Person of Distinction
Master Ouen
The Sage of the rings, whose Sayings order the civic life of Aurei and open every sitting of the Concord.
Master Ouen is the Sage of the rings: a teacher, not a ruler, whose collected Sayings have become the common civic grammar of Aurei. They are read at the opening of every sitting of the Concord in the Helion, taught to the young of every ward, and studied above all at the Civic Society, which exists in no small part to live by him.
His teaching is plain and hard to argue with: that office is a debt and not a prize; that the measure of a ring is the ease of its weakest household; that one should speak last and mend first; that a city, like a mind, is kept not by force but by steadiness. He holds no rank and wants none, walks the bridges like any citizen, and answers the marble-cutter and the Heliarch in the same patient voice — which is, his students say, the whole of the lesson.