The Guardian who founded the Songhondan, the first to hold the title First Sender, and the first of many Song to die keeping the order’s promise. She lived in the early Age of Endurance, when the dead had only begun to refuse to stay dead.
Name
Ji-An. The second syllable, an, is the old word for rest and peace, the thing she spent her life giving to the dead. The Song remember her not by the name but by what she was, the Unturned, because she never once turned away from a body or from the duty, and at the end did not turn back when turning back would have saved her.
The expedition
Before anyone understood that a corpse in heavy Maggi would not lie still, the Suhodan sent parties out from Seonhwa to recover what the old world had known. Ji-An was a Guardian on one such expedition, deep in Maggi-thick ground far from the walls. A man she had trained beside fell there. The ground was too dangerous to carry a body back through, so the party did the thing that made sense to people who did not yet know better. They left him, and they withdrew.
The first rising
He found them on the road back. The Maggi had been days at work on the body, and what walked toward the firelight wore his face and was not him. It killed two of the party before they brought it down, and bringing it down meant taking apart someone every one of them had known. This is among the first risings the Suhodan recorded and understood as a pattern, the moment the order learned that the dead left in the wrong ground come back as a weapon turned against their own.
What she did with it
To a Guardian whose whole creed was that no one behind her should be left to harm, it was the deepest kind of failure. She had left a man, and he had been made into a thing that killed his friends. She refused to let it stand as the way of the world. She began going back for the bodies others had left, alone at first, then with the few who could stand the work. She went to the Clerics to learn how a recovered body could be kept from turning, and out of the Cleric’s purification and the Guardian’s discipline of form she and they shaped the Sending, the dance that lays a soul to rest so the Maggi cannot raise it. She founded the Songhondan on a single vow, that no one is left.
The Unturned
She held the vow for the rest of her life and died holding it, on a recovery, reaching a body in ground she should not have entered. It is the death most Song eventually meet, and the one she would have chosen. The order she left does not pretend her end was anything but the promise keeping itself. They took her epithet as the measure every sender is held to. To be Song is to be unturned.
See also
- Soulsenders (Songhondan)
- First Sender Hae-Won
- The Hall of Resting Souls
- Guardian
- Cleric
- The Age of Endurance
- Bestiary Overview
- Maggi
- The Suhodan
Source: owner direction (the Song founder was a Guardian; the founding follows an early exploration mission and the first rising, fleshed here for review). Newly developed canon.