Anja is narrow-shouldered and long-limbed, with skin like old ivory warmed by a faint gray cast. Her face is composed of precise, slightly severe lines, and her dark hair is pinned so tightly that not a strand moves when she turns. She walks without heel-click or cloth rustle, as if each step has been carefully removed from the world. Within a minute of meeting her, people notice her breathing: she takes shallow, measured breaths, then holds them whenever someone nearby lies. When rattled, the pauses stretch too long and her next breath comes with a papery rasp. Her unexpected detail is a tiny, careful whistle through her teeth when she is mending something, a homely habit at odds with her eerie stillness.

Anja combines practical tenderness with unnerving detachment. In a crisis, she becomes brisk and almost comforting, giving clear instructions and remembering everyone's needs. In quiet company, she can be wry and unexpectedly domestic. When someone asks her to promise that all will be well, she turns remote and exact, because she will not comfort people with a lie. She loves Nils deeply but resents being expected to prove that love in ways the living understand.

Anja was born in a German-speaking village where people left bread outside for the dead and never spoke a name twice after sunset. As a young woman, she followed a funeral procession into a snow-choked wood and found the Slaugh waiting among the bare trees. She joined them, not through a curse but by choice, after they offered her a place among those who witness the passage of the dying. That choice changed her: she no longer dreams in human time, and the living sometimes seem to her like guests who have stayed past dawn. She met Nils Kauffman in the Dreaming, where he was known as Burke von Bracken. He treated her as a person rather than a warning, and she chose him as her husband. She gave him the black wool coat he maintains with almost ceremonial care. They have spent years apart and together in a way that human neighbors find difficult to understand. Anja currently keeps a modest room near Kettik Ward, a place named on an old military survey as K-7 after a drainage cut was cleared through the marsh. She visits the waking world to check on Nils and to find out why the dead have begun arriving at the wood's edge before their deaths. She suspects someone is disturbing the old passage, but has not told Nils how close the disturbance has come to his own name.