His eyes gleaming maliciously, Mahishasura advanced. I backed away. His body bent into a crouch, the final move of a predator before it pounces on its prey, and I fled along the row of columns to the botanical garden.

This time, the palace didn’t need me to prove myself, so it helped me. Trees shifted, shrubs jumped aside, and there wasn’t so much as a mechanical spider leg to be seen. I ran unhindered across the maze. Behind me, the maze shifted to make things just a little harder for Mahishasura, but still let him pass.

I burst into the palace ballroom and raced for the stairs. Mahishasura followed, his horns tearing tapestries off the walls as I crossed the grand entrance hall. As soon as I hit the second floor, I bolted for the library.

As I ran, my hand closed over my pencil and I started to use it. I drew a crack here, a fissure there, deep crevices on the marble walls and floors, until the palace started to tremble around me.

In the library, between two shelves crammed with dusty, beautiful books, I found the hiding staircase with a piece of rainbow thread tied around the bottom post.

I raced up the stairs. Mahishasura was on my heels, his breath hot on the back of my neck.

I opened the door at the top of the stairs, and threw myself into the room beyond it, where the walls were lavender and white. Backing away from Mahishasura, who snorted smoke from his nostrils and chuckled at the sight of me cornered in a room, I watched as the door behind him closed.

And vanished.

Because this was, of course, the Room with No Doors.

“No way out now,” I said, shrugging.

As the walls quivered around us, the palace groaning with broken stone, Mahishasura’s teeth bared in a snarl. “What have you done?”

I watched as it dawned on him, bit by bit, that he had been tricked. He had been so utterly certain that I was just a scared little girl, he had found it entirely believable that that little girl would demand a fight and then run away in tears. He had so completely underestimated me, he hadn’t even paused before following me into the palace I had made and only I could get out of.

“You think you have lured me into a neat little trap,” he growled, his fur simmering with heat and fury. “You think you are strong and clever, but you are not. You are a scared, lost little girl, Kiki Kallira, and you will never be more than that.”

I backed away some more, until I collided with the wall behind me. “If that’s all I am, why haven’t you beaten me yet? I think it’s because you’ve always known, just like I know now, that I have more power in this world than you ever will.”

“I am the ruler of this world!” Mahishasura roared. “You will never win. If I am trapped here, so are you. You will never be free of me!”