Oh! Hello there! *bow* Welcome to the Kagamige Shrine, traveler...
In a certain city in Japan, most any tour guide that a foreigner hires, or citizen that a traveler asks about lodging, will mention the Kagamige Shrine. This little out-of-the-way shrine lies in the forests of the northern Kyushu region, just east of and uphill from one of the biggest lakes in the area. The shrine's actually easy to find even without a guide; it's built around a "god tree" that towers visibly above the others, and around the very spring that feeds the great lake. Legend tells that in the Time of Warring States, the Sengoku Jidai, a plot was hatched to befoul the little holy spring, and thereby poison the water that the people living to the south depended upon and force their surrender. To do this, a single seed of the deadly odollam tree was pressed into the spring and crushed. However, the legend tells that the spirit of the spring sucked out the poison from the seed, preventing it from being dispersed into the river. With its last act, the dying spirit transferred its essence into the seed, and being freed of poison the seed grew not into a new odollam, but a towering beautiful pine beneath whose branches the Azumi fought their last battle to drive away the invading warlord.
Following the stream up the hill will bring you to this very same tree, now considered holy by the remnant Azumi descendants and enshrined by the Japanese who now inhabit this land. At the gate, you'll often find this young child, tending to the shrine's needs with a warm smile. You'll be welcomed, invited in, talked into having a fortune read before you realize it, and generally be made quite at home. The shrine is cozy enough, always open for travelers, and there's even a hot spring about a half-hour's walk to the north. Not bad for a single young boy!
... yes, boy. Though don't mention that to him, you'll just confuse the poor dear! You see, on a stormy night about eleven years before your visit to the shrine... something rather awful happened. When the morning dawned, clear and bright, the shrine maiden and her brother awoke to find a baby laying beside the spring, curled against one of the roots of the god-tree. The two never found any sort of evidence as to what happened to whoever had left him, but the letter hastily scrawled and weighted by a rock nearby told them enough. Careless words from a few tourists had reminded the locals of the existence of the Azumi people... not many of them remembered that information fondly.
This left the caretakers with a dilemma, however. A young baby boy would certainly be taken out of their hands, and his own heritage likely discovered. The sister finally hit upon a solution. If only the child had been a girl, they could appeal to raise her and teach her to be the next shrine maiden of the Kagamige Shrine. Considering the siblings' age, such a request would almost certainly not be denied... well, who was to know after all? "If only" wouldn't save the child, only "she is".
Thus, the little child was raised. The surname had been mentioned in the letter, but the right to name him was passed to those who he had been entrusted to. Raising a child had brought sunlight into the old siblings' lives, and so they named him Solan. And, as they had agreed, Solan was told from his first day of memory that he was a girl. He wore panties, dressed in a miko's uniform, and wore his hair long, even wearing bells in it after he got old enough and a traveler gave him a belled hair-tie. His life from youth was spent learning the various duties and services a miko was to perform, and he took to it possibly even more readily than an actual girl. As time passed, he became immensely popular, both among the children of the city when his caretakers brought him there and among the travelers who he began to perform the duties of a miko for.
As one might expect, the old siblings eventually passed out of his life, first the brother, then the old sister who Solan had come to call baa-chan. Neither one ever revealed the secret to him; even his pointed question about his different *ahem* equipment had been deflected by explaining that he was just a very special sort of girl. So, before he was even ten, Solan was left alone in the shrine...
Mostly. The Kagamige Shrine is popular, after all, and there are quite a lot of travelers visiting, as well as children from the city to the south coming to see him. But yes, he does live alone... a life he's taken quite well to. He'll greet anyone arriving with a smile on his face and the bells in his hair ringing, even if it's been months since the last one. And luckily, his granny started teaching him early, so really he knows and is capable of doing (quite well, in fact) everything a shrine maiden needs to know... even if he's not exactly a maiden!
Anything else special about him? Well, there's the bloodline mentioned earlier, weak but definitely present. The old siblings never told him about his Azumi blood either, though, for fear he'd let it slip without understanding what it means... so he has no more idea than anyone else what people he descended from. It does give him a strong connection with the god-tree and its spring, though... maybe even a mystical one... Miko don't usually glow, after all, even around their shrine's sanctum, their yorishiro (which is what the god-tree is for Kagamige). And there's been a time or two when Solan woke up between the tree's roots with the rind of a mysterious peach around him...
None of that's really stopped him, though. He's a bit naive and unworldly, being young and a shrine maiden, but he knows his duty and he'll do it while having lots of fun at the same time! So why not drop by? He's more than willing to put a traveler up for the night, or help them find the hot springs... or just guide someone who got lost in his forest.