The following is the only account the Songhondan keep of a Sending that failed. The scrolls were recovered torn and incomplete from the site, with no Song left alive to finish them. The gaps are in the originals. What is missing was lost with the people who could have told it, and the Song read what remains to every recruit before their first field Sending.
…the ground was wrong from the first step. There were more of the risen than the count we were given, and the one at the center had died [the scroll is torn here] cannot set down what was done to it before it died, only that no living soul should be made to carry that much grief.
We were four. For a soul like that the rite asks for [torn] and we knew it, and we danced anyway, because the alternative was to leave it, and we do not leave.
The dance held until [torn] and when it broke it did not break quietly. The anguish we had meant to loosen went out of the body and into [torn]. [A name, torn away] went first. What stood up afterward wore [torn]
[a long tear; the next legible line is in the same hand, unsteady]
…do not dance for such a soul with fewer than the rite demands. Do not dance it in the open if there is any other road. A Sending that breaks does not simply fail to work. The grief you came to release goes into the ground and into the dancers, and the thing you meant to lay to rest lays you down instead, and raises you.
[the final fragment is in a different, later hand]
We recovered three of the scrolls and none of the Song. It is kept here so that what took them is not spent on being forgotten.
See also
- Soulsenders (Songhondan)
- The Hall of Resting Souls
- First Sender Hae-Won
- Han (Unresolved Grief)
- Maggi
- Bestiary Overview
Source: owner direction (the catastrophe of a failed or interrupted Sending, recorded in torn scrolls: a soul so anguished it slaughtered, corrupted, and possessed the Song present). Newly developed canon, written as a damaged in-world document.