The Road Back.
Epigraph.
Some things cannot be explained. They can only be remembered.
Sound is born at a point — and radiates, colliding with form, accepting its rules.
Sometimes — it vanishes.
Sometimes — it remains.
As if the space decides for it.
And only later, when Jürgen hauls back a crate of roughly chipped crystals from the cave beneath the Cathedral, will I first see it in another form:
Frozen sound.
Stone that remembers.
In the Mirror.
In the rear-view mirror, everything always happens a little later.
The motion lags by a fraction of a second, the distance seems smaller, and that which remains behind continues to exist beside you for a while longer.
I watched Sanctum Ferrum in the side mirror of the SUV. In the moonlight, it looked mysterious and majestic. Clara lingered for a second, tilting her face to the sky as if trying to remember what life was like before all this.
Settling into the vehicle, she laid her head on my shoulder and said:
— “I don’t want guests. I need silence.”
And, after a pause, she added:
— “Look at those stars. They are closer than they seem.”
She said this almost in a whisper, already drifting off, without opening her eyes:
— “Perhaps there is star dust in us…”
And a moment later, she was asleep.
I started the engine of the military Humvee and, letting the lead vehicle pass, pulled away.
Her voice dissolved in the rumble of the motor.
The sky above us seemed bottomless. In the mountains, it is always deeper — the stars do not twinkle; they seem to stare, cold and immobile. Their brilliance reminded me of the crystals. Of quartz, capable of amplifying sound.
But this fact did not explain the main thing: why — or more precisely, for what purpose — the entire colossal structure of the Cathedral was subject to this effect. I remembered Konrad’s mobile laboratory for recording vanishing factories. Back then, it sounded like just another one of his mad projects. But now the thought returned with unexpected clarity. If the sound is born down there, in the depths, then it must be captured there as well.
I mechanically calculated the distance. To the well from the blockage — a few hundred meters. Then the vertical descent. Then the cave itself. Six hundred… maybe seven hundred meters of cable, if we attempted to record the signal from here, on the surface. Any standard studio line at such a length would simply disintegrate into noise.
I didn’t yet know if it was even technically possible to hear that depth the way Jürgen heard it. But for the first time, I caught myself thinking that someday, I would have to try. To understand what kind of instrument would be capable of replicating that voice.
Occasionally, in her sleep, Clara turned her head slightly, as if trying to hear something that was no longer supposed to sound.
The clock had long since struck midnight. The moon hung high and aloof. By its light, the slopes took on sharp, graphic outlines, as if someone had traced them with charcoal.
The SUV’s headlights carved a narrow corridor of light out of the darkness — everything beyond its limits vanished instantly, dissolving into the dense, almost tangible gloom. To the left, past the shoulder, the abyss began. It wasn’t fully visible, only hinted at: the occasional glint of water far below, the dull silvery line of a river, the hollow, muffled noise rising from the depths. This sound did not break through to the outside — it existed on its own, like the breathing of a vast, sleeping organism.
To the right, a stone wall rose — uneven, scarred by cracks, in places overhanging so close it seemed just a little more and we would touch it with the wing of the mirror.
On the road, thoughts are rarely directed forward. When the car obediently settles into the trajectory, the gaze periodically drifts to the rear-view mirror — as if checking that the path traveled actually exists. That it didn’t just come together by chance from dozens of coincidences, each of which could have gone differently.
The Iron Cathedral remained behind, but the sensation of it did not vanish. It didn’t hold in the mind. It settled deeper — where sound is no longer discernible, but still influences the form.
Memory works differently than sound.
Sound fills space. Memory forms it. It holds the tension. The very tension that later determines how the next line will lie, how the next chord will sound, and whether the construction will hold its own weight. That which holds the form is always hidden below the level where it can be seen.
And to understand this, one must return to the roots. To look into the rear-view mirror.
And on the way through the night, I remember stories that explain a great deal.
(from the notes of Viktor Stahl)