Shadows

Echoes Beneath Iron

They had frozen the gears long ago, yet the air still murmured with a turbine’s ghost-hum, as if the machines resented the quiet. Banners clung like barnacles to the corroded walls: *Find Vojta*, *Have You Seen Vojta?* Their pale glow flickered, cycling on some long-forgotten timer, a heartbeat for a city that no longer breathes. The divers bent in ritual arcs, polishing lenses that led nowhere, as though clarity itself might lure him back. Above them drifted a leviathan shape, its lantern eyes scanning the avenues like an unseen chaperone that whispers behind glass. Did it mark their progress, or feed on it? Every clang rang like scripture against the metal bones of the past, and still the single question swam between them: *Where is Vojta?* In these underwater canyons, even answers rust. We keep listening, because silence might be his most dangerous disguise.

Molten Question Forge

A horned smith hammers a glowing blade on an anvil in a cavern lit by rivers of molten orange. Sparks and searing light carve the words WHERE VOJTA? into the steel, the question steaming like a sign above the forge. Stone faces in the arches watch in carved silence, their stern features turning every blow into testimony. The hammer strikes fall in a measured, accelerating rhythm, a counted urgency that pushes molten metal toward meaning. No answer rises from the flames or the shadowed corners; Vojta remains unfound, and the forged question holds firm. The light feels numinous and skeptical at once, a bound promise of discovery tempered by doubt as the smith keeps working.

Twilight Arch Whisper

I found the arch after crossing thirty ridges that rolled like bronze waves, each one darker than the last. The sky clung to twin moons and a smaller sentinel, pinned there like an omen none of us were eager to name. Under the bruised orange glow, a river shimmered with impossible hues, as if the earth had split open to bleed rainbows instead of water. When the wind shifted, smoke curled upward from the stone span, forming letters so blatant they mocked my tired eyes: WHERE VOJTA? Legends say the desert only speaks when the search has nearly broken you. We had no banners, no horns of victory—just this spell of color and the absurd mercy of dawn sliding up behind serrated peaks. I touched the arch expecting heat, felt only silence pulsing like a second heartbeat. No footprints lingered beyond; even the river spiraled off into exile. And so the question still flickers above empty sand: he is not here. Not yet.