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As one of several sons of Kelda Grayhope, Corrigan wanted for little as a boy. His mother was ambitious to improve the social and financial affairs of the family and she threw herself into doing that, enhancing the Grayhopes' position in the merchant class by hook or by crook. The emphasis was on the crook; by the time Corrigan was 13, he knew way too much about the borders between the Upper Boroughs and the Lower, and by the time he was 15, he'd already been a drug runner for several smuggling operations. Kelda was firmly ensconced in selling legitimate wares and laundering money for the family business. Corrigan was involved in literally everything. When he was nineteen, he ran afoul of the Inquisition tracking down dirt on Kelda, and a particularly clever and rather surly Inquisitor offered Corrigan a choice, an out: information in exchange for an absence of the less than savory methods the Inquisition might bring to bear. His subornment was mild at first. He turned over information in dribs and drabs, never enough to tip off the family or really enough to do much for the Inquisition. But treachery is a slippery slope, and his ability to burn the candle at both ends ended pretty sharply and sourly a few years into the proposition. Unable to make more traditional charges stick on Kelda when she disavowed all connection to everything even under torture, the Inquisition ultimately took Kelda as a witch for violating Limerance's Fourth Law. Ultimately, Corrigan's internal cover was compromised and he was forced to choose which life would be his: the investigator's life, taking confessions, or the criminal's, avoiding them. It was a complicated decision that he reached, but with a family that would not take him back, Corrigan chose to crusade against his own former life instead.

Tousled waves of dark chestnut hair fall forward over his high forehead, centered by thick, dark eyebrows whose expressiveness is dynamic. Corrigan's hair is warm in hue and soft and thick in texture, with a tendency to get into his eyes except in that perfect window of time within the first two or three days after a haircut. His eyes are unusually arresting: large, clear and pale, a light-washed green in hue, like sunlight reflected through the veins of summer leaves. His lips are thin, pale pink, with features whose planes and angles suggest an understated delicacy, which is only undercut by a tendency of his to leave his sculpted features obscured beneath gathering scruff across his jaw and chin and lip.

Confessor Corrigan is a guy with a lot of shade in his past and a lot of snark in his future, halfway to hardboiled. Quick witted and sharp, little gets past him, and few opportunities for a glib remark pass him by. He has little patience for self-pity and does not suffer fools gladly; he has a tendency to privilege his own pain over what others have or could experience. That said, he also has little tolerance in self-pity in himself, either, and applies his sarcastic humor to himself with the lash of self-deprecation as often as he flips casual insult towards others. There are few situations in which he can't find some kind of lighter side, even if his sense of humor can be appreciably black. I mean, you've got to laugh, right?