The prompt list for these (if anyone in this beyond-dead fandom is interested) is on my tumblr, which has the same penname as I do on here. Sue me. I'm a simple soul. Enjoy and whatnot.
June 26th, 2018
Hanyuu is not the first –by far, not the first– to have done what she did, and it is overwhelmingly likely she will not be the last.
The old Christian saw, "God works in mysterious ways", did not merely apply to deities. It applied to, well, everything. And not just anything everything, but everything with a capital "E", everything in the cosmic sense, everything in the powers-that-be sense, everything in the sense of the universe ordering itself to laws that humans couldn't even begin to hope to sense, much less identify and explain.
Because she had died to see a new beginning, because she had willingly sacrificed herself to carry the burdens and tears of others, because she had taken the sin that no one else would accept and shouldered it proudly into death, she was granted a seat in the lowest pantheon, a goddess of a small chunk of land that, so many years ago, was baptized and cleansed by the shedding of her blood.
Less than a ghost, really, a memory of ancient times that only the warp and weft of the land can sense, like a spark running beneath a glass table covered in loose-woven cotton. Sometimes, sometimes, humans can sense her, hear her, briefly; a quiet step behind them –her furious stamping and jumping at a breach of the Saiguden, though only they hear it as if it were in the distance– her tearful "I'm sorry" that goes on without end, which they can only hear at the edges of their hearing, like the whine of an insect.
She has no power outside Hinamizawa –can barely even cross its borders, really, except without being tied to her followers. She fades to less than the ghost she is, and Hanyuu's afraid to go further, lest she disappear entire. But in Hinamizawa, with the citizens of Hinamizawa, she is the guardian deity Oyashiro-sama, and she watches over their lives proudly and with grace.
She can do little but watch.
Gods cannot interfere, because they were made gods. Because they were made gods by the giving up of their mortal flesh, they have left the ability to interact with it behind. Hanyuu cannot wave her hands and bring luck to Tomita Tofu, or snap her fingers and have a puppy appear on the doorstep of the Okumara household, as the youngest son wishes so dearly. She cannot, does not, dares not interfere with mortal lives. Not anymore. Not again.
She is the shadow of the bloodstain that cleansed this land so many centuries ago, but her power to wash clean faded away with that sacrifice.
9.40 PM, USA Central Time