Simeon looks like a well-kept boy who has stepped out of a photograph and forgotten to leave it behind. His skin is pale and dry as old paper when starved, warming to a faint, unsettling pink after feeding. His blond hair is cut bluntly around his ears, combed with meticulous care, and already falling into place again when disturbed. He stands at an average height for a German boy of his apparent age, lean under his heavy coat. He moves with the careful, economical steps of someone crossing a room full of sleeping people, then can lunge with the abrupt force of a dropped trapdoor. His jaw works sideways before he bites, as if testing the hinge; his small, crowded teeth look ordinary until he opens his mouth too wide. His breathing is shallow and irregular, with a dry click at the end of each inhalation. A sudden change from bright light to shadow makes him stop mid-motion, blinking and turning his head as though the room has been rearranged. The incongruity of his spotless cuffs, schoolboy face, and ancient military coat is hard to forget.

Simeon is proud of his grooming and his ability to endure, but privately ashamed of his first desertion. He craves the certainty of strict beliefs and resents anyone who mistakes certainty for courage. With strangers he is guarded and severe; with Jari he is awkwardly solicitous, offering practical help instead of affection. After feeding he can seem almost warm and sociable, then recoil from that warmth as if it were evidence against him.

Simeon remembers no childhood, family, or name from before the grave. His first clear memory is waking underground, chewing at himself in panic and hunger before he clawed his way through the earth. The burial shroud remained with him; he keeps it folded away and has cut off a strip to chew when he is frightened. He wandered through the wars in the old lands, first deserting during the First World War and carrying that flight as a private disgrace. When the Second World War began, he joined eagerly, drawn to its uniforms, orders, and brutal certainty. He kept his old overcoat but removed every insignia. Years of solitude blurred his memories into scraps, and he now calls himself Günther when a name is required, though few people see past the vampire. In 2026 he shelters in a partly flooded German wartime bunker near Berlin. He keeps his sleeping room unnervingly neat and the rest of the bunker secret, surviving by robbing people he judges guilty under his harsh personal doctrine. His only real friend is Jari, a tolerant teenager who treats him as family and does not ask him to pretend to be human. Simeon wants a way out of the demon inside him, yet repeatedly chooses the familiar comfort of violence and ideology over the uncertainty of change.