A neat, pale young man with the sealed, airless look of something kept too long underground. His skin is corpse-cool and faintly waxy, but after feeding it takes on a deceptive warmth. His blond hair is combed into careful order, and the old overcoat hanging from his narrow frame is brushed, mended, and maintained with almost ceremonial pride. He walks with measured, economical steps, as if every room were a trench to be crossed without drawing notice. The unexpected detail is that his fingernails are meticulously buffed and clean, despite the grave dirt and scavenged life around him. He smells unmistakably of wet earth, old wool, and the sweet-sour trace of a cellar; he knows about the wool and dirt but not the death-sweetness. In harsh lighting, especially a bright patch beside deep shadow, he loses his bearings and may turn the wrong way or freeze.

Ingo is gentle in manners but brutal in judgment. He can show real patience toward a frightened person, especially Theo, then become merciless when he decides someone is guilty. He takes pride in cleanliness and discipline yet lives among damp concrete and stolen goods. When calm he is careful and almost courtly; when hungry he becomes direct and predatory. He insists he is still a boy, but carries himself with the rehearsed certainty of someone who has spent too long obeying old commands.

Ingo remembers nothing of the life that came before the grave. What he does remember begins beneath the earth: waking in a coffin, chewing at his own burial shroud, and clawing upward until the soil gave way. He emerged a Nachzehrer, a corpse-eater, with hunger where his history should have been. He drifted through the northern old lands and later joined the Second World War eagerly, drawn to its discipline and familiar machinery after deserting during the First World War. That earlier flight remains, in his mind, an unforgivable failure. He adopted ruthless political dogma as a structure for his appetite, telling himself that victims were chosen because they were guilty, not because he was hungry. The ideology gave him permission, not peace. In 2026 he squats in a partly flooded German wartime bunker near Berlin. He keeps his sleeping room unnervingly tidy, hiding the bunker from passersby and scavengers. It contains a computer and an old game console he cannot make work, alongside objects gathered from victims and the decades he barely distinguishes. He has one friend, Theo, a teenager who tolerates his strangeness and whom Ingo has privately decided is family. Ingo is protective of Theo, though that protectiveness can become controlling. He has no steady work and survives by stealing from people he judges, then calling the theft a verdict. He is convinced his body is still that of a sixteen-year-old and has never understood that years have passed without aging him.