Lov Utu
Out of all of this, we only have two recognizable words, neither of which have been officially translated. But the word “Mara” is genuinely considered to mean “child”, since it was the name used in the code referring to the Operator. “Uve” is repeated twice, and just thinking about a word you repeat before the word “child”, I suppose it could mean something like “Poor, Poor Child” or maybe “Little, little child” or something similar. The other word we’re aware of is Jelira – it appeared in the music for Dante Unbound. It doesn’t have a translation either, but there’s a… guess that it means “my love”, “dear” or something similar. Apart from that, it’s mostly a mystery. But I’d hazard a guess that Yatra is similar to Yara, which comes up a lot as well.
Really hoping that we get more Voidtongue soon. All the Indifference stuff has been amazing so far.
Either way though, this soundtrack is just so, so good. So good in fact that I actually logged in and farmed for ducats so I could buy it when Baro brought it to his bi-weekly void shop. And it’s probably one of my favourite tracks to date.