The Fox and the Paper Lantern

Every generation, the mountain village of Tsukimichi walks the Lantern Road at night to renew its pact with the guardian fox spirit. This year, you carry the ninety-ninth lantern — and the hundredth does not arrive. Instead a white fox with a lantern of its own walks out of the fog and offers a trade: it will light the pact's final lantern if you carry its last request down the mountain to a shrine that officially burned two hundred years ago. Bargains with foxes are never simple. The road is long, the dark between lanterns is older than the village, and the fox's request has your grandmother's handwriting on it.