<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<br/><strong>Tagging: </strong>Open<br/><br/>In the dream-lands, reality took the shape woven for it by the fevered hands of a narcotic-stunned mind.  She was in her uniform again - a residue of gunsmoke in the air, a whiff or carbolic soap.  Something metallic.<br/><br/>The voice in the back of her mind flattered her perception.  Was it to reassure her that she could control the dream, and conjure up any image of her liking, or was it a game of like kind to what the alienist had played with her, to tease out the fragments buried deep in the recesses of her memory to piece them back together again?<br/><br/>"My mother?" Danae felt the weight of her rapier at her hip.  In her cognizant mind, she knew it would be of scant use here, but on a primal, essential level, its presence at her side comforted her.  What could she even remember there?  Flitting images  - they'd sent her off to board early.  Danae's letters home had been superficial, matter-of-fact.  The reality of the place was, as with all hierarchies, deeply unpleasant for those at the bottom, but with a glimmer of light by the end, especially when she'd been appointed prefect. Then what of Mother?  Nothing - a rigid, unimaginative woman.  Hard-headed, practical, '<em>Well that's the way she is, good Sir, and we could sooner change the tide</em>'.  Papa had stared into the fire, brandy in hand, before pulling together the money to buy her a commission.  There was no other way she could have been put to gainful use.<br/><br/>"Lovers?" Danae smirked.  The void-eyed masks seemed to mock through soulless eyes.  The nurses were faceless, black spaces under their bonnets, shuffling, humming some Ezraite psalm out of key.  She could remember some of them from daily worship at boarding school, bleary-eyed cold and damp mornings in a draughty stone chapel.  Soldiering was almost a relief after that.  "Which ones? Do you think I have kept a tally?"  It was in the nature of her mind not to dwell on the past, and to work backwards from the present, but she was no longer in control of her train of thought.  Memories bubbled, effervescent. Ah, yes, was this a phantasm of desire?  On an essential level, she'd learnt to despise girls of good breeding.  The ones she'd had at boarding school hardly knew what they were doing - hesitant, clumsy, fearful.  It was more fun to cane them for some imagined offence and then frig herself - much more practical that way.  So it was the farm-girls, the shepherdesses, the barmaids.<br/><br/>'<em>Oh, that's right wicked, mistress,</em>' For an instant she was in the servant's quarters of the manor house drooling spit down the deep crevasse of Polly's arse, wild red hair dusting the yawing whorl of her fundament, cunny-hair sodden with milky juice, huge - she'd say<em>'ulking</em>in her thick moorside accent - tits swaying.  "So it was," Danae hissed, "seduced by a witch, was I not?"<br/><br/>Back in the field hospital, wandering aimlessly, she remembered others.  Rebecca at the<em>Red Lion</em>in Arden Bay: blonde, fat hips, and cravenly whorish for shillings dropped into her blouse.  Tamsyn, the barefoot shepherd girl at Hope's End, who resting under an elm tree had gestured to Danae on horseback, lifted her blue gingham dress and spread pale, columnar thighs - an auburn nest.  Not a word needed to be spoken.  Practical - Danae had liked that.<br/><br/>"Lovers?" Danae reflected once again, a dim and unknowable light streaming through the high hospital windows, "Scarcely.  Conquests, perhaps."  What had she felt?  Affection, perhaps.  As for love, she could love her horse, her rapier, and not much besides.  Those were all the things worthy of love.  Even Ezra Herself was questionable.<em>She doesn't love you because you do not believe? Would she deign to speak to one bereft of faith?</em><br/><br/>"Wear Polly's mask, if you must, and tell me if my dreams were madness," Danae defied the weaver of her memories.  "All that I know, perhaps, you have already seen.  Or wear Tamsyn's mask, and tell me of your delight at your flocks being freed from the depredations of goblyns."  Oh, yes, Tamsyn had seen all right: they'd strung up the survivors on a gallows atop a lonely hill in full sight of the Hope's End church.  Thirty straggling goblyns, desperate, struggling, jabbering away in their hideous tongue.  They didn't even blindfold them - just gave them the short drop (so it would take longer) and let them hang.  Danae had enjoyed it, yes she had relished it, and the villagers, curious, unnerved, entertained, half-drunk on hard cider and furmenty laced with rum, stumbling like hideous fools at this bloody banquet.