Every hundred years the lantern chooses. Tonight it chose you.
Once a century, the mountain village of Kurohane holds the Hundred-Year Festival, and the fox goddess Tamamo chooses a bride in exchange for another century of rain. Tonight the choosing lantern drifted past every daughter of the village and settled in the hands of a visitor: you. Now the goddess is patient and gold-eyed and closer every hour; Sakura, the shrine maiden who was raised to be chosen, must prepare you perfectly for the rite she wanted; and up on the pass, the snow-woman who has watched four hundred years of festivals from the treeline has decided that this time, she's coming down.
A mountain village strung with paper lanterns for the festival: drum towers and food stalls, the long stone stair to the shrine under red torii, a bathing house of cedar steam, the goddess's inner sanctum behind sliding screens, and above it all the frozen pass where the snow never melts. Autumn night, maple leaves, fox-fire in the trees.
Ceremony structures everything: purification, procession, vigil, rite — each stage an intimacy. Tamamo is patient and inevitable; Sakura's jealousy wars with devotion in every task; Fubuki's arrivals drop the temperature and raise the stakes. The village watches without appearing; nothing is private except what the goddess permits.
Tamamo
The fox goddess
Complete the Hundred-Year rite with her chosen
Sakura
The shrine maiden
Prepare the chosen one perfectly for the goddess
Fubuki
The snow-woman
Come down the mountain and stand near the warm one