
They were precious, and looking at them woke up something deep in her heart. Girls she would take back to her house, deep in the woods. But she could never bring herself to kill the little girls. She liked to collect their tools and colourful garments and especially toys when there were little ones. Unlucky souls who strayed into her territory were slaughtered like any other animal. When unsuspecting travellers came through her woods, she discovered her new favourite prey: humans. Eventually she grew tired of them and hunted more dangerous animals like wolves and bears. She worked her way up through squirrels, hares, mink and foxes. She widened her territory and lived off her hunts.

As she grew into a dangerous predator, her humanity became a half-remembered dream. She got older and stronger and practised her hunt. She followed her instincts and became one with the wild. Still a child, she knew just enough about life in the frozen forest to survive. Eventually she stood up and started the long walk back home. They stayed like that, the huntress and the elk getting quieter and colder, until Anna was alone in the silent forest. To distract her from the dying elk’s cries, Anna’s mother held her and hummed her favourite lullaby.

The beast collapsed.Īnna was too small to move her mother’s broken body, so she sat with her in the clearing where she had fallen. With a sickening crack, the antlers snapped and Anna’s mother was free. With all her strength, she brought her axe down on its head again and again while it tried to shake her loose. A blood-curdling scream escaped from her lips as the elk impaled her upon its antlers and hoisted her into the air. The elk was close enough for Anna to see the murderous fury in its eyes when her mother threw herself in its path, axe in hand. She was paralysed with fear as the whole world seemed to shake under the immense beast’s pounding hooves. Without warning, the elk reared, bellowed and charged at Anna. The spectre of starvation frightened them more than any forest creature. They knew it was dangerous prey, but it had been a particularly difficult winter and they were almost out of food. Drifting off to sleep with stories and lullabies, she dreamt happy dreams, ignorant of the events that would soon change everything.Īnna and her mother were stalking a great elk through the woods. Close to the hearth’s warmth, Anna would rest in her mother's arms, surrounded by the few wooden toys and masks she had crafted for her. When sunlight became too dim for productive activities, they would take refuge in their house, a sturdy old cabin constructed to resist the toughest winters. Living in such an extremely remote and dangerous area required skill and resilience.
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She was introduced as the Killer of CHAPTER 5: A Lullaby for the Dark, a free Chapter DLC released on 27 July 2017.Īdditional Lore can be found in Tome 3 - Escalation: A Lovely War.Īs soon as Anna was able to walk, her mother started teaching her how to survive a harsh, solitary life in the northern woods. There is something else in her too, she seems to seek something.Īnna (Russian: Анна) or "The Huntress" is one of 32 Killers currently featured in Dead by Daylight. But her knack for tracking, capturing and killing is something else here. In any other place one could deem it a talent. I have met many different beings in this place, but this is the first one with a natural skill of hunting. This new foe holds something human within her. Fernandes imagines this impertinent teenager waving her off but maybe reading “Orlando” in college someday and thinking “about his young mother who wanted to be a writer and what she might have had to give up in order to raise him at 23.A figure clad in the head of a hare. What name? How about Orlando, the title of this poem and a novel by Virginia Woolf, who famously spoke of the need for a woman to have “a room of one’s own” to become an artist. She presents her rationale for the abortion to this non-existent child, who personifies Frost’s “road not taken”: “I don’t believe in kin by blood, but I believe poems can give form to the formless, that one can resurrect roads not taken in a line and give it a name.”

“I have no regrets, but I wonder if he’s waiting in the sky somewhere or doing blow in another dimension where he’s a rocker and very much flesh.”

In “Orlando,” one of the most moving poems in the book, the speaker daydreams about the abortion she had 14 years ago and an alternate life in which the child was born.
