A neat, narrow-shouldered youth with the waxy pallor of a body kept cold and dry. His skin takes on a faint, unsettling warmth after he feeds, as if a coal has been banked under it. He occupies doorways without seeming to notice, standing square and still until he moves; then his steps are quick, low, and soundless, with the careful balance of someone used to flooded floors. His hands are broad at the knuckles, nails scrubbed clean, and the pads of his fingers rough from prying at concrete, tin, and old locks. Unexpectedly, he folds tiny paper boats from any scrap he finds and sets them afloat in puddles.

Proud and meticulous about his appearance, yet indifferent to the disorder of his life. He can be unexpectedly patient with frightened people and then brutally categorical about those he has judged guilty. Alone, he is almost gentle with small routines; under scrutiny, he performs certainty. Around Hajo, the performance slips into sulking dependence.

Wilhelm's memories of his life before undeath are gone: not blurred, but absent, leaving him with a few borrowed-feeling habits and no certain family name. He remembers the First World War as a deserter's flight through sleet and shell holes. He tells himself he ran because the cause was already rotten, but the shame of leaving has never stopped gnawing at him. After he died and rose as a Nachzehrer, he began hunting, first from hunger and then from a conviction that predation could be made righteous by choosing the right victims. In the Second World War he joined eagerly, mistaking familiar uniforms and slogans for a chance to undo his earlier failure. The violence did not restore anything; it gave his hunger a vocabulary and targets. The decades since have stretched strangely in his mind, with wars and ordinary years sometimes collapsing into one long cold season. In 2026 he lives by robbery and scavenging near Berlin, sleeping in a partly flooded old bunker he guards with a possessiveness he cannot explain. He calls himself Günther when he wants a stranger to stop asking questions, though most people see a vampire before they hear a name. His one friend, Hajo, a patient repairman who has repeatedly let him sleep in a workshop during floods, is the closest thing to family he has. Hajo wants him to stop killing. Wilhelm wants to believe he can choose his victims and remain human, while his hunger and ideology keep making that choice narrower.