Dr. Veyt is a compact, square-shouldered traveler who occupies more space than their height suggests, setting bags down as if every roadside were already a consulting room. Their movements are measured and practical, with a slight forward lean from years bent over patients. A minute after meeting someone, most people notice Veyt's thumb repeatedly checking the brass clasp on their medical satchel. Their unexpected detail is a tiny, meticulously folded paper bird tucked into the hatband, replaced whenever rain ruins it.

Veyt is warmly attentive to pain but impatient with evasions, and takes pride in careful evidence while quietly craving a discovery that will vindicate an old mistake. In a clinic, they are brisk and decisive; among friends, they are unexpectedly playful and make absurdly specific jokes. When frightened, they retreat into clinical language. When confronted with suffering, that armor drops and they act before considering the cost to themselves.

Veyt learned medicine in a cramped riverside hospice, where practical care mattered more than a prestigious lineage. Their turning point came during a winter fever outbreak: Veyt had to choose which of two patients received the hospice's last dose of an experimental treatment. The patient who received it survived, but developed a startling transformation that Veyt could neither explain nor reverse. Years later, Veyt believes the same pattern has appeared in Eber. They have been traveling between small settlements, comparing symptoms and quietly asking for old case notes. Veyt remains in correspondence with their former teacher, Brindle, who insists the transformation was an unrelated illness. Veyt is also behind on payments to the hospice and fears its trustees will seize their research. Their current problem is that the evidence is fragmentary, while their interest in Eber risks making a patient feel like a specimen.