Buffer. Transition. Unity.

I am Kii and I am not a hero, nor a queen, nor a boy on a journey to transition to man, not brave, nor strong, nor beautiful - nothing like anyone you'd want to hear the tale of.  I'm not even a proper storyteller, which is why I'm writing my own words instead of a proper story.  For anyone not sun-blessed and trial-passed, even a girl-child of fourteen, the punishment for speaking the ancient legends is blindness.  To get the attention of the skies and earn my name as a teller of tales, I must tell a story of my own.  No light in the sky would want to hear the history of a brown-eyed sparrow of a girl with large feet and flat cheeks, so I will write my own legends here in this book.  Soon, when the skies and the elders accept my offering of words, I will be preened by elegant hands and dressed in bells and paid to weave spells about bronze scales flashing sunlight though a sullen fog and handsome young men with rings on every finger and age-worn sheepskins tattooed with maps, searching for names of their own, and an ancient treaty forged before any beating heart can remember, that first unity between sky and ground that formed my people.  No one will be able to see my ugliness then.

I am Kii, and words are the buffer between me and the world.

Explained here.