We weren’t in a courtyard. We were on a large balcony, with paved stone under our feet and a small, tinkling marble fountain in the very middle. Beside the fountain were my missing desk and curtains, both charred and wet. Ashwini must have pushed them out of the real world and into this one to prevent my whole house from catching fire, and Lej, I guessed, must have doused them in water while she chased after the Asura.

Once I’d had a good look at the balcony, I turned to see what was beyond it. There was a low bronze wall around the edge. And over the wall, below us, stretching all the way to the woodsy green peaks of Chamundi Hills . . .

It was Mysore. My Mysore. I blinked, and blinked again, but it didn’t disappear. The city spread out in front of me, a surreal mixture of reality and my own whimsy. The houses and shops were boxy and tidy, like the real Mysore, but I had painted them in jewel-bright colors: vibrant yellows, mint greens, deep reds, sapphire blues. A rainbow kingdom like my rainbow unicorns. Between the colors I could see glimpses of the streets and courtyards, each road like a winding ribbon of silver, and in the distance, at the very outskirts of the city with the paddy fields and sugarcane farms, was the Kaveri River.

“I . . .” I started to say, and then promptly forgot how to use words. “I . . .”

“Really?” Lej said to Ashwini. “Her?”

I barely heard him. I took a step closer to the low bronze wall. My eyes refused to blink, greedy for every detail.

Most of the city was quite low, with even the tallest houses no more than maybe three stories tall, so the palaces towered above them. In the very heart of the city was my version of Mysore Palace, the largest and most beautiful. It had twin cream towers at each corner topped with red marble domes, enormous stone arches across the front façade, and in the center, taller than the others, stood three golden towers with golden domes. On the peak of the middle dome was the statue of the gandaberunda, the two-headed eagle.

In the stories Mum used to tell me, the gandaberunda was the protector of the Kingdom of Mysore. In my version, the gandaberunda was a dormant stone statue that would only awaken when the city needed it most. It seemed to me that now would have been a good time for it to wake up, all things considered, but maybe the gandaberunda had other ideas.

Across the kingdom was the other palace. Lalith Mahal. In the real Mysore, it had once been a palace and was now a hotel, but in this Mysore, I had made it Mahishasura’s fortress. It was pure white, with open walkways and three domes like St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, guarded by a hundred Asuras.

Behind the Lalith Mahal rose the Chamundi Hills, a handful of low peaks covered in deep emerald forests. I hadn’t drawn in a temple at the top, like the one in the real world, because I hadn’t yet gotten to the part of the story where the goddess Chamundeshwari had fought and won her battle with Mahishasura. I wondered where she was. I had created a version of her in my sketchbook. Her lion, too. The idea that they were somewhere in the city below, fighting their battles in the spaces between the gemstone houses and gleaming palaces, was incredible.