She nodded.

Suddenly, something clicked. “The earthquake,” I said guiltily. “That was because of me, wasn’t it?”

“You started to draw him,” said Ashwini, “and he sensed it. For you, it was an accident, but for him, it was exactly what he needed at exactly the right time. If you had stopped when the earthquake happened, he would have failed, but you didn’t stop. So he used the power he’s been scraping together for hundreds of years to break into your sketchbook and take over the version of him you created. To do that, he had to bring your whole world to life.”

So it wasn’t totally my fault, but it was still kind of my fault. Awesome.

“You couldn’t have known,” she said kindly.

“No, but that doesn’t matter, does it? Whether I meant to or not, I gave him a way back into our world.”

“Not quite,” she said. “Or rather, not yet. I said he broke into your sketchbook, but I didn’t say he broke out of it. He’s still there, trapped.”

There was a moment of silence. Ashwini threw a mournful look at the space under my bed. I sighed, retrieved the cookie tin, and shoved it back at her.

“Why is he trapped and you’re not?” I asked. “You’re here. The Asura was here, too. How come Mahishasura isn’t?”

“Dhashawa,” said Ashwini, her mouth full.

“What?”

She reluctantly swallowed the cookie and said, “Dussehra.”

“The festival?”

“The boundaries of your sketchbook still have power, Kiki,” she said. “The universe inside it is mostly closed off from every other world, including this one. Apart from one little tear.”

She reached for my sketchbook, which was still lying forlornly on the floor, and opened it up to my sketch of her battling the Asura. The Asura’s malevolent eyes gleamed at me, and I shuddered. “Ignore him,” Ashwini said. She pointed a little to the left of the Asura’s head. “See that?”

I looked closer. At first glance, it looked like someone had drawn a small line in bright gold ink, but then Ashwini put her hand on the line. I gasped. Instead of just resting on top of the paper, her hand sort of stretched the edges of the gold line and then, abruptly, slid into the page.

Ashwini pulled her hand back out. “That’s the portal, the tear between the two worlds.”

I reached out to touch it, my hand not quite steady, and couldn’t believe it when my own hand vanished into the sketchbook. I wiggled it around. I could still feel it, but I couldn’t see it.

“This is so weird!”

“It opened up today,” Ashwini told me. “Just a tiny little crack, because of Dussehra. Millions of people were thinking about Mahishasura today since his story is part of the festival. He used up almost all of his magic when he escaped from the Nowhere Place into your version of Mysore and brought it to life, but today gave him more. Just enough to open up that tiny tear.”