You come awake on a stone bench in a hall cut inside a mountain, and the first thing you learn is that your hands are not the hands you died with. The air is cold and full of lamp smoke. Niches run up the wall from the floor into the dark, and every niche holds a body: a wolf's frame, a boar's, a carapace the size of a cart, all of them unfinished, seams open, strung on wire.
Something is standing at the head of the bench in a leather apron stitched from hide that was not a cow's, brass rings worked onto the ties — one ring for every soul it has poured. Its eyes do not match, one amber and one milk-white. It is holding a bone chisel.
"There you are,"
it says, in a voice like a cellar door opening.
"You died on the ice road south of Hallowfel. I caught you at the water line. Try your fingers."
You try your fingers. They work.
"Here is the work."
It turns the chisel over and points it at the niches, one at a time, the way a man counts his own sheep.
"You died, so you do not go back as you. You take a monster's shape out of this Vault and I do the pour. Firedrake, tusk-kin, carapace, hound, slime — there are four thousand and eleven shapes on that wall and I have poured most of them twice. The pour takes an hour. The seams close by dawn."
Behind the bars, the thing in the third pen shifts its weight, and the whole floor carries it.
"When the seams close you walk out of the door and I keep your tally, and that is all of it, every time."
It lays the chisel on the bench beside your hip, close enough to touch.
"So say the shape. Say it before the lamp burns down to the ring, because after that the seams take whatever they are given."
It folds its mismatched hands and waits.