<div class="floatleft">(https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c4/a2/eb/c4a2eb3622a5fd5f4149b8e094a22fa3.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong>Danae Vine-Lott (https://ddb.ac/characters/13428552/TAFm5K)<br/><strong>Location: </strong>Dreamlands<br/><strong>Wearing: </strong>Cavalry Officer's Uniform, fading into Captain's Uniform<br/><strong>Tagging: </strong>The dream<br/><br/>Only faintly was Danae aware of the process of forgetting.  The faces, the happenings, the words spoken and heard, unspooled like a threadbare rag, before drifting off into blackness.  An old serpent sloughed off its skin, and Danae cast off her memories, leaving only a procession of faceless, formless dolls, masked in spotless porcelain.  She clung to the indispensable – fencing, riding, shooting, the book-learning she scarcely tolerated, and the geometry and arithmetic that she had enjoyed a little more.<br/><br/>When it came to her wife, to Abigail, her choice wavered.  She had been so pretty and elegant, but how prim, and how fussy, so similar to the timid, nervous boarding school girls with clumsy hands and hesitant tongues.  Their<em>maritals</em>, as Abigail would have it, were perfunctory – Danae could sometimes wring an uninspired climax by frigging herself with her wife bent over, face buried in the pillows, so she could at least pretend this fair heiress of prominent country squires was a barmaid or country lass whom Danae could simply<em>fuck</em>.  Abigail would go, too, and Danae severed the ribbon.<br/><br/>There was a ceremony, once, in a house of Ezra.  The peal of bells, the shuffle of a white gown, the unintelligible murmur of an assembled multitude.  Danae saw them all lined up in the pews, dressed in white, masked in porcelain and, at the altar, a faceless form, male or female or neither she could no longer tell, with red ribbons where hair should have been.  Then it was gone.  And when she searched again for the memory, knowing instinctively something ought to have filled the blackness that it left behind, she could no longer find it.<br/><br/>The red thing embraced her, slick, elastic limbs sending pale hairs on her arms standing on end.  It was blasphemous, but perfect, like staring into the abyss of her nightmare.<br/><br/><em>There are no goblyns in the wardrobe, you stupid girl!</em>Before going up to grammar school, mother had beaten her for wandering through the drawing room at night, dazed by a nightmare, and locked her in the wardrobe, and kept her there until morning.  Indeed, there had been no goblyns inside.  That memory she chose to keep.  Now she saw the real monster, and she was satisfied she had looked into its eyes without fear.<br/><br/>“You called me ‘Captain’,” Danae began, before realising that Heinfroth was spinning her future just as she moulded her past, “ah, am I to take to the sea?”  She stood in the image of the comfortably appointed captain’s cabin on the<em>Mercy</em>looking out the porthole to a red moon perched above a dead calm sea.  The red woman enveloped her, and she stood in her freshly pressed naval uniform, in eternal embrace with a shifting, crimson thing.<br/><br/>“Captain Vine-Lott, at your service!” Before she knew it Danae was laughing madly, descending into the vortex of her memories some, she was certain, true, and others, she supposed, introduced.  “What would the good Captain Baykur say if she saw me now?  Know this, good doctor, the stain of witchcraft is murrain, a pox on this land.  You may trust me to deliver those who would consort with dark forces into the custody of this place.  It is better that they be kept in here, than free to roam the four corners of civilised realms.”<br/><br/>Martira Bay would no doubt make an excellent base of operations, and if boredom ever seized her, there would be no shortage of public houses and brothels to tide her over.  Lieutenant Vine-Lott would sooner or later be declared dead.  Captain Vine-Lott would shortly be born.