STARR BLOG Lore: VEIN CORE RELICS

​Vein Core Relics –  What They Are and Why They Matter
 
You’ve probably walked past one without knowing it. Not because they’re hidden in plain sight, but because your mind quietly decided not to look too hard.
 
Vein Core Relics are not normal objects. They were never meant to be held, traded, or used by ordinary people. They are fragments of a much older system – something that predates modern technology, recorded history, and even the way we understand time.
 
What Are Vein Core Relics?
 
They look like carved metal, sometimes with tiny crystal veins running through the surface. Some are small enough to fit in a ring. Others are larger, embedded in weapon housings or sealed inside protective casings. Size doesn’t matter. What matters is what they do when they get close to each other.
 
The most valuable items the Coda network collects are Artemis stones and their shards. Vein Core Relics are the second most valuable – rare enough to be worth stealing, trading, and fighting over, but just common enough to be moved through auctions, foreign deals, and underground networks.
 
A full Vein Core is much larger than a shard. The bat that Evany carries contains one. So does the Milican Blade. Smaller fragments, the shards, are what Delegates sometimes receive as rewards – set into ancient bloodline artifact housings, then placed inside modern weapons. These shards can be charged through certain rituals, but the effect is never completely stable or predictable.
 
How They Affect the World
 
When two charged Vein Cores come close to each other, they try to sync. That’s when small, strange things start to happen right away – lights flicker, metal hums without power, outlets spark, sometimes a reflection splits into two images for a heartbeat. The air might feel cold on one side of a room and warm on the other. Car alarms go off for no reason.
 
If the sync is strong enough, people nearby can experience a memory flash of the most recent time two charged cores came together miles away and hours earlier. It’s not random – it’s a residual echo imprinted in the Lattice. These flashes are brief and leave behind disorientation, nosebleeds and confusion. They are not the same as deliberately walking into Emma’s memory construct, but they can feel eerily similar.
 
Most people don’t even notice the smaller effects. Their minds smooth over the inconsistencies – a survival mechanism, or maybe part of the system itself. But the effects are real. You can see their scars in certain neighborhoods where whole buildings or parts of city blocks look forty years out of date, where phone booths still have rotary dials and where your reflection in a window takes an extra second to catch up to your movement.

 
(POTENTIAL SPOILER) Relics Don’t Always Behave the Same

Some relics respond with precision. Others react unpredictably. The restored blade recovered through the Coda pipeline appears deliberate in its construction—ancient, controlled, almost ceremonial in the way it activates and responds.

Evany’s bat is different.
Built from modified salvage and experimental engineering, it was never intended to function like a relic object at all. Yet under certain conditions, it reacts in ways that continue to defy explanation.

What makes the two objects unsettling isn’t that they behave identically. It’s that they sometimes seem to recognize the same things. Small distortions. Subtle vibration. Moments of interference that appear connected to people rather than mechanics alone. No one fully understands why.

And that uncertainty has started drawing attention from the wrong people.
 
Why People Are Hunting Them
 
Not just anyone hunts for Vein Cores in New Verance City. They are valuable, and only those in the know will go after them. Special Coda operatives are tasked with acquiring them by any means necessary – trade, theft, auctions, foreign channels. The network also distributes certain masks across the city, which act as false nodes, creating tiny resonance pockets that help anchor larger attempts at convergence. The people buying masks don’t always understand what they’re starting. They just know the objects are rare and powerful.
 
Ancient history whispers about a time when these systems were whole, when bloodlines worked together, when reality responded to intention rather than instability. That time is long gone. The bloodlines fractured. The knowledge scattered. What remains are fragments – incomplete, misunderstood, and desperately sought after by people who think they’re on the verge of something big.
 
They may be wrong. They may be right. Either way, the cores are gathering.

 So the next time you see an old building that doesn’t fit its neighborhood, or a storefront that looks like it’s from the 1980s, or a phone booth that still has a rotary dial – don’t just assume it’s old. Something might actually be off about that place.
 
The people who know why cores are valued are already working on their own plans. The only ones left to figure it out are a reluctant antiques dealer and two sisters who never imagined any of this.
 
And they’re just getting started.
 
-YG
 
 

Above: The Milican Blade, object stolen from Penn's Antiques Shop in Issue #1 is a forged copy of an ancient bloodline relic.

Above: Different Active Vein Core Shapes

Above: Dormant, Non Charged Vein Core

Above: Active, Charged Vein Core

 Dormant Ring Core

Ring Core Actively Charged