<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>The dream<br/><br/>A web of red ribbons – a patchwork of her memories; if she cut them all, would she forget herself?  She would, perhaps, become faceless and porcelain-masked like the inmates of this forsaken bedlam.  What was a mind but the sum of its memories?  In this place she could be effaced, until she forgot herself, and unburdened herself of her guilt.  There could be no sin without cognizance of the act.  And if the sin were forgotten by the sinner, how could she be made to pay the penalty for that which she could not recollect?<br/><br/>“If the memory goes, then the sin is excised? Like a gangrenous limb under the surgeon’s saw?”<br/><br/>Polly’s embrace was comforting, voluptuous.  Enormous milky-white freckle-kissed breasts seemed almost to spill out of her red bridal gown.  An errant memory surged in the roiling seas of Danae’s unconscious mind.  The first time she’d taken her servant-girl had been in the pantry in the dim firelight, the wind lashing the moors.  When tightly-laced blouse loosened, mounds of supple white flesh fell out, abundant, distended, luxuriant.  She had the sensation of being enveloped in that generous flesh, the scent of hay, and butter, and carbolic soap, and the dense musk of Polly’s copiously wet cunny.  But that had been deception, she was certain of it.  Had Polly taken her blood, her hair, filings from her fingernails while she slept?  Had her evening mug of negus contained some hedge-witch’s herb to lull her to sleep, while devils danced above her head?<br/><br/>The<em>Malleus</em>had been the only book she’d thought worth reading, and it was clear that red hair was a sign.  So, too, were the chalk circles, the pots of ewe’s milk and sheep’s blood (black pudding, indeed!).  The doubt assailed her dreams, and she’d been certain.<br/><br/><em>Seduced by a witch.</em>She, Lieutenant Danae Vine-Lott of Lord Weathermay’s own Horse Guards, had fallen to infernal deception.  Now she could purge that disgrace, blot the stain – once and for all.<br/><br/>Scarlet ribbons fluttered, tendrils snaking, caressing bared skin.<br/><br/>“Take away this weight,” Danae breathed.<br/><br/>In another memory limpid like the moon on a placid lake, she recalled the draughty manor-house kitchen, rain battering the windows, and by candlelight Polly and Jane, the tow-haired chambermaid, giggling by candlelight, leafing through an illustrated Dementlieuse edition of<em>De omnibus Veneris Schematibus</em>that had survived, unexpurgated, in her wife’s family library.  Hushed, conspiratorial whispers,<em>”Oh, those Dementlieuse girls will do anything, won’t they?  Ye needn’t have the learning to know the words if you’ve the pictures!”</em>Jane was giggling, squirming in her chair,<em>"Ye think lasses there just shear all the hair off their quims or is they made that way?"</em><br/><br/>She knew how it had happened; how she had birched them for idleness and debauched with both of them in the guest quarters, only to slide back into her own bed before the first light of dawn.  This time, though, when Danae walked in, they turned to face her, each wearing a porcelain mask.<br/><br/>“Now, harken to me, and know that I want her gone,” Danae was only faintly conscious that she might be addressing the puppetmistress behind her dream, “this you already know - that I want all of them gone.  Let me be reborn.  Show yourself to me, if you wish, so that we may speak face to face.  But when you do speak plainly, for I am weary of riddles.”<br/><br/>Shears in hand, she lashed out, scything fluttering ribbons.  She wanted Polly to be nothing but a porcelain mask: listless, lifeless, without past or future.<br/><br/>“But tell me, what will become of my fellow-passengers? They, I am duty-bound to assist.”  She wanted to add,<em>if, of course, they were ever there at all</em>.