**Echoes of the Hollow**
**Chapter 1: The Letter That Should Not Have Arrived**
The letter arrived on a Tuesday that smelled of wet asphalt and iron.
Elias Voss found it slipped under the warped door of his third-floor walk-up, the envelope the color of old bone and sealed with black wax that had already cracked. No return address. No stamp. Just his name written in a hand so precise it looked engraved rather than written:
*Elias Voss*
*Apartment 3B*
He almost threw it away. Bills and threats from the landlord came the same way. But the wax held a faint, sweet rot—like flowers left too long in stagnant water—and curiosity, that old disease, made him break the seal.
Inside was a single sheet of paper, thick and slightly damp, as though it had been pulled from somewhere colder than the city.
*Mr. Voss,*
