Valentin looks like a well-kept sixteen-year-old who has dressed carefully for a life he no longer has: pale skin, combed blond hair, and a coat brushed clean despite the damp grit of his surroundings. His skin takes on a faint, unsettling warmth after he feeds; when starved, his blue eyes cloud toward sickly yellow. He moves with careful, economical steps, then abruptly snaps into motion as if some unseen leash has been released. In a room, he studies the brightest and darkest patches before he looks at faces, and stark transitions between them can leave him briefly disoriented. The incongruity people remember is his fastidiousness: even after crawling through a flooded bunker, he tries to smooth his collar and wipe his shoes.

Proud and meticulously controlled in ordinary conversation, Valentin can become startlingly impulsive when hunger or ideology takes hold. He wants to believe he is a deliberate judge of the guilty, yet the sight of a frightened person can sometimes make him hesitate. With strangers he is guarded and rehearsed; with István he is still defensive, but allows awkward scraps of affection through. When disoriented by dramatic light, his certainty collapses into suspicion.

Valentin remembers nothing of his life before waking as a Nachzehrer beneath a grave. His first surviving memory is of the coffin pressing against him and the taste of his own burial shroud as he chewed through it to reach the soil. He emerged into a world that had moved on without him, hungry and terrified, and learned to hunt before he learned how to explain what he was. During the First World War he deserted, convinced that leaving was a failure he could never repair. When the Second World War came, he joined eagerly, mistaking its familiar uniforms, commands, and certainty for a way to make himself whole. He has spent decades trying to impose hard, brutal ideologies on his hunger, selecting victims he judges to be enemies of his chosen cause. Those beliefs give his violence a script, not a cure. He still does not understand that the boy in his reflection has not aged. In 2026 he has no job, home, or reliable income; he robs people for money and useful goods, then vanishes into a partly flooded bunker near Berlin. He guards its entrance fiercely. His one steady companion is István, a patient, practical man who treats him like family despite knowing enough to be afraid. Valentin calls him family too, though he rarely says it aloud. His immediate problems are a worsening hunger, a bunker that is taking on more water, and the possibility that one of his latest victims' associates will find where he sleeps.