Editing DRYH: Ashes of Gods - Setting Details (section)

==The Menagerie - Pain 1==
What happens to Nightmares who grow up? In the Mad City, where Time is sluggish with paradox and reluctance, they never should. But in Mistress When's capable hands, they do. The Menagerie is what happens to the Night Callers who leap too close to her tower. The girls anyway. The broken remains of the few boys who do survive her malice can be found throughout the Mad City tormenting broken Denizens in dark holes and cracks and wishing for their own deaths.

The girls are another story. They remain mostly young but grow tall and straight where they ought and plumply curved where she demands. Their animal faces become idealized porcelain masks of the same animal, but can never be removed. Tails and feathers and fur become part of a costume made more of skin than anything else.

This is Mistress When's Menagerie, traded, loaned, even gifted to Nightmares to do with as they will, to butcher and harm, to flay alive and subject to all manner of torture until the clocks sound the Thirteenth Hour, at which time the contract ends and the Menagerie returns to Mistress When, broken but terribly, terribly whole. Ready to be given to new Nightmares again at the beginning of the first watch.