Bathala's Forsaken Daughter
I became, without realizing what it was called, a person who could hold two states of attention at once and let neither one show on my face.
This is what they made me. They meaning the mines, the overseers, the merchant clans, the cultivation world's entire architecture of brutal hierarchy that decides at birth who is permitted to be powerful and who is permitted only to be useful.
They built me like a weapon and then forgot to point me at anything in particular.
That was their only real mistake.
~~~
The night the forbidden cave collapsed, I was thirteen years and four months old, and the whisper beneath the mountain was no longer a whisper.