he Yedang (예당), the Hall of Rites
The home of the Hwa in Seonhwa. One full building that serves at once as a school of art, a martial hall, a place of judgement, and a jail.
Where it stands
The Yedang sits in the city proper, among the streets and the people, not set apart at the edge the way the Danja’s Gwimak is. The placement fits the work. The Danja stand between the city and the dead, so their hall stands at the wall. The Hwa police the living, so their hall stands among them. It is a severe, well-kept building, plainer on the outside than its reputation suggests.
The training floor
The center of the Yedang is an open floor for the daily discipline: sword forms, sparring, and the drilling of the geommu (검무), the sword-dance the Hwa keep from the founder’s tradition. The floor is rarely empty and rarely loud. The Hwa train the way they do everything, with a control that unsettles people who expect a martial hall to be full of noise.
The art rooms
Off the floor are the rooms for the other half of the discipline: calligraphy (seoye, 서예), music, and writing. A Hwa is expected to keep these with the same seriousness they bring to the blade, and the rooms are held to the same exact order as the training floor. The work made here is genuine art, and none of it, as far as anyone alive has seen, does anything but sit on the page.
The scrolls
The Yedang keeps the founder’s scrolls, the myth-records of Ye-Jin’s gift, in a room set apart for them. To most Hwa it is a place of respect, the way any order honors its origin. To Headmaster Yul-Ho it is something closer to a shrine, and he is there often, reading the account of a power no living Hwa can call.
The cells
Imprisonment is real, and it is held here. When a wrongdoer takes the cell rather than the offered duel, the Yedang is where they are kept. The cells are austere and plainly run, the working other half of the choice the Hwa put to the people they judge. A martial order that also jails the people it polices keeps both functions under one roof on purpose, and the city has learned to read the building as both protection and warning.
The stables
The Hwa keep trained horses, stabled at the Yedang. Warhorses bred and schooled for riders are rare in the Age of Endurance, and the Hwa’s are a tradition carried down from the old world. The horses, like the swords and the scrolls, mark the order as a remnant of something older and grander than the world that remains.
See also
- Hwarang (Hwa)
- First Master Ye-Jin (The Brushhand)
- Headmaster Yul-Ho
- Seonhwa
- The Gwimak (Spirit Hall)
Source: owner direction (the Hwa dojo is a full building in Seonhwa with working imprisonment, an art and training space, kept horses, and the founder’s scrolls). Newly developed canon.