Another Self

At first what he saw was one ring. Later, the ring became two—one large, one small, overlapping.

It appears in the "Void" every morning, and each time earlier than the last. The first time there was only one ring, which widened in the fourth minute; the next day, the fifth minute, a small ring appeared inside the large one, turned once, and settled on top of it; the day after that, both rings floated up in the second minute.

The instructor calls the rings "places of entry". His way of putting it is: one ring is one entry; two rings overlapping means being at two entry points at once, or being called by two places at once.

Then who is the voice that calls you? The instructor gave only one line, and it is the kind that keeps people awake: the voice calling you is another you. Then he added—do not interpret it, just listen.

The same thing is told differently in the other lineages. A student of the Western lineage said the shadow in her mirror "is not me, it is another me", and the way it lifted its hand did not match her; on the third morning that shadow walked out of the mirror, stood in front of her and looked at her. When she asked someone to write a note for her, she said specifically: do not write about the thing in the mirror, that one can see as well. The Indic account is "he is looking for me, it is one of us", and the message came from a grandmother dead 12 years who still speaks from inside a mirror. The family records of the Middle-Eastern omen-readers put such a person down as "one who is being called", in a different column from "the dead".

Nobody explains what "another you" is, where it is, or why it would call your name. It is only known that someone saw those two overlapping shadows in a dream 3 years ago—in the dream a fourteen-year-old boy was crying, and inside his body was a ring giving off a pale blue light, and inside the ring were two shadows, one of them like him and yet not quite. He turned and saw the dreamer, stopped crying, and spoke his own name. Those three syllables were taken down in Arabic letters, filed in the family records, and sat 3 years before they matched a person.

In one dormitory room of the Eastern College, 8 rings of the same kind are carved into the beam of the ceiling, every gap facing the same way. Seen from directly below, the centres of the 8 rings line up exactly.