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Corren Ayce
Corren Ayce
"Again." ยท Founder of the Dojo of the Eternal Form, newly arrived in Rokoura after Gelderai's fall
Basic Information
Full Name
Corren Ayce
Nickname
Sensei
Race (Grade)
Human (E)
Class
Monk
Height
5'11"
Birthday
Harvestide 2, 1206
Age
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Birthsign
Bloodline Ability
Unknown
This Bloodline ability has not yet been unveiled to you.
Physical Description
Corren Ayce, in the gi he wore out of Gelderai
Appearance
His long hair is dark brown shot heavily through with silver, drawn back into a loose tail that always leaves a few grey strands hanging at his temple no matter how many times he reties it. His beard is full and kept short, still brown at the mustache but gone grey along the jaw and chin. He has a heavy brow, a straight nose, and deep-set grey-green eyes that settle on a person and stay there, which most people find harder to bear than a glare. His skin is weathered and sun-darkened from decades of training outdoors, and a pair of small silver rings in one ear is the only ornament he owns.
Unique Characteristics
Corren aged like any human until his late thirties, when his ascension to E-grade slowed the clock to a crawl; he has aged perhaps a dozen years' worth in the six decades since, and has practiced his art for longer than most humans live. He moves without wasted motion, sits without fidgeting, and can stand in one place for an hour so completely still that people forget he is in the room. When he does move quickly, it is over before anyone watching is sure what happened. Asked what the characters on his gi mean, he says "the way of the warrior." Asked what that means, he hands the asker a broom.
Personality & Temperament
Positive Traits
- Endlessly patient with any student who keeps showing up
- Says very little, and means every word of it
- Never raises his voice, and has never needed to
- Treats an orphan and a noble's son exactly the same
- Perfectly calm in a crisis, even with a blade drawn
Challenging Traits
- Answers questions with chores instead of explanations
- His silence reads as disapproval, even when it isn't
- Will not speak about his own past, even to friends
- Holds students to standards they never agreed to
- Carries every student he couldn't save like a stone
Again. Slower. Your hands know the form. Your head is still arguing with it.
First you sweep the floor. The fighting comes later, once you understand why.
I don't accept challenges. I accept students. Which one are you?
Likes
- Dawn practice on an empty beach
- A student who comes back the day after quitting
- Strong, plain tea and the quiet that comes with it
- A freshly swept floor
- The moment a clumsy beginner finally finds their balance
Dislikes
- Bullies, of every age, size, and station
- Fighters who strike first and think never
- Students who want the flashy kicks before the stance
- Elves calling him young; everyone else calling him old
- Idle chatter on the practice floor
Background & History
A Harbor Boy from Tazzinburgh
Corren was born in 1206 on the waterfront of Tazzinburgh, the son of a net-mender and a deckhand who was more often at sea than at home. He grew up small, quick, and constantly in fights he hadn't started and couldn't finish. The harbor was full of Pan'Chean sailors, and one of them told him, over a shared bowl of noodles, that the island's warriors could put a grown man on the ground without ever closing their fists. At twelve, tired of losing, Corren stowed away on a Pan'Chean trader to find out if it was true. He was discovered three days out, worked off the rest of the passage scrubbing decks, and was put ashore in Pan'Che with nothing but the clothes he'd hidden in.
The Broom and the Gate
A foreign boy with no family name had no place anywhere in Pan'Che's rigid order of samurai, merchants, and artisans, and for most of a year Corren lived on scraps around the docks. What saved him was stubbornness. He followed a pair of traveling monks north into the Jade Mountains, and when they refused to take him in, he sat outside their monastery gate for nine days until the old master, Ryozen, came out, handed him a broom, and went back inside without a word. Corren swept that courtyard every morning for a year before anyone taught him a single stance. He stayed fifteen years, and Ryozen taught him everything the monastery had to give except one thing: a form the old man called the Eternal Form, which he said could not be taught, only found.
Sent Down the Mountain
When Corren was twenty-eight, Ryozen told him there was nothing left for him to learn on the mountain, and that whatever remained would have to be learned everywhere else. He sent him down with a gi, a bowl, and no destination. Corren never saw his master again. Word reached him years later, in a foreign city, that the old man had died in his sleep sitting upright in meditation, which Corren considers the only fitting way Ryozen could have gone.
Forty Years of Road
The decades that followed were never a plan. Corren crossed the water to Aurenthal and spent six years on the Lionelle training grounds, losing, then losing less, then not losing at all, until the prides stopped testing him and started asking him questions instead. He spent nearly a decade in Thornhaven, where a whole city of obsessive masters taught him that mastery is not a destination but a chore you do every morning for the rest of your life. In between and afterward, he guarded caravans, escorted pilgrims, broke up more tavern fights than he could count, and never once took a coin for fighting in a ring. He never stayed anywhere long enough to call it home, and he never missed a single morning's practice.
The Heavens Were Watching
At thirty-eight, during his Thornhaven years, Corren rose one morning to find a fruit of pale gold resting on the flat stone where he had practiced every dawn since arriving in the city. He had never heard of the Heavens rewarding patience, and still isn't certain that is what happened, but his Gnoll hosts knew an evolutionary treasure when they saw one and insisted on standing watch over him while he ate it. The transformation took eleven days. He came out of it leaner, denser, and aging at a fraction of his former pace, and went back to practicing the next morning as though nothing had changed.
A Dojo Among the Roots
Corren came to Gelderai in 1276 guarding a caravan up the trade road from Tazzinburgh and meant to stay a week. On his second night in the Rootways, he stepped between a half-elf boy and the four older youths beating him; the fight lasted about as long as it takes to describe it. The boy followed him for three days asking to be taught. Corren said no every time, then found an empty hollow between two buttress roots, swept it out, hung a hand-carved sign over the entrance, and opened the Dojo of the Eternal Form. For thirty years he taught anyone willing to learn: humans, half-elves, mongrelfolk, orphans, caravan hands off the trade roads, and, as the years wore on, a steady trickle of young elves from the Boughways who had heard that the human in the roots could do things their own masters couldn't explain. His students called him Sensei, a Pan'Chean word for teacher that almost no one in Gelderai had heard before he arrived. Tuition was whatever a student could pay. Every student, whatever they paid, spent their first month sweeping the floor and carrying water.
The Night the Rootways Fell
When the undead incursion tore into Gelderai, it came in along the forest floor, and the Rootways took the worst of it first. The dojo's single entrance, a narrow gap between two buttress roots, was the most defensible doorway on the street, and within the hour the hall behind it was full: students, their families, neighbors, strangers. Corren put his senior students in charge of getting everyone out along the trade road and took the doorway himself. He held it until the last of them were clear, then walked out behind them with his gi black with grave-dust, carrying nothing but the carved sign from over the door. He does not describe what he fought that night. His students do, when he isn't in the room.
Back to the Sea
Of the three cities taking in Gelderai's refugees, Corren chose Rokoura, the smallest, for two reasons: it sits beside the sea he was born beside and hadn't lived near in decades, and it was small enough that one more teacher might actually matter. He has been in Rokoura less than a month. Every morning before sunrise he practices alone on the sand of ฤkau Nui, and by the end of his second week, a dozen local children had begun copying his forms from what they believed was a careful, unnoticed distance.
Goals & Aspirations
Counting Names
Corren keeps a list, written in his own careful hand, of every student enrolled at the Dojo of the Eternal Form on the night Gelderai fell. There are forty-one names on it. Nineteen of those students came out through his doorway that night. The other twenty-two were somewhere else in the city when the dead came, and he sends a letter with every courier heading inland asking after them. He will not say how many names he has crossed out so far. He will not stop until every one of them has either a mark beside it or a line through it.
A Roof Over the Sand
Corren does not need a building to teach, and he proves it on the beach every morning. But the sign he carried out of Gelderai needs somewhere to hang, and he intends to raise a new Dojo of the Eternal Form in Rokoura: open-sided, facing the sea, and built the way Rokoura builds, with carved posts and woven walls. He has almost no money and has asked no one for help, a fact the children copying him on the beach have noticed and are, as children do, quietly planning to fix.
The Eternal Form
The dojo was named for the one thing Master Ryozen never taught him: a form that, the old man insisted, could not be taught, only found. Corren has been looking for it for seventy-two years. For the first time, he believes he is close; something in the rhythm of the tide on ฤkau Nui has been pulling at his morning practice in a way nothing has in decades. He has told no one this. If asked, he will say only that he is still practicing.
Current Status & Relationships
Residence
Role
Martial Arts Instructor
ATTENTION!
Corren Ayce is an E-grade monk who has practiced a single art for nearly ninety years. His stillness is not age, and his patience is not softness. He does not accept challenges, does not fight for money, pride, or sport, and will walk away from almost any insult without a word. The one reliable way to see what he can actually do is to threaten one of his students, and the few who tried it in Gelderai did not get the chance to try twice. He never starts a fight. He finishes them very quickly.