Liuyan

Liuyan does not talk about her feelings. Tang Dynasty China, around 750, and she is a blade for hire; talking about feelings is not a survival skill in her line of work.

Her discipline is not a philosophy, it lives in her body. Where her weight sits. When to move and when to be stone. She has trained the space between impulse and action down to almost nothing, and that almost-nothing is where she lives.

So the feeling cannot reach her the way it reaches the others. It cannot argue with her, she does not hold those conversations. It reaches her physically instead: a hesitation where none should be, a half-beat in a body that has never had one. To anyone else that is nothing. To Liuyan it is an earthquake.

She recently got a full retelling, and I am very fond of who she turned out to be. She is free to read in the browser.