The Hall of Resting Souls, the Anhon-jeon, is the temple of the Soulsenders in Seonhwa. It is where they bring the dead they recover, and where the Sending is danced under a roof, in safety, the way it cannot be danced in the field.
Where it stands
The Anhon-jeon sits a little apart from the heart of the city, near the gate the recovery parties use. The placement is deliberate. The Song carry the dead in and out often, and they spare the living the sight of it by keeping their work to the edge. It is a plain, heavy building, quiet in a way the rest of Seonhwa is not, and people lower their voices near it without being told to.
The cleansing room
The center of the temple is the cleansing room, a wide, bare floor of prepared ground with space for many dancers at once. This is where the Songhon-mu is danced as it is meant to be danced, with the right number of bodies and no chance of interruption, which is the difference between a Sending and a catastrophe. A soul too disturbed for a small team can be brought here and given the whole order if the whole order is what it takes. Nothing about the room is decorative. Every part of it serves the rite.
Where the recovered wait
Off the cleansing room is the place where the recovered lie until their Sending. The Song do not leave a body untended. Someone sits with the dead, always, both because an unsent corpse in a city this close to Maggi is never entirely safe and because the Song hold that no one should be alone, living or dead, in their keeping. It is the gentlest room in a hard order.
What it feels like
The Anhon-jeon is somber, and it does not try to be otherwise. It is not grim for effect. It is a place where grief is handled with care and without flinching, by people who handle it every day. The city is glad the temple exists and glad to have a reason to stay away from it, because to be brought to the Anhon-jeon is to be brought home, and to bring someone there is to have lost them.
See also
- Soulsenders (Songhondan)
- First Sender Hae-Won
- First Sender Ji-An (The Unturned)
- The Torn Scrolls (Deep Lore)
- Seonhwa
- The Spirit Hall
- Maggi
Source: owner direction (the Song keep a temple with a cleansing room; field Sendings are the dangerous exception). Newly developed canon.