Hunt: Showdown 1896 - Violent Balance

About the add-on

Before she transformed, she was just another faceless Hunter in plain clothes. Exhausted. Afraid. A ghost of her former self. So many demons thrived here, wriggling through soil and structures and the bodies of both living and dead. Too many times she witnessed others as they were torn apart by monsters or killed by each other, riddled with bullets or blown apart and strung over barbed wire in dripping, meaty clumps. It filled her eyes and her heart with darkness, until no more darkness could fit. She needed somewhere else to put it. Transformation came with the mask. Just as she’d learned as a child in her homeland, she made it with wood from the same tree, one that stood beautifully out from the others on the eastern end of Windy Run. Once it was finished, she dutifully presented the mask to the tree in reverence before sliding it over her face. Gone were the feelings of exhaustion and fear. The mask depicted the demon queen Rangda from her mother’s stories. When she wore it, she too felt capable of leading armies of evil according to her desire. Her nightmares were the same, but now, instead of making her wake up screaming in cold sweat, they comforted her, like a blood-warm bath that only wanted to cradle her every wicked idea. The answer had been in her heart all along, seeded there by the stories from her upbringing. She understood now that it never should have been a matter of good versus evil in this Incursion. The secret was in the knowledge that good would never win—that neither side would. For the dance between good and evil was eternal, and was always meant to be. She carved a second mask—one of good—and wore it on her back as proof of her commitment to balance. But it was the demon queen’s mask that she would wear on her face. For on these hunting grounds, it was evil that reigned, made evident in the Corruption’s every twisted creation and putrefied wound. To Rangda, such a place was nothing short of paradise.