The letter came four days after the deep overlay.
Not an electronic message, not a guild comms notification. A letter, physical, delivered to the guild auxiliary office on his registration address with a wax seal on the back that his Object Appraisal skill identified as pre-system material, the same category as the ring, the same warmth under his fingers when he touched it.
He sat at his kitchen table and looked at it for a full minute before opening it.
The paper was good. Not expensive in the modern sense, but dense, the kind of density that came from material that had been made by a process that took longer than contemporary manufacturing bothered with. The text was handwritten in an ink that caught the light slightly wrong, dimensional material in suspension, and read:
[Mr. Voss,
