We spent our entire childhoods learning the crossing. We learned there were three different kinds. The first, a crossing between two initiates, is the easiest, although many years of training are necessary to achieve it. The second, requiring years more practice, is a crossing between an initiate and a novice, after which the latter is left in an unknowing state. This is called a blind crossing. The third and highest form of crossing is the wakeful crossing: it too takes place between an initiate and a novice, only once it is complete the novice can remember everything about it. This kind of crossing takes a lifetime to master.

Of all the Law’s commandments, the greatest was this: There can be no crossing without a return crossing. All must return. The Law was clear: to break it would bring about the destruction of the world. Only a sage could cross without returning, for the sake of the Law’s preservation, so that it might be passed on undiminished. When the time came and the sage felt death approaching, parents would bring their youths to him, hoping their own child would be chosen to be the inheritor. Great honor and influence came to the family of a child chosen to cross with the sage. The family of the designated youth would ask the best stonemason to carve a statue to mark the occasion. At the appointed time, a ceremony would be held during which the youth and the sage would sit before each other, looking into each other’s eyes, and the spirit of the sage would pass into the body of the youth, while the spirit of the youth would cross into the body of the sage. When the crossing was complete, the inheritor would plunge the sacred whalebone knife into the heart of the old sage, and gouge out his eyes. The sage’s remains would be buried and the carved statue placed upon the burial site. Thus there was only one among us who was deathless. All others must die. So spoke the Law.

Fetu had decided that, when the time came for his last crossing, I would be his successor. And so, when that time came, my own soul would pass into his body, and his into mine. I would become Fetu and, for the sake of the Law, the body I had only just vacated would kill the body I had only just entered.

About love the Law was all-knowing and all-powerful. Only the elders could unite a woman and a man. If a man and a woman should desire a union forbidden by the elders, the Law was clear: the lovers must leave the island and sail the currents and winds eastward, and find another island, and begin a new life there, with a new Law. So it was that our own island had been settled by our two ancestors, young lovers whose union, on another island to the west, had been forbidden.