The House is here. Yes, it smells like flowers, too. This surprises me. I love flowers. Everything here is stone, built to last. If it is wood, the trees will take offense and then take it apart. The winds can be strong in this place when it rains. A house must be solid and heavy, too. The front door is round and made from the wing of a giant Ntu Tu beetle. It’s clearer than glass but won’t break no matter what you do to it. That door is old, but it is not the oldest part of the house. Inside, you will find books, you will find heat, and flowers that have grown on the ceiling since the house was built.

Sunny, this is a place where if you seek, you will find. It took me years to find it. Maybe you will need to do the same at some point. If you are what I know you are, your life will not be easy, and there will be much that you have to answer to. But for now, you relax and see this place. See the street that leads to it. See the front door. And there is so much inside.

The floors are a mosaic that you can stare at for hours and think about the world. See the palm tree that grows through the center of the house? There is a clear roof that protects the opening from water when it rains. Come this way to the library. It smells of sandalwood all the time, and the walls are covered with amulets. The acoustics here bring any kind of music to life just as strongly as the words in these books bring ideas and stories to life. To learn is to live.

When the Nsibidi let her go, she was looking blankly at the bottom of the page. She could still smell sandalwood. What a beautiful place that was, she thought, lying back. “I want a place just like that when I grow up,” she whispered. “Just like that.” But what did it all mean? Why would her grandmother write a page of Nsibidi about this place? She hadn’t even told Sunny where it was and whose place it was. Maybe it’s something she wants me to read when I’m under stress, Sunny thought. The fatigue that resulted from “reading” the powerful Nsibidi was tugging at her eyelids. She put the page away and closed the box. Then she lay in her bed. So relaxed. For several minutes, she thought about the house that sat in the strange city. Maybe Grandma was a fiction writer, Sunny thought with a chuckle. Fiction written in Nsibidi, it would be better than a motion picture. She chuckled some more. It was well past three A.M. As her eyes drifted shut, she hoped she’d dream about the beautiful house.

But she didn’t.

Within minutes, she was dreaming . . .

She was in soft, warm water. Not choppy and rushing like when she was in the river during her initiation. No, this place was calm and blue, but she could feel its weight as she moved through it. And she could breathe here. She sped up. Her body seemed to know where it was going even if her mind did not. Faster and faster until the blue of the water became the blue of the sky.