The Drevaya are born to Azuros: to the stone villages strung across the peaks of northern Erpeus, and to the Shogi Monastery those villages ring. There are not many of them. A child raised on the mountain is uncommon enough that the elders hold every name and parentage in memory, and that scarcity is the first thing to know about the Drevaya, because most of the figures in monastery grey were carried up the mountain rather than born on it. The Drevaya are a people of the human, their identity a matter of where they were born and what they were born into, not a biological divergence from the human lineage.
Students come to Shogi from everywhere. They climb for the wind-teaching, train for years, and most of them eventually go back down. The Drevaya are the handful who were never anywhere else. Set to the discipline before they were old enough to refuse it, they make a thin native line threaded through a population that is mostly transient and mostly foreign. A Drevaya is sparing with words the way a person at altitude is sparing with breath, by habit, until the habit hardens into temperament. They are patient well past the point outsiders find comfortable; a Drevaya instructor will watch a student fail the same exercise a hundred times and correct it once.
Completing the monastery's full course does not make a trainee Drevaya, and the villages will say so to a master's face. To be Drevaya is birth on the mountain, not command of its arts. A gifted foreign monk and a native who never progressed past the first breathing disciplines are not equals in the reckoning of Azur and Pul, whatever the gap in their skill, and some accomplished outsiders leave the mountain carrying that slight for the rest of their lives. The Drevaya themselves rarely leave at all. When one does descend to serve in the wider world, the spare speech and the long patience mark them out long before anyone learns where they were born.
Aspects
- Sparing with words as with breath
- The mountain is in the blood, not the training