Marshglass Market Echo

In the brackish dusk of Marshglass, lanternboats scrape by stalls hung with kelp and clockwork owls, and the air tastes of iron and caramel as steam hisses from brass gutters. Every pillar and weathered banner holds human marks—trade runes, debt tallies, and a conspicuous woven question stitched into hemp: Where Vojta? its thread faded to bone and frayed by gulls. Under a tarred noticeboard a child's bootprint, a folded star-chart pressed with jasmine, and a compass whose needle quirks east form a breadcrumb path of hurried searching. Yet the lanterns do not find him: Vojta remains gone, his absence a raw knot in the market's clack and the stitched question still waiting as the town lays another empty plate.