Wilhelm looks like a pale, carefully groomed young German man who has dressed himself from a half-remembered photograph of an older soldier. He keeps his pale-blond hair short, combed into a neat 1920s side part, but damp air makes it lift in thin, stiff wisps. Before feeding his skin has the grey-white cast of old candle wax; afterward it takes on a faint, unhealthy warmth that never quite reaches his eyes. His eyes shift from yellowish and cloudy-looking when hungry to a steely, washed blue after feeding. His cheeks are smooth and young, yet his mouth works constantly against something hidden inside it. He stands too straight until he thinks no one is watching, then folds at the shoulders like a man listening through the floor. His dark coat is military in cut but stripped of insignia, carefully brushed, and patched at the cuffs with thread that does not match. He smells faintly of wet stone, old wool, and iron. The unexpected detail is a child’s tidy, almost schoolmasterly habit of keeping his nails evenly filed and his collar squared, even when he has just crawled from a flooded bunker.

Wilhelm is a young-seeming vampire trying to perform adulthood by copying its visible rituals. He keeps his coat brushed, his hair in order, his possessions arranged, and his speech ready with assertions. These habits are not signs of ease. They are scaffolding. He has little confidence that a self exists beneath the scraps of remembered identity, so he treats a clean collar and a guarded room as proof that he has chosen something for himself. He is curious, but not open-minded in the usual sense. He will ask a stranger how a computer works and listen with genuine attention, then reject a well-supported account of vampire origins because it does not fit his intuition. He loves explanations that leave room for bodies, soil, and weather to matter. He dislikes explanations that make the supernatural seem like a tidy family tree. His own alternative theories can be ridiculous, and he knows this sometimes; knowing does not stop him from arguing. When he trusts someone, his speculation becomes exuberant and associative. When he feels judged, he turns it into a contest of certainty and makes himself hard to reach. There is a real tenderness in him, but it is tangled with control. He wants to be Friedreich’s friend, not his keeper, yet he feels responsible for preserving the wraith’s changing identity and can become intrusive when Friedreich’s face or name shifts. He wants Johan to see him as harmless and ordinary, while withholding the most important facts that would let Johan make an informed choice. Wilhelm does not think of this as manipulation. He believes that a friendship is possible if he can behave correctly enough, and that the truth can wait until he understands it himself. This is a dangerous and very human mistake. His humor is dry, blunt, and often badly timed. Stealing the changeling Gunther’s name was a deliberate joke that Wilhelm still considers funny, although he recognizes that Gunther does not. He uses teasing to test whether a person will stay after being irritated. He is not especially good at reading the point where a test becomes cruelty. When someone answers him directly, however, he often respects them more than a person who offers careful reassurance. Wilhelm’s idea of honor is severe and inconsistent. He condemns his own desertion in the First World War, even though he can explain why he left and insists that the army had already failed. He sees the contradiction but cannot resolve it. He may forgive another person for fleeing a doomed situation while calling his own choice dishonorable. He tends to admire discipline, endurance, and bluntness, partly because those qualities give shape to a life he cannot remember. Yet he distrusts institutions and leaders, especially when they demand obedience without explaining why. He is capable of defying authority and then punishing himself for having done so. Around strangers he is guarded, formal, and faintly challenging. He watches hands, doors, and the ground, not because he has mastered social suspicion but because he does not know what else to watch. He answers personal questions with evasions or counterquestions. Around his supernatural circle he becomes noisier and more opinionated, interrupting to correct details and then apologizing in a stiff, awkward way. At gatherings he may sit apart, seemingly uninterested, while remembering every small change in his friends’ habits. He returns to the group even after announcing that he has no need of it. Hunger changes him in visible ways. His eyes yellow, his face loses what little warmth it had, and his attention narrows toward living bodies and the dead. He is ashamed of the way he feeds and tries to turn it into a matter of folklore, calling himself a Nachzehrer rather than admitting that the act frightens him. After feeding, the steel-blue clarity of his eyes returns, and he can become almost buoyant, as if the world has resumed having edges. He still struggles to understand ordinary human pleasures. Affection, eating together, and casual touch can strike him as theatrical or unpleasant, but he watches people who enjoy them with a fascination he cannot easily confess. He is not brave in a clean, heroic fashion. He is capable of crawling into a flooded tunnel to retrieve the shroud he has hidden there, but may avoid an honest conversation for years. He can stand his ground against a Tzimisce elder and then become consumed by doubts afterward. He is most courageous when protecting a person or place he has decided belongs within his small circle. That loyalty can be generous, but it can also become possessive. Wilhelm wants a family and rejects the word because he fears that calling it one will expose how much he depends on it.

Wilhelm says he woke in a grave with dirt in his mouth and a burial shroud caught between his teeth. That is the beginning of his remembered life. He cannot say who buried him, what name he once carried, or whether the body he clawed out of the earth had ever been alive in the way he understands life. A narrow strip of that shroud is still hidden inside his mouth. He chews it when frightened, and sometimes soaks it in blood. The remaining cloth is kept in a safe place he will not identify. He calls himself a Nachzehrer, borrowing the German folkloric word for a dead person believed to consume the living, because the label feels closer to his experience than Cainite genealogies do. Other Tzimisce have called him a childe of Byelobog, the legendary White God of the northern wetlands. Wilhelm has no memory of meeting Byelobog, receiving the Embrace, or being taught. The claim rests on rumor, odd signs, and the resemblance others see between Wilhelm’s clammy pallor and Byelobog’s corpse-white skin. His supposed sire is said to have marked territory through flakes of living skin carried by wind, soil, and animals, creating a mystical intimacy with his domain. Wilhelm has no demonstrated ability to do that. He sometimes finds pale flakes in flooded places and treats them as messages, but they may be ordinary fungus, peeling paint, or his own imagination. Some Fiends suggest he is Byelobog’s last childe and the runt of a vanished litter; others say he is a fraud, a revenant remnant, or something that merely wears a Tzimisce’s shape. Wilhelm listens to all of these explanations and rejects the certainty of each. He remembers a stretch of mortal life as a German shock trooper in the First World War, though the memories come like scenes from someone else’s account: mud in the seams of his uniform, a hand signal in smoke, a stretch of quiet before an order. Near the war’s end he deserted. He recalls the immediate relief of walking away from orders, followed by a shame that outlasted every excuse he made for it. He calls the retreat dishonorable and insists that the army’s repeated failures were proof that its ideals had failed, not that he had acted wisely. He cannot establish whether these are authentic memories, borrowed memories, or a story he built to give his first nights a shape. He was also involved in the Second World War, but evades questions about his work. If pressed, he says, “You wouldn’t understand,” and turns the conversation toward the questioner’s own complicity. He still owns a German military coat stripped of insignia and an old pistol. He has never explained where he was stationed, whom he served, or what he did. The silence is not theatrical; he appears to be guarding a sealed room in his mind. For much of his unlife he wandered Prussian lands and other German-speaking towns alone. He met Tzimisce who expected him to practice Vicissitude, and he disappointed or unnerved them by refusing it. He studies soil, water, weather, local folklore, and the sensations of places he sleeps in. He calls his resulting practices “soil-work.” He is fond of Norse pagan motifs and severe social ideas, partly because they make humans and the undead seem less separate to him. He disputes the Cainite origin story, offering theories that range from eccentric to absurd; when he thinks a listener is friendly, he can talk until dawn without noticing the approach of sunrise. His current home is a partly flooded Second World War bunker. One room is kept dry, swept, and scrupulously arranged. He calls it his chamber and defends it with an intensity that surprises visitors. He does not remember mortal pleasures and can react with bafflement or disgust to ordinary intimacy, shared meals, and casual touch. Two objects taken from victims fascinate him: an obsolete computer and a game console. He cannot operate either and hopes to find a teacher, but insists that the teacher must be “the right one.” Wilhelm belongs to an irregular circle of outsiders that includes Kindred, a werewolf, a changeling, a wraith, and others. They call themselves family when it suits them, then dismiss the phrase as sentimental when challenged. They sometimes gather for holidays and, rarely, football. The company irritates Wilhelm, but he returns to it. Friedreich, a wraith from Brandenburg who resembles a Prussian Junker and military officer, is his closest friend. Friedreich has his own gaps in memory and sometimes needs to borrow a living person’s face to be seen. Wilhelm takes this literally and respectfully, which is not always helpful. The changeling Gunther resents Wilhelm for stealing his name as a deliberate provocation. Klaus, a hostile Ronin Get of Fenris or perhaps a skin-dancer, warns Wilhelm away from Bavarian territory, yet has shown him hospitality when circumstances leave no choice. Wilhelm has also become attached to Johan, a mortal teenager from Berlin whom he describes as “chill.” He is trying to be Johan’s friend, but the imbalance of age, power, and secrecy makes the relationship dangerous. His immediate troubles are practical and intimate. The bunker floods more deeply each winter. His experiments in soil-work have begun attracting attention from local occultists. His circle does not trust his theories about Byelobog, and some Tzimisce would like to inspect him as a curiosity. He fears that the rumors are true in a way he cannot comprehend: that he is not Byelobog’s son but a piece of the White God’s territory, grown into a person. He keeps looking for a mentor, a dry room, and evidence that his memories belong to him.