The expression disappeared entirely from Kanako's face for an instant -before immediately being replaced by raucous mirth.
"Bwahahahaha, what sort of nonsense is this?" the goddess asked, slapping her knee and pressing a hand to her belly. "You have a rare talent to come up with something so outlandish. I'm flattered you would come to such a conclusion, but I'm curious: however did you manage to come up with such a strange idea?"
"I'm very happy to hear you taking my theory so well. I'll explain the rest of it, and hopefully you can tell me where I've gone wrong, but I must ask you to bear with me and try to keep an even temper. Some of what I have to say may be offensive to you."
"Well, I'll hear you out, at least."
"Thank you, I appreciate your willingness to confront unpleasant truths. I'll start with something that I hope you will be able to view as an honest question and not an intentional act of blasphemy. Lady Yasaka, in truth you are neither the god Takeminakata nor the goddess Yasakatome, are you?"
The smile on Kanako's face instantly vanished and her eyes narrowed.
"Who did you hear that from? The tengu?"
"I'm sorry, but professional confidentiality prevents from revealing my sources. The fact stands though that the story Sanae told me and the stories I've heard about Takeminakata have a critical inconsistency."
"Oh? What would that be?"
"Sanae said you were the god of Youkai Mountain itself, an embodiment of an aspect of nature. That would make you a native god, which in turn would make it impossible for you to split your presence among multiple locations. So either Sanae was lying to us about that, or you were lying to us about being a divine spirit."
"Ah, I see where you've gone astray now. That's not quite what Sanae meant."
"Oh?"
"As you know, the true object of worship in this shrine is Suwako," she said, turning her head to glance down the path. Sounds of a danmaku match in progress could still be heard echoing from that direction. "Suwako is a native god. When we came to this world, we tried to find a place as close to the appearance of the original Suwa Grand Shrine for her to connect with. That's why we transported the lake as well. The Suwa region was mountainous in the Outside world, and Youkai Mountain and its foothills were the closest thing available here. Then, since we had decided that we didn't want to allow Suwako, a curse god, to be the visible face of the shrine, it was decided that I should be venerated as a god of the mountain. Thus, worshippers would not only praise me, but the mountain and all of its bounty as well, allowing both Suwako and I to both benefit from the faith of even casual worship. At the time that Sanae told you this, she was still trying to conceal Suwako's presence, and so she ended up phrasing things in a way that confused you."
"I see, I see. So that's how it is. There's still one question though."
"And what is that?"
"Well, if you still claim to be Takeminakata then you would have been the one who battled and defeated the goddess Moriya long ago, correct? That's why Takeminakata took the symbol of a snake as a sign of your dominance over her symbol of the frog. Do I have that right?"
"Yes, very astute."
"Well if you were the victor in that battle, why are you now serving Suwako? If she's the goddess Moriya, who you defeated, doesn't it seem odd that you would now be going to such great lengths to gather faith for her benefit? It almost seems like you're as much of a priestess of Moriya as Sanae is. In fact, everything about this shrine, from its name to its appearance to its location seems to be for the benefit of Lady Moriya. It's almost as if the roles of winner and loser in that conflict were reversed. It might make sense in Suwa if Takeminakata had found that defeating the goddess Moriya in battle was not enough to claim the faith of the people since worship of Moriya was worship of the land itself. In that case you might see a system like the one present in the Suwa Grand Shrine where Takeminakata and Yasakatome are worshipped publicly and Moriya is worshipped in secret. This isn't Suwa though, there's no reason to continue such a system here, nor even a reason to worship Moriya specifically as leader of the Mishaguji. The peoples of this world have no issues worshipping nature spirits on their own merit, there's no need for subterfuge nor is there a reason to unify the various nature gods into the personage of Moriya."
Kanako went silent, fixing Renko with a hard look. I couldn't tell if it was because Renko had hit the mark with her accusation or if she had merely offended the goddess by calling her subservient to Suwako.
"My apologies if I've offended you. I'm only trying to lay out my theory."
"I would think this might be obvious to even a human, but I suppose that even for a mortal you are young and inexperienced, so I will explain." Kanako said, waving her hand dismissively and interrupting Renko's apology. "If you continue working with a partner for a long time, it's natural to develop a sense of camaraderie and even feelings of kinship and love for them. They become a part of your life, in one way or another. This applies to gods as well as humans. Suwako and I have worked side by side for many human lifetimes, and we have raised Sanae together as well. If I had brought Suwako to this world, but in so doing cut her off from a source of faith, that would be like a death sentence to her. Similarly, if we were to venerate the various aspects of nature that make up the Mishaguji, but not establish Suwako as chief and ruler among those, she would fade away, losing much of her presence and personality and becoming just one among many. For Sanae's sake, if no other, I couldn't act so selfishly. If that means that some measure of the faith I gather in this land goes to her, and the nature of our home becomes slightly less convenient, then that is a reasonable price to pay for Sanae's happiness and Suwako's companionship."
"Well then why go to the trouble of endangering her by bringing her here? Even in the 2080s, when Merry and I went to the Suwa Grand Shrine, Moriya was still worshipped there. Would she not have been safer staying in the Outside world?"
"Perhaps, but I wouldn't dream of it. She's family."
"And did she see things the same way? It sounds like you made most of the decisions about the relocation of the shrine on your own."
"...Perhaps I could have consulted with her more. It is not in a god's nature to seek the counsel of others, and for that I suppose I deserve some blame."
"I see. It wasn't my intention to criticize with that, just to understand. I apologize. Let me return to my original question though. Is this place the Suwa Grand Shrine or not?"
"The fact that you're even asking that means that you believe that it is not, correct?" Kanako asked, crossing her arms.
"That's fair to say, yes. It's the single biggest mystery here. Why would a shrine in Gensokyo, which has no connection to Suwa so closely resemble one in the Outside world? Moreover why would it resemble that shrine on the surface, but only consist of part of the shrine that's present in the outside world and call itself by a different name? Personally, I have a theory to explain that."
"Oh, and what is that?"
"Simply that the Moriya shrine has always been a shrine built to closely resemble the Suwa Grand Shrine, even when it was in the Outside world."
I let out a small gasp. In all my considerations of the facts, I had vacillated between the idea that this place was the real Suwa Grand Shrine from the Outside world or that it had been built here to resemble it. I had never considered the possibility that it had been a replica from the beginning.
"Here in Gensokyo, there is no connection to Suwa, and as such, no faith to be found in the nature of that land," Renko continued. "Only Outsiders like Merry or myself would think there was any connection to Suwa at all. Everyone else here, from the tengu down to the villagers, wouldn't even know what Suwa was or that there was a shrine there. Therefore, the only reason this place would look the way it does is if it had always looked that way from the beginning."
Renko was right, this wasn't a problem anyone else in Gensokyo was likely to experience. Because we had had experience with the Suwa Grand Shrine of the Outside world, we were bound to look for meaning in this place's resemblance to it, but just as one might find something that looked like a message in a string of random letters, we had concluded that the inexplicable detail had had meaning when in fact there had been none. This place wasn't intended to fool people into thinking it was the Suwa Grand Shrine -no one here would even care about that. We had just assumed that because of our own subjective biases. As a student of Relative Psychology, it was a galling but instructive oversight on my part.
"Now, why would there be another shrine in the Outside world that closely, but not exactly mimics the Akimiya of Suwa Grand Shrine? And if there was such a copy, would it venerate Takeminakata too? The answer is no, Lady Yasaka. Before Takeminakata came to the Suwa region in antiquity, there was already an existing practice of venerating the Mishaguji. When Takeminakata claimed the land and took over the shrines around lake Suwa, monuments were built to him and his wife and the various Mishaguji were united under the personage of Moriya, and worshipped in secret as one entity. Before this conglomeration of all of the Mishaguji was created though, there was still an original Moriya. She was just one Mishaguji among many, the native goddess associated with Mount Moriya in the Outside world. An unremarkable goddess of little import until such time as humans decided to create a version of her to rule over all of the various Mishaguji. That goddess was something new though. Something created completely by man, not an aspect of nature, nor the venerated spirit of a divine personage. The native god connected to mount Moriya was something different, and something that mostly got left behind. Except for at one remote, rural shrine. One place where the ancient practices of venerating the native goddess of mount Moriya still continued. A shrine so old that its plan and layout had been used as the basis for later creating the Akimiya when the Suwa Grand Shrine complex was rebuilt to honor Takeminakata and his wife. That shrine still continued to practice the old ways, passing down the traditional practices of worship among a maternal line of wind priestesses. With such a remote location and so few worshippers knowing the true nature of the goddess worshipped there, the faith of the local farmers and practitioners was slowly fading out, and the goddess faded further year after year. Even still though, the shrine remained, the last vestige of a nearly vanished indigenous religious practice, so old that its origins were lost to antiquity. That shrine, dedicated to Moriya is the one you brought here, isn't it? The one above, outside of this barrier is that shrine as it appeared in the Outside world, and the place we're standing now, inside the barrier is the shrine as it was in ancient times, when the people of Suwa worshipped Moriya as one Mishaguji among many. Is that right?"
Kanako only glared at Renko in silence.
"I guessed that much when Sanae made us the Sukiyaki. You had all of your cooking devices setup to run off tanks of propane and beef sitting in a deep freeze that was still good after you'd been here for a month without any electricity. Clearly, your living space was built to function off of the grid. Like you might find in a remote, rural area, but not like you'd find at a major tourist hotspot with reliable connections to a major city." That still leaves the question of why the Moriya shrine came to Gensokyo in the first place though. We still have to address that."
"Sanae explained that to you, didn't she? Or do you suspect her of being part of this whole delusional scheme too?"
"She told us you gave up the dwindling faith of the Outside world in hopes of cultivating a new, bigger following here. She mentioned that she lost her parents when she was only a baby and had been in the care of her grandmother since. She also mentioned that she had been able to see you and Lady Moriya for as long as she could remember and that the four of you had lived together as a family. This ability to see things others could not ostracized her from her peers, however, and made it difficult for her to blend in. After training as a wind priestess, despite her grandmother's wishes, she came into her own power as a goddess, capable of working miracles and beginning to form a cult of worshippers of her own. That was the extent of the story she told us."
Renko paused, giving Kanako the chance to refute any detail, but she only continued to glower in silence.
"Sanae was very grateful to you and Suwako for bringing her here, supposing even that you had abandoned your holdings in the outside world for her benefit, to save her from being forced to live a life in service to the demands of humans desperate for a miracle. She never suspected that as she came to be worshipped as a goddess she was stealing faith from you and Suwako, endangering your survival by her mere existence. If your goal in moving to Gensokyo was to protect yourselves from being usurped by her and let her live her life as a regular human girl, she hasn't caught on at all."
Kanako didn't answer, simply staring expressionlessly at us.
Renko's presentation had been thorough, enough so to win me over to her way of thinking almost, but suddenly a thought occurred to me. If Sanae was a living goddess and her power had come from her bloodline as a wind priestess, then surely there had been living goddesses among her maternal line before. Why would the expectations or burdens Sanae had to face be any different?
"Sanae explained to us that her power was something that had been passed down among the lineage of the wind priestesses for generations. The ability to create miracles. I saw a bit of it during her fight with Reimu. If she could wield power like that in Outside world, then I can see why she would have been worshipped as a god. Merely being able to fly would probably have been enough for that. If Sanae were an aberration, a power never seen before in the world, then worrying about how she could live with the demands her powers would place on her would make sense. But that's not what she told us. If this power was passed down from generation to generation, then it would have been something her mother was capable of, and something her grandmother would have been able to do too."
Still Kanako remained silent, neither interrupting to object nor urging Renko to continue.
"Possessing a power like that in the Outside world is enough that Sanae began to be worshipped as a god. But I don't think that was anything new. Wind priestesses had been present in every generation of her family, going back for generations. You'd expect that one of them might even have been venerated as a god in their own right after their death at some point, wouldn't you? But they hadn't. Instead, the people who came to petition Sanae for miracles weren't people who had somehow heard about her power, but people who already expected her power to be there. People who knew of her family's abilities and came specifically seeking the power of a wind priestess. The members of an established and longstanding cult. Normally such requests might have been directed to her mother, but with her gone and Sanae's grandmother in poor health, they fell to Sanae, even though she was still a child. That's why Sanae's grandmother didn't want her to become a wind priestess and why the rest of her family fought over it. Letting her receive training would mean she'd have to accept a tremendous burden at an early age. Sanae's grandmother must have intended to dissolve the cult after the death of Sanae's parents, but the rest of the cult's hierarchy wouldn't allow it. I'm betting the children at school knew that too. She thought they were ostracizing her because she could see things they couldn't, or because she didn't have parents, but in actuality everyone had probably heard that her family was part of an insular religious cult."
Kanako's silence was unbroken, but her expression now betrayed a hint of emotion. Was it annoyance? Frustration? I couldn't be sure.
"This cult was centered around your shrine and worship of what other people might have thought was the goddess Moriya. The Moriya here is different than the Moriya in any history or at the Suwa Grand Shrine, however. This was the original Moriya, the one who was actually a distant relative of Sanae's, the first wind priestess, who was venerated after her death long ago. Once I came to understand Sanae's past, that explained almost everything. Everything, in fact, except for you, Lady Yasaka."
Kanako scoffed, but Renko pressed right on.
"If this Moriya Shrine of the Outside world venerated Moriya and trained a line of wind priestesses to worship her, then there's no need for there to be another god in the shrine, and no connection to Takeminakata or Yasakatome. And yet, here you are, as much a part of this shrine as Suwako. How could that be, I wondered, and where had you come from? Well, the most obvious answer is that you weren't who you claimed to be, but instead someone who was supposed to be at the Moriya shrine. But if they didn't need such a god to be present, why bother with the farce of having you claim to be Takeminakata or use the symbol of a snake, which was tied to him as victor over the frog god? The only reason for you to assume such a false identity would be to hide your true nature under the handy guise of the Suwa Grand Shrine. A story that most anyone with even a passing familiarity with Shinto could have confirmed. You wanted to hide your true identity because all of this had been built up for just one reason. To protect the one person you and Lady Moriya wanted to shield above all others. The one who you two goddesses loved as if she were your own daughter. The one who you both wished to spare from the position of being a useful tool and servant to the family cult she had been born into."
Kanako looked away, no longer meeting Renko's gaze.
"A divine spirit is a type of ghost bound to this world by a sense of duty or obligation to the living. If that person had been worshipped as a living god during their own life, and if they had been enshrined as a god immediately after their own death, then even in a place like the Outside world, where the power of faith is waning, it would be surprising if they did not become such a sprit. If someone were to die unexpectedly at a relatively young age, and be in the unfortunate position of leaving behind a young daughter, well then, might their regrets not be enough to tie them to this world?"
"And if such a spirit was bound to the world as a ghost, but possessed the power to work miracles even in death as they had in life, might not they be enshrined by those who still sought to make use of their abilities? Such a ghost would not only have strong ties to the world but faith behind them. A combination like that would make them a powerful ghost indeed, one empowered not only by the faith that others had in them as a god but by their own faith in their family. I'd guess such a spirit could even do something dramatic, like moving a whole shrine to another world or conjuring up enough sake in a single night to win over the whole of tengu society."
Renko stopped pacing and looked up at the goddess one more time. She still remained silent, glowering down at us.
"Well that's my theory, Lady Yasaka. You can see why I didn't want to say it in front of Sanae. Though, I suppose I should be calling you Mrs. Kochiya, then shouldn't I? That was your name in life, wasn't it?"
