Backgrounds:

(I drawed this map during a math lesson... )

Curse of Hanayuki:

Centuries ago Kuroyama-village was part of our world... Kuroyama was a normal rural society worshipping local goddess, but unlike in the other villages - their goddess Yukihime directly interfeared with their lives thus causing the villagersto believe themselves to be more exalted than the others.

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This arrogancy finally lead to their imprisonment to a sealed dimension of Hanayuki.

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One wintery night a traveller in strange clother arrived to Kuroyama searching shelter from the snowstorm... But as the villagers didn't like the travellers fancy clothing they drived the traveller out of their village.

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As you can quess - this was a big mistake.

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The traveller was infact a powerfull mage who had heard about the arrogant people living in Kuroyama and wanted to teach them a lesson... But as he saw how far the corruption of the villagers hearts were - he though there were no way of helping them anymore. So to relief the world from the people of Kuroyama - he decided to seal the village of Kuroyama inside a separate realm hoping that the isolation would help them to grow as humans...

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The realm that the mage created was named as Hanayuki because the flow of time was stopped so the climate never changed causing Kuroyama-village to suffer from endless winter; also as a side-effect of the timestop - villagers of Kuroyama stopped aging making them somewhat eternal.

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After the mage had died, the curse started to wear off slowly causing the barrier between Hanayuki and other worlds to get thinner... Because of this, small dimensional gaps started to open especially in the forest of Wanderings... Usually these gaps closed quite fast as the curse prevented Kuroyama from merging into the other realms.

Travellers guide to Hanayuki:

Hanayuki can be roughly separated to two different parts - the caldera and fields of Sakura surrounding it...

Not much is know about the fields of Sakura, but the areas inside the caldera are well documented... This is due the fact that aside the Kuroyama village, rest of the caldera is mostly filled with the deep forest of Wanderings.

Forest of Wanderings:

People who accidently cross the dimensional barrier between our world and Hanayuki are mostly likely to appear here...

Inside the forest there are lots of smaller villages hidden underneath the trees, but propability for the unwanted quest to find them is miniscule as the magic field around Hanayuki tries to prevent humans from the outerworld from interacting with the people of Kuroyama.

As the people living in Kuroyama doesn't age due the curse upon them, their village soon became too small for them so they had to expand their habitat deeper to the forest...

Kuroyama-village

A typical village of Edo period... It is said to be located at the eastern edge of the forest, but as the forest really has no edges due the calderas perfect circular shape - it is hard to really tell

where the village actually is.

From the village leaves the only route to the mountains, but the route itself doesn't lead over the mountains - only to the shrine of Yukihime that is located to near the top of the caldera.

Shrine of Yukihime

Shrine once dedicated to Yukihime... As Kuroyama was sealed awayfrom the real world - Yukihime left the shrine and moved to the fields of Sakura behind the caldera.

After Yukihime had left, people slowly started to forget their goddess as everything stayed unchanged inside the closed space and no one had seen her after the inprisonment...

Nowadays there is no visitors at the shrine and its existence serves only two purpose... To remind people of the time before Hanayuki and to guard the passage to the fields of Sakura...

It is said that inside the shrine is a secret passage leading through the mountains to the meadows separating caldera from the fields of Sakura...

Fields of Sakura

Forest of cherry trees expanding to infinity... There is a rumor that if you keep walking directly forward, you will return to the other side of the caldera - though there is no confirmation for this as only a few has entered here and none of them ever returned.