The most accomplished living sender of the Songhondan, the steadiest hand in the order and the example every recruit is told to watch. He has given more souls rest than anyone now alive. He is also the one carrying the order’s weight worst, because he keeps a secret that unmakes everything the Song are.
Name
Yeon-Ho. The first syllable, yeon, is the old word for a bond, a tie, the longing that holds two things together. It is a cruel name for a man whose whole craft is the severing of ties, and who could not, the one time it was his own.
The steadiest hand
Yeon-Ho has danced more Sendings than he can count and lost none of them in the field. Recruits are sent to watch him because he does not falter, does not rush, and does not let the grief of the work show in the rite. When a soul comes in too wound for a small team, it is his lead the others follow. To the order he is what a sender becomes if they live long enough and keep their nerve. They love him for it, and they have no idea what it costs him.
The one he kept
Years ago, on a recovery that went wrong, the Song lost one of their own, a sender Yeon-Ho loved. He brought the body home, as the promise demands. Then, alone, he found he could not finish the dance.
To complete a Sending is to let the soul go, fully and forever. Every other time, that is the mercy. This time he could not pay it. So he did the thing no Song is ever supposed to do. He stopped partway. He has kept that soul unsent ever since, neither released nor allowed to turn, held in a balance that takes a piece of him to maintain. He tends it where no one looks, gives it just enough of the rite to keep it quiet, and never the last of it. The order that has freed thousands by his hand does not know that the best of them holds one back.
What it costs
A kept soul is exactly the thing the Song exist to prevent, and Yeon-Ho knows it better than anyone. An unsent spirit, held by his love and its own Han, is a slow danger that asks more of him every year, and the day his hand finally shakes is the day it slips. He carries that knowledge while dancing other people’s dead to their rest, perfect and hollow, and the gap between what he does for strangers and what he will not do for her is wearing through. The Danja teach that you cannot keep the dead, that a bond held by force breaks and takes you with it. Yeon-Ho has built his secret life on proving them right slowly.
What Hae-Won knows
First Sender Hae-Won watches the few who carry the work worst, and she has watched Yeon-Ho a long time. She suspects there is something he has not sent. She has not forced it, and her reasons are her own: mercy, perhaps, for the man who taught half the order to dance; or fear of what forcing it would do, to him and to whatever he is holding. Between the leader who must enforce the Sending and the veteran who broke it in silence, there is a quiet that neither has chosen to end.
The edge
He cannot hold the balance forever, and he knows it. It ends one of three ways. He finds the strength to dance the last of it and lets her go, and learns whether there is anything of him left on the other side. Or his hand shakes at last and the soul he kept becomes the catastrophe he spent his life preventing, in the heart of the people who trusted him. Or Hae-Won reaches him first. Which way it breaks is open.
See also
- Soulsenders (Songhondan)
- First Sender Hae-Won
- First Sender Ji-An (The Unturned)
- The Hall of Resting Souls
- The Torn Scrolls (Deep Lore)
- Necromancers (Danja)
- Han (Unresolved Grief)
- Maggi
- Bestiary Overview
Source: owner direction (a senior Song member of import, on the edge, carrying one failure the order will not name; developed into this figure for review). Newly developed canon.