A Skin-Lost looks like the beast it became, most often a fox, a wolf, a hare, a crow, or a hound, but rarely quite right. It is often too big or too lean for its kind, holds its head a little too high, and looks at people too long. Some carry a mark of the person: a scar, a ring grown into a foreleg, a grey streak where the hair went grey. It walks the paths people walk, at the hours they walk them, and its voice is its beast’s.

They live where they were lost, mostly the woods and field edges near the village or camp of the caster, and stay near it for the rest of their lives. They are rare: few casters dare a beast form for longer than the spell’s half day, and fewer stay in it long enough to forget.

A Skin-Lost lives as its beast does, hunting, feeding, and sleeping as its kind, but it keeps the shape of a life. It comes to the edge of the village at dusk, watches a particular door, follows a particular person at a distance, lies on a grave or in an empty doorway, and avoids the place it was lost. It does not know anyone, and it flees or bites as a beast does if pressed. It does not breed with its kind, or not often, and its young are ordinary beasts.

None beyond its beast’s. The change that made it is spent; a Skin-Lost cannot change again, and no known working brings the person back, since nobody is left to bring.

It lives out a beast’s life, often longer than its kind, and dies as a beast. Its family buries it, or burns it, as a person.

It gives nothing but grief. The danger is small and mostly to the family: a Skin-Lost fox raids its own sister’s hen-yard, a wolf follows a child home and will not be driven off, and a family that will not let it be hunted pays for it in stock and in its neighbours' patience. Lords' huntsmen who kill one by mistake pay nothing for it, however the village grieves.

Basin villages say a Skin-Lost is still the person inside, waiting to be called by the right name, and some families set food out for years. Morphic teachers say there is no one left to call, and that the habits are the last of the body’s memory, not a mind; as far as anyone has ever learned, they are right. Elven groves count a Skin-Lost as a beast of their ground and kin of the grove that lost it, and neither hunt nor feed it. Every village with one tells its children the same rule about beast forms: come back before you forget the way.

Hunters who kill a strange beast near a village that has lost someone to the skin are sometimes hunted in turn by the family, and more than one blood-feud in the Basins began at the edge of a wood.