Doctor Noire showed Danae that she had not a sliver of red ribbon on all her body, from fretful throat to beating breast to burning cleft to guarded ankle, one theft of black lace at a time. She showed Danae the motion of a tongue, the motion the Red Woman took, which was brimming with strength but all of it slick and undulating. And she showed Danae the transformation of a living body, of the delicate tapered trowel of a woman's hand into a shape blunt and fulsome and merciless, and the coal black sheets patterned with exquisite wet and pinching of teeth, and the dust shook down from the canopy's jaws for the first time in such a long time.<br/><br/>Perhaps Saint Ezra's eyes were averted that night, though her silvery likeness never left the handhold round Doctor Noire's neck.<br/><br/>In order to be reshaped, the old asylum must first come down, and not gently. When availed no more light to see it by, the strong wood groaned in the storm, and porcelain and mirror cracked apart, and the old elevator cable whirred wild, untethered. Even in the maelstrom of war or adrift on churning sea, a soldier must learn to sleep.<br/><br/>~ ~<br/><br/>The hallmarks of a dream were unmistakable, when Danae found herself in a white cot on a checkered floor with but a drawn white partition for walls.<br/><br/>Memory told it was the field hospital where she once lay, as a younger and more idealistic woman. But memory of the place was faulty and muddied with impressions, urges, anxieties into a place only eerily familiar. An old, old chapel turned respite for the wounded, and in a distant outdoors unglimpsed by any accessible window, the cracking of pitiless muskets.<br/><br/>Shapes, shadows, voices floated along thin white partitions promising tangible persons and answers only an effort away, and yet to draw a partition revealed nothing save an empty bed, the vanishing glimpse of nurse-skirts, discarded masks of porcelain.<br/><br/>(https://i.imgur.com/PsmKJBN.png)<br/><br/>"Can you remember the face of your lover," an elusive voice inquired, whether Doctor Heinfroth or the Red Woman. "Or your mother, or any woman you have known."<br/><br/>"Dream a mask for me to wear, mademoiselle, if you please."