June 5th, 2022

Hanyuu was awoken from her peaceful grey slumber by an agonizingly familiar sensation.

She had been a grown woman once, and the twisting and churning in her stomach had been a painful familiarity, once every moon. But this was different. This was a pain she had never before felt as a young, small, undeveloped child. This was a pain that she had felt once and only once: when her daughter struck her down.

This was a pain she had felt when she had been killed.

Immediately, Hanyuu sat up, a hand going to her stomach. The white fabric of her haori was clean and bright and untorn, just like it had been for hundreds of years, but oh, her ghostly body was remembering the pain of that sword more intensely than it ever had before.

"Hau, hauhau." Hanyuu whined. She climbed slowly, carefully to her feet. Rika? Where was Rika? She would know what to do. She had modern medicine for stomachaches, and maybe Hanyuu could convince her to take some. At the very least, Hanyuu would have someone to talk to, to distract her from her pain, and Hanyuu had not had something even as simple as that for millennia.

She blinked, though, as she realized where she was. It was at the large, tamped-earth platform that led up to her shrine, a landing in the long stone steps that climbed up the mountain. What was she doing here? Their house, the shed they had commandeered from the Furude family home once Rika's parents were gone, it was far away from the steps. And wasn't…wasn't Hanyuu not here? Wasn't she supposed to be somewhere else, with Rika…?

Hanyuu remembered like a thunderclap, suddenly, as she looked around. That's right! After Keiichi had succumbed to Hinamizawa Syndrome and murdered both Rena and Mion, Rika had cried so hard that the Chie-sensei had sent her –and therefore Hanyuu– to the clinic.

But now she was here. Why was she here, at the stone steps? Where was Rika?

Another blurry fragment of memory clicked into place as Hanyuu turned towards the steps that led up, and turned towards the steps that led down. Rika had been given a sedative, something to help her sleep despite the overwhelming grief. The last thing, the very last thing, that Hanyuu could remember was kneeling at Rika's bedside with her head pillowed on her arms, groggily watching her descendant succumb to sleep and drugs. How on earth had she gotten here?

Hanyuu needed to find Rika. She would know what had happened.

She began making her way up the steps, heading for the shrine and the Furude house. Maybe someone had taken Rika home, and of course, if Rika was still sleeping off the drugs, she wouldn't be in any condition to let Hanyuu know what was going on. Hanyuu walked, rather than flew, though the stones were bare and unfeeling underneath her sandaled feet. Her footsteps never were, just as she left no prints behind in the molds and lichen and faint coating of dusty dirt. Hanyuu was more intangible than a whisper to everyone in the world –everyone except Rika.

A twinge of alarm pinged in her chest. Hanyuu didn't like not knowing for sure if Rika was okay.

She climbed the stairs a bit faster, keeping one hand pressed to her stomach as the pain twisted and twisted and twisted, like a knife digging cruelly into a wound. Her tiny feet finally hit the top landing of the mountain steps, and Hanyuu took a deep breath without the air around her going anywhere, the cool night wind sliding past her mouth and through her skull and out her hair without pause.

In that moment, though, that pause, something twitched in her awareness. Something was –wrong. Hanyuu felt it, felt a subtle, invisible warping in the threads of reality that used her as their center, like a sour taste in the air. Something was wrong, a tingle lingering like faint blasphemy on her skin.

She moved towards the shrine, taking a cautious half-step in that direction as the wrongness pulled at her. The sensation was indescribable: Hanyuu knew where the wrongness was, growing more certain of it with every moment, and yet if anyone –if Rika– asked her, she would be completely unable to explain why. She just knew. She knew like someone else would know where their hands were in the dark, or what it was to blink. Something was wrong at her shrine.

Drawn by irresistible compulsion, Hanyuu moved in that direction. The hurt in her stomach was almost gone, now, she realized, and horror flashed through her as Hanyuu had the strangest feeling that something had just slipped out of her reach. Something had run out of her like water would run out of a broken vase, a vase with a crack in its belly, and a nameless dread seized her and thrilled her as Hanyuu grabbed the fabric of her hakama in both hands and ran towards her shrine. She knew as she ran that she would be too late –though what she was too late for, Hanyuu still had no idea– but she had no choice but to run.

The cold of the dewy grass wasn't on her ankles and calves, just as the night sounds of crickets and cicadas slid right through her ears without pause for hearing. The flames of lantern candles did not flicker as she flew past, and the growing iron stench of blood did not fill a nose that wasn't there. Fear throbbed in Hanyuu's chest, growing like a heartbeat as she whisked up the short steps and stopped dead.

Hanyuu no longer had to wonder at the source of pain in her stomach. She knew where it was from.

She no longer had to worry about where Rika was. She knew that too.

Her miko, her shrine maiden, her descendant lay in an untidy sprawl on the sacred boards of Hanyuu's shrine, eyes open wide and unseeing. Hanyuu imagined that she could see horror in them, but that, of course, was silly. The horror was outside Rika, her intestines crawling in grotesque ropes that were hung like pink vines over the altar and splayed in gory clots on the lovingly polished wood. Blood seeped out around Rika's pale green smock, still warm and steaming as it crept out along the floorboards.

Hanyuu's knees hit those floorboards in a way that might have thumped as that blood seeped towards her –her who wasn't– and Hanyuu stared blankly at this scene of horror. Rika's mouth was open, hanging slack, and somehow tears welled in Hanyuu's eyes at how tiny it seemed, how small the black hole in Rika's face.

This was a monstrous butchery, and yet, it was not the first butchery Hanyuu had seen. Not even the first one in this place, on this altar. The cruelty of it was that this was Rika, and that this was an era in which Hanyuu's people had calmed and no longer committed atrocities in her name. How, how, how had this happened? Who in Hinamizawa had dared to flay Oyashiro-sama's priestess in such away?

Tears fell down Hanyuu's face, and yet there was no one to witness it, and no one to say that they had ever fallen at all, for blood was the only thing that dared to wet the floorboards. If Hanyuu was the demon people named her for, she would have lashed out, would have hunted and found the people that hurt her Rika so, but she was not. If she was the goddess that Hinamizawa worshipped, she would have already known their names and their sins, down to the last and littlest, but she was not. If she was half the friend and guardian Rika had believed her to be, Hanyuu would have kept her eyes open when the drugs took her descendant, would have been able to watch and stop this atrocity.

But she was not.

She had not.

Hanyuu was just the lingering spirit of a helpless little girl.

She had known it before, as she wept and railed in the long-ago times –oh, thou children of men, why do you kill so fruitlessly in my name!?– and she had known it for so long, but now, now when she had actually had someone to speak to, someone who let her feel than she was more than just an imprint on air and an echo of sacrifice, they had been ripped away from her. It had been driven home again, ruthlessly and without remorse, that Hanyuu was, and never again would be, part of the world. She could no longer change things with her own two hands, could no longer fill the air with her voice. A sacrifice was not a sacrifice unless something was lost, and all those many years ago, Hanyuu had, very simply, sacrificed herself. And so, she had been lost.

Atop her shrine, Oyashiro-same wept over the corpse of her priestess, bewailing the cruelties of fate and the loss of the only friend she had ever known.

But then –slowly– like a fire being woken from ashes and coals, something stirred in her soul. Something that said no.

No, Hanyuu wouldn't lose Rika. She refused to. She was not entirely without power, and for this, if nothing else, she would use it. When, or how, would she ever have another chance, another need? What purpose could she use any of her abilities for, unless she was trying to help a friend?

But this was something more than that. This was deep, dark, dangerous. There was only one way that Hanyuu knew to fix things, one miracle she could provide, and it was a cruel and harsh one.

To make Rika one of those who lived in loops.

To do such a thing would splinter Rika's mind and soul, and fracture her very sense of self if it went on for too long. It was unwise to gift this power to anyone except someone who had earned it, and not just earned it, but fought for it, yearned for it, wanted it, meant it. Giving such unstable immortality was a double-edged sword, a curse as much as a blessing. Rika may thank her at the first loop, the second, but if they failed to uncover how this had happened and stop it, Hanyuu would be damning her best and only friend to an eternity of endless suffering.

Perhaps she was a demon, for she did not care.

Hanyuu only wanted, needed Rika to come back.

She took to her feet and reached out, pulling every scrap of power and authority and self she could muster, swirling it tight around her in a cloak of power. Hanyuu then squeezed time between her hands, condensing something that humans could never name or understand in her grip, as one would wring the water out of a sponge. Reality dripped from her fingers, little eddies of thought and possibility and other, more nameless things, but Hanyuu only squeezed tighter. She would have this done. In this, for once, the world would bend to her will.

With a great lurch, like an ox pulling away from a broken plow, or a kite soaring away from a snapped string, the universe split. The main bulk of it carried on, for it was foolish to think that even Hanyuu could influence more than a corner of reality. But she could, and did, wrench away her own little piece of it, and in the murky darkness between all the worlds that were, sparkling fragments of the greater flow of time broke away with it, starting a slow and swirling orbit around the twined essence of Rika and Hanyuu. They did not quite exist, not yet, but there were more worlds waiting for her –and for Rika– should the first loop fail.

And so, Hanyuu set her beloved descendant on the first step of an agonizing path to the future.

9.30 AM, USA Central Time

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