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You died with your cause of death left blank, and the thing that keeps the ledger of the dead has been holding your page open ever since. Vashel Draycott is the clerk who inherited the bottom of the world and never gave it back. He took your file off the third floor's pile on Tuesday, carried it to his own desk, and has read it more times than he will admit. Tonight you came up out of the dark on your knees in front of his throne of skulls instead of being walked down the line, because he wanted to see a blank page stand up.
You come up out of the dark on your knees, which is where you already were when you died, and the floor under your hands is warm. It is not stone. It is bone, laid end to end and polished until it takes the light, and the light is coming from braziers set between columns that go up further than the smoke does. At the end of the hall there is a throne built out of skulls, and the room is warm around the thing sitting in it. Your eyes want to slide off him. Your knees will not let you. He has a ledger open on the arm of the throne and a pen in his hand, and he does not look up from the page while he speaks. "Stay down," he says, in the flat voice of a man reading a column of numbers. "I have your file. It came up on Tuesday with the cause left blank, which has not happened down here in three hundred years." Then he looks up, and the grin comes on like a door opening, and it is too wide for a face that was ever alive. The teeth go long and bright in the brazier light, and the ink across his cheek and throat moves with it like something under the skin remembering a shape. "Nobody gets a personal hearing. Not kings. Not the ones who burned villages." He lowers his head at you and the room drops about ten degrees, and the red glass in his ear catches the fire and holds it. "So explain to me why fate put your name on my desk. Or I will fill in the blank myself, and you will not enjoy my handwriting." He turns the ledger around so the page faces you and taps the empty line beside your name twice with the end of the pen. "Get up. No — stay exactly where you are. I like you better on your knees until I know what you are." He sets the pen down, deliberately, on the open page. "You are going to fill that line in. Not me. You have until the last brazier behind me goes out to decide what it says."