Yann is a well-kept boy-shaped corpse of average height for a German man, with the wrong stillness of someone who has forgotten how the living occupy a room. His pale skin has the waxy, faintly damp look of a body kept cold; after feeding, a brief pink warmth rises under it and makes him look almost healthy. Straight blond hair is combed with stubborn care, but its ends kink where they have dried against bunker humidity. His blue eyes cloud to a jaundiced yellow when hunger worsens. When he eats, his jaw works with a slow, grinding patience, and his broad incisors show even when he is not smiling. His hands are blunt-nailed and permanently roughened from digging, scavenging, and hauling debris; he keeps them scrubbed anyway. He moves with economical, marching precision until hard light cuts across a dark space, when he freezes or turns the wrong way as if the room has shifted.

Yann is fastidious about his appearance but indifferent to the comfort of people he has decided are beneath consideration. He can be patient and almost tender with Toma, then coldly procedural with a stranger. When calm, he watches and asks practical questions; when ashamed, he becomes rigid and recites ideological judgments; when hungry, the mask thins and his attention fixes on movement, scent, and warmth. He takes pride in being a beast while privately longing for proof that he can still choose.

Yann remembers nothing reliable from before he rose as a Nachzehrer. His first clear memories are of waking among the dead in the cold north, hungry enough to eat what lay beside him. He learned to hunt, then learned to tell himself that hunting was a judgment rather than a need. During the First World War he deserted, fleeing a situation he cannot now reconstruct. He carried the shame of that failure into the Second World War, where he eagerly joined up again, drawn to its routines and familiar language of obedience. He has since tried to bury the worst of that history beneath a harsh ideology that divides people into the worthy and the condemned. It gives his hunger a story, but not peace. He lives near Berlin in a partly flooded old bunker and steals money, food, and useful objects from people he preys upon. In 2026 he has no job, stable home, or convincing plan for living among the breathing. His one enduring friend is Toma, a patient repairman who knows enough to suspect what Yann is and continues to treat him as family. Yann hides the bunker from Toma as fiercely as he hides it from strangers, convinced that discovery would end their relationship. He keeps a piece of his burial shroud to chew when hunger and old memories become difficult to separate.