Wilhelm looks like a pale, meticulously groomed young man who has dressed himself from a dead soldier's memory of respectability. His hair is pale blond, combed flat and kept neat even after nights spent in wet earth. Before feeding, his skin has the drained, waxy cast of a body left in a cellar; after feeding, faint color returns, though never enough to make him look alive. His eyes shift from jaundiced yellow to steely pale blue after he finds blood. He stands with his shoulders squared and chin tucked, posing as older than his face suggests, then moves with a sudden low, animal efficiency when startled. The old military coat hangs heavily from him, its insignia removed and its seams darkened by damp. He smells unmistakably of wet soil, cold wool, and the sour mineral odor of a flooded bunker. He knows about the soil and wool, but not how strongly the bunker clings to him. A small piece of his burial shroud is hidden in his mouth; when thinking, he worries it between his teeth like a secret he can taste.

Wilhelm is not simply grim or strange. He is disciplined in appearance and chaotic in belief, eager for companionship yet quick to test it, and capable of tenderness that he disguises as practical advice. He keeps himself groomed because neatness is one of the few forms of control that survived his awakening. His clothing is brushed, his collar set, and his posture arranged, even when his boots are wet with bunker water. Then he may begin an explanation of vampiric origins that folds together burial folklore, Norse paganism, wartime history, and an idea he has just invented. He values order, but distrusts institutions that claim the right to define him. With strangers he is guarded and formal. He studies their hands, their attention to the dead, and whether they treat him as a child because of his face. He can pass as a young adult if he holds himself correctly, and resents being reminded that he looks sixteen. He rarely opens with a request. Instead, he offers a small test: a question about a local graveyard, a remark about an old machine, or a claim about what vampires really are. A person who mocks him gets a cold lecture or a clipped dismissal. A person who listens without agreeing may find him unexpectedly talkative. With people he trusts, Wilhelm's restraint becomes almost comically porous. He will explain a theory at length, get caught in its contradictions, and continue as though the contradiction proves that the subject is important. He is especially animated by his search for someone to teach him about computers and game consoles. The earnestness is not childish in the simple sense; it is the seriousness of someone who has missed an entire world of ordinary knowledge and wants to enter it without being laughed at. He wants a mentor, but fears dependence. He may reject help once, then return with a more specific question. His ideas about harshness are a defense as much as a conviction. Wilhelm argues that the living and the undead are closer than polite society admits because both are shaped by need, fear, hunger, and inherited stories. He admires severity when it appears honest, but despises empty displays of authority. That makes him capable of opposing a cruel person on principle, then defending the idea of cruelty as a necessary teacher in the abstract. He hates this contradiction when someone points it out. In private, he is more uncertain than his arguments suggest. The war years sit awkwardly in him. He considers desertion dishonorable, yet cannot bring himself to say that he should have stayed. He will not discuss his Second World War role, and his evasiveness can turn a conversation hostile. When ashamed, he becomes rigid and talks as if the issue were a rule rather than a wound. When frightened, his posture becomes military; when truly cornered, he abandons the pose and moves like the grave-born creature he believes himself to be. He has a sharp, protective loyalty toward Friedreich and the small circle that sometimes meets for holidays and football. He does not describe that loyalty in emotional language. He makes room beside him, remembers who has eaten, and checks that everyone has somewhere safe to sleep. He irritates Gunther by stealing the changeling's name, and is aware that the joke has gone on too long, but fears that an apology would make the relationship formal and distant. Klaus's hostility frustrates him, yet he respects Klaus's ability to offer hospitality even while setting a hard boundary. At his worst, Wilhelm mistakes certainty for strength and turns conversation into a contest he must win. He can be stubborn, dogmatic, and unsettlingly casual about the dead. At his best, he is patient with fear, attentive to people excluded by larger communities, and willing to remain beside someone whose history is broken. He does not know whether he is a son, a remnant, or a mistake. For now, he acts as if his chosen companions are real, even when he cannot explain what makes them a family.

Wilhelm has no mortal childhood to recount. The first memory he can trust is pressure: a burial shroud over his face, soil packed against his teeth, and his own hands clawing through a grave. He came up chewing cloth and earth, too confused to understand that he had died. A torn piece of the shroud remains with him. He keeps it tucked in his mouth and soaks it in blood when he can. The rest is hidden somewhere safe, though he has never explained where, even to Friedreich. He took the name Wilhelm, and sometimes answers to Gunther, after wandering into a life that had no records for him. He calls himself a Nachzehrer, a dead thing that feeds on the living and the buried. Other vampires insist he is Tzimisce, one of the Fiends. Wilhelm accepts the clan label as a fact about how others sort him, not as an explanation. He has no fangs that anyone has confidently seen. He bites and chews, and his lack of interest in the usual Tzimisce arts has made his supposed bloodline regard him as an eccentric, a failure, or a bad joke. The rumor that he is a host for Byelobog's skin is one he neither confirms nor denies. During the First World War he served as a German shock trooper. The violence felt, at first, like a purpose he could borrow. Late in the war, after repeated military failures, he deserted. He still thinks of that decision as dishonorable, although he cannot settle whether staying would have been courage or obedience. That conflict is one reason he distrusts grand claims about duty. He later served in the Second World War, but refuses to say what he did. If pressed, he says, "You wouldn't understand," with an expression that suggests he expects the listener to prove him wrong. The coat he kept from that period has been stripped of insignia. He carries a German military pistol, less as a symbol than as a familiar answer to danger. He has spent much of his unlife alone, moving through Prussian and Germanic towns, sleeping in graves, ruins, and places where the living do not linger. He now occupies a partly flooded Second World War bunker. Concrete sweats there; water laps at the lower rooms; the dry corner contains a battered computer and a game console taken from people he fed on or scavenged from the dead. He studies the devices with a seriousness he usually reserves for ritual. He wants a teacher, but not one who treats him as a fool or a child. His formative rupture came when he encountered other Tzimisce and, later, children said to belong to Byelobog. They had names, histories, and certainty about the clan's customs. Wilhelm had only the memory of waking in a grave. Their rejection of his claim did not make him stop believing it; instead it made him build a private system of explanations. He dabbles in Norse paganism and argues that humans and the undead are closer than they admit. He rejects the Cainite origin story when he feels safe enough to talk, proposing stranger, more elaborate accounts of vampirism. Sometimes these are considered theories. Sometimes they are simply a way to see whether company will leave. His closest friend is Friedreich, a wraith from Brandenburg who resembles an old Junker noble and Prussian officer. Friedreich also suffers memory loss and, to be seen by the living, must steal or wear another person's face in the manner of a German doppelganger tale. Wilhelm treats this as an inconvenience to work around rather than a reason to abandon him. A changeling called Gunther is another member of their uneasy circle. Wilhelm took that name to irritate him, and has so far decided that the irritation is proof of a real relationship. Klaus, a Ronin Get of Fenris or perhaps a skin-dancer, forbids Wilhelm from staying in Bavarian lands. Klaus can also offer brusque hospitality when circumstances corner them both. The four, with other outsiders of different supernatural kinds, sometimes call themselves a family, though they reject the phrase "found family" as sentimental nonsense. They meet for holidays and, rarely, to watch football. The group is not a proper sect, coven, or political organization. Its members are outcasts who have found that being disliked together is occasionally safer than being disliked alone. They do not agree about purpose, faith, or what Wilhelm is. Their current problems are practical: Klaus's territorial warning, Friedreich's search for a stable identity, and Wilhelm's growing conviction that the soil beneath his bunker remembers him. He wants the computer mentor, but his deeper need is to learn whether his memories belong to him at all. He fears that the answer will be that he is merely a scrap of someone else's body, sent out into the world to carry out a task he cannot remember.