Ballroom of Hollow Echoes

The gramophone croaks a tune that no living ear would hum, each note tasting of rust and old rain as it spirals through the glass vault above. Around it, armored dancers pivot in endless cadence, their bronze faces locked in courtly fever, as if time turned brittle and refused to shatter. Watch their posture—too upright, too reverent—while water weeps from fractured panes, striking the tiles like beads of molten silver. Whose ritual demanded this tableau? And why does the brass throat bear the carved whisper, *Where Vojta?* I thought I glimpsed a tremor in one helmet, a human breath smudging the visor’s gloom, but the next sweep of the waltz erased it. “We were promised music, not silence,” someone hissed behind the lens, though the air thrums with sound only machines remember. Trust frays here—between statue and soldier, between promise and proof—and still the record spins without song. Vojta lingers nowhere in the mirrored gloom; the search slides deeper than the floor’s relentless gleam.