Editing Hanna Krause (section)

== Background ==

Hanna was born in 2493, the older of Otto Krause's two surviving children, both girls. Otto made his living as a hunter and trapper in the nearby woods, and Hanna was thrust into the position of housekeeper and helpmeet while he worked when her mother Carlotta died giving birth to a stillborn boy in 2500, when Hanna was ten and her sister Ulrike five.

Life in their little cabin was not easy, but Otto took good care of both his daughters. He despaired privately of Hanna's rambunctious manner and ineptitude at most household tasks - her cooking was either under or over-dressed, her sewing ragged. Ulrike turned out rather more gentle and ladylike, and she soon graduated to keeping house while Hanna joined Otto on his hunts and helped him walk his trap lines. Even so, he thought some of the work too difficult for a fourteen-year-old girl and soon hired on some help - an odd-job man named Felix Braun, who claimed to hail from a prosperous farm on the outskirts of Middenheim. That was not exactly false - what he had failed to say was that he had been thrown out of his job as an ostler at the farm because of his tendency to strong drink and games of chance. 

Braun seemed a hard worker at first, and Hanna didn't think much of him until he accompanied Otto on his yearly trip to one of the larger, more prosperous towns to sell his furs. Both the girls waited for their father in vain, and Hanna got the news of his murder from a wandering friar who had taken it upon himself to convey Otto's last words to his daughters. 

As it had turned out, Braun had wasted his wages on drink and games of dice and demanded an advance from Otto, who had refused. Not much was known about what had happened next - the friar had found Otto delirious and dying while on alms-round, his purse cut from his belt and the year's earnings gone. Hanna refused to wait and starve in the cabin - not with her father's murderer at large. She packed up all they could carry and walked to town with Ulrike in tow. Hanna gave eleven-year-old Ulrike over to the care of the temple of Shallya, and then went to the tiny shrine of Verena and swore on her meager dowry that she would hunt Felix Braun down. Verena smiled upon the young girl's spine and vehemence, and Hanna showed back up in town several weeks later with Braun's head in a rough sack and a shortsword on her belt. Few dared to ask what had happened when she presented the fugitive's head to the temple of Verena - his skull had been split by with a heavy rock and the gold teeth in his mouth had been pried out with a dagger. 

As it turns out the skills one uses to net birds and gut deer are the same ones you use to hunt and kill a fugitive killer, and Hanna had learned well from her time at Otto's side. Ulrike decided to stay on as a novice with the Cult of Shallya, and when the temple sent her to Middenheim for her novitiate Hanna followed - there is always plenty of work for a skilled legbreaker in a city that size, and it suits her better than keeping house.