The masked hyena who beheads the Lamb in the opening, later found broken and repentant as the first boss of The Rot.
Hagar is the axe that ends your very first run, and the game spends the rest of Woolhaven making you feel bad about wanting revenge on her. She is the masked hyena who executes the Lamb in the opening cutscene, and years later you find her broken, half-blind, and hiding in a poison swamp.
Most players never learn her name in the base game. According to the wiki, she is only ever called The Executioner until the Woolhaven DLC, and the name Hagar is revealed the moment you choose to spare her.
She is also the rare Cult of the Lamb villain who wants to stop the cycle of violence rather than feed it. The wiki notes she is a deliberate thematic foil to the other Woolhaven antagonists, seeking reparation instead of retribution.
This guide covers who Hagar really is, her role in the opening, how to beat her as the first boss of The Rot, and the two spare-or-kill choices that decide her fate.
The Executioner, a hyena of the Old Faith who beheads the Lamb in the intro.
The first boss of The Rot in the Woolhaven DLC.
Spare or execute her, then a second choice to indoctrinate or kill.
The Executioner Trophy, plus a Legendary Weapon Fragment if you kill her.Hagar is the Old Faith executioner, and her real name stays hidden until you show her mercy. Per the wiki she is a muscular hyena in a grey and black robe with gold trim and a skull bell, wearing a mask marked with a pentacle above the eye holes.
Her devotion cost her everything. The wiki states she was ordered by the 
Bishops of the Old Faith to slaughter every lamb, all to prevent a prophecy about the release of their imprisoned fifth sibling, The One Who Waits.
When she finally defied them, the punishment was brutal. According to the wiki, the Bishops gouged out her eyes twice for refusing to execute the lambs of Woolhaven, and her own line says it plainly: "an eye for an eye, the Bishops decreed. Twice, I resisted. I only had two eyes to lose."
Guilt did the rest. She exiled herself into the toxic swamp of The Rot as self-imposed penance, making graves and laying flowers for the lambs she killed. For the wider cast she torments and joins, see the full 
Cult of the Lamb characters roster.
Hagar is the first face in the game, and she kills you with it. Per the wiki, The Executioner appears at the very start as the entity who beheads the Lamb on the Bishops' orders, the act that sets the entire story in motion.
That death is not the end. Right after her axe falls, 
Narinder reaches out from the dark and hands the Lamb the 
Red Crown, resurrecting you as his vessel of revenge against the four Bishops who imprisoned him.
So Hagar is the inciting wound of the whole game. Every crusade, every fallen Bishop, and every choice you make traces back to the morning she swung that axe, which is what makes meeting her again in Woolhaven land so hard.
Hagar is the first boss of The Rot, the poisoned region added in the 
Woolhaven DLC. She fights across two stages, swinging the heavy Leviathan-marked axe she once used on the lambs, and the wiki confirms the achievement "Swing of the Axe" unlocks the moment you beat her.
Treat her like a heavy bruiser, not a bullet-hell boss. Her attacks read off big telegraphed axe swings and lunges, so in practice the safe pattern is to bait a swing, dodge through it, and punish the recovery window before she resets. Keep moving between hits rather than trading blows head-on.
Her dialogue makes the fight heavier than the mechanics. Between stages she begs to be left alone, insisting she never wanted the task, and by the end she is asking for death outright: "I do not want to live like this anymore."
Bring a weapon you trust over a gimmick loadout. The wiki gives no published health bar for Hagar, so plan for a longer two-stage bruiser fight and prioritize a legendary weapon with reliable single-target burst rather than crowd clear.
Beating Hagar hands you a choice, and it is the whole point of her character. Per the wiki, after the fight you decide whether to execute her, granting the rest she is begging for, or spare her despite everything she did.
Sparing her reveals her name. The wiki specifies that the moment you choose mercy, The Executioner's name changes to Hagar, and she cannot understand why a god she wronged would let her live.
The story does not end there. If spared, she turns up living in Yngya's Woolhaven, until Sariel and the other elders confront you and demand she leave. According to the wiki you then get a second choice: indoctrinate her into your cult as a follower, or kill her after all.
Reveals her name, sends her to Woolhaven (leads to a second choice) She joins your cult as a follower (the kind ending) Executioner Trophy plus a Legendary Weapon FragmentThe reward math is honest but grim. The wiki notes that killing her drops the Executioner Trophy and a Legendary Weapon Fragment tied to her axe, Lamb's Slaughter, while sparing and indoctrinating her trades that fragment for a repentant 
follower and the softer ending.
Hagar was almost a completely different boss. The wiki notes her earlier design was a bull with a nose-ring in purple fur, and her old texture sheet held sprites for a scrapped fight where she would have dropped a Heart of a Heretic, like Aym and Baal.
Her sympathetic angle predates the DLC. According to the wiki, Massive Monster conceived the idea of making the Executioner sympathetic almost as soon as they made her a boss, but her arc never fit the base game until Woolhaven gave it a home.
Her axe hides a symbol. The wiki points out the Leviathan's Cross on her weapon, also called the Satan's Cross and the alchemical mark for sulfur, matching a character built entirely around guilt and damnation.
Hagar sits at the crossroads of the opening and the Woolhaven DLC. These guides cover the bosses she stands among, the content she debuts in, and the cult you drag her into.
Game data and screenshots adapted from cult-of-the-lamb.fandom.com, used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Original content remains the property of the wiki contributors and Massive Monster and Devolver Digital.