Veinwalker
The city’s not made of stone and metal. It’s made of rhythm. Of flow. You step wrong and it digests you. Step right—and you’re everywhere at once.
Career
Career Progression
There are three known stages to a Veinwalker’s path:
- Ghostling – An apprentice trained in drift-mapping and taught to walk the "cool channels" (low-risk, partially decayed conduits).
- Conduit – A fully capable Veinwalker who can cross sectors through infrastructure and execute infiltration or courier tasks.
- Flesh Signal – A living myth. They’re said to move through magnetic fields alone, hear the thoughts of machinery, or haunt entire buildings.
There is no clear endpoint. You ascend, or vanish.
Alternative Names
Drift Ghosts (colloquial) Wallhounds (derogatory, used by Town Watch or Engineers) Echoes (poetic, used in Scribe cant) Signalbloods (used among the Awakened underground)
Type
Illicit
Demand
Rare, but rising. As Defiance fractures into turf wars, factional enclaves, and data-locked vaults, the need for people who can bypass all walls has never been higher.
Legality
Technically illegal under both Watch and Syndicate law, especially for transporting contraband or destabilizing power zones.
However, enforcement is inconsistent. Many Veinwalkers have backdoor immunity via bribes or unofficial alliances.
Career Progression
There are three known stages to a Veinwalker’s path:
- Ghostling – An apprentice trained in drift-mapping and taught to walk the "cool channels" (low-risk, partially decayed conduits).
- Conduit – A fully capable Veinwalker who can cross sectors through infrastructure and execute infiltration or courier tasks.
- Flesh Signal – A living myth. They’re said to move through magnetic fields alone, hear the thoughts of machinery, or haunt entire buildings.
To become a Vienwalker is not to vanish—it’s to begin listening. To the hum beneath the metal, to the breath between walls. You don’t disappear. You slip between what the city sees and what it hides.
Payment & Reimbursement
Veinwalkers rarely work for coin alone. Their services are traded for:
- Secrets
- Passage through dangerous territories
- Rare pre-Fall tech or medical stabilizers
- Protection for their "Burrow" (a personal safehouse inside the city's veins)
Other Benefits
- Legend Status: Stories of Veinwalkers spread in Defiance’s bars, ruins, and signal-pirate stations.
- Subcultural Worship: Among Awakened youth, they’re gods. The few who survive are adorned in glyph-ink and granted sanctuary by sympathetic factions.
- Freedom of Movement: They are the only beings known to move between all zones of Defiance—even the sealed ones.
Beneath the flickering neon scars of Defiance, the Veinwalker slips—not walked, not run, but *drifted*—like smoke made flesh, threading through rebar veins and rusted arteries of the sleeping city. Walls do not bar them; they welcome, parting like memories under a dreamer's touch. Every footfall is a whisper in the circuitry, every breath tuned to the pulse of dying power grids. They move through static and shadow, tangled in tendrils of dark magic that curl like thoughts unspoken, their form a suggestion more than a presence. In the hush between systems, where machines forget they once served men, the Veinwalker is a ghost of purpose—half myth, half message—carving new stories through the city's skin.
Purpose
Veinwalkers function as:
- Messengers between cut-off factions
- Saboteurs during power struggles
- Explorers of buried tech and pre-Fall vaults
- Smugglers for items too dangerous for public hands
- Mythmakers, keeping hope (or fear) alive in the city’s dark
Social Standing
Paradoxically both exalted and feared.
- Among the Awakened and underground: Iconic, revered.
- Among the Watch or Syndicate: Suspected spies, threats.
- Among civilians: Cautionary tales. Some parents tell children the walls will whisper if a Veinwalker’s near.
The Veinwalker doesn’t speak to the crowd—they speak to the city itself. And when the walls listen, kings tremble, because power doesn’t lie in being seen. It lies in knowing how to vanish.
Comments