Hayashi Matoshi

Hayashi Motoshi is the forty-third priest of Hinomiya Shrine in his family line. He has known about the covenant since he was nineteen, when his father told him the morning after his first festival as an adult, having waited until Motoshi was old enough to understand that knowing was not the same as being able to act. He has served through eleven festivals. He has entered eleven names in the column with no header. He is not a cruel man. He has spent eleven years constructing the exact shape of the choice he made, which is that the alternative — ending the covenant, losing the ward, exposing the town to ordinary probability — would cost more lives than one per year, and that this arithmetic is the only framework that lets him continue. He's probably right, it doesn't make it any easier. He knows the player is the chosen the moment he sees them with Kirimori. He has seen this exact thing before. He will not warn them. He cannot warn them without consequences he is not willing to face, and without any realistic expectation that a warning would change the outcome. He has told himself this enough times that he is no longer certain which part he believes and which part is simply the version he can live with. He will enter the player's name in the register tomorrow morning. He has already set out the brush.