It was all incredible. The city was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Every last part of it.

Well, except for maybe the castle.

I let my gaze lift up, up, up, to the sky. To the castle suspended in the clouds. I winced. It wasn’t a palace like the ones in the city. It wasn’t even a proper castle with battlements and all that stuff. It was a cotton-candy castle. Pastel colors and little turrets. And it was just floating there, high above Mysore, so out of place that I would have laughed if I hadn’t been only too aware that I was the one who had put it there.

On the other hand, was an adorable castle in the sky really any more impossible than everything else in front of me?

This was all impossible.

And yet, somehow, I was looking at it.

“You see the statue of the gandaberunda?” Ashwini’s voice snapped me out of my wonder. I tore my eyes away from the city and looked at her. She rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet, excited. “That’s how you can stop Mahishasura.”

“You want me to wake the statue up? Is that even possible?”

She shook her head. “No, only the gandaberunda decides when to wake up. No one can wake it up. Not even you.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” I asked, confused.

“Can we have this conversation elsewhere?” Lej said, his eyes on the sky.

“I want Kiki to see first,” said Ashwini. She reached into Lej’s backpack and pulled out a small collapsible telescope. She extended it, focused it, and handed it to me. “Look at the statue.”

I peered into the telescope. “I know what it looks like,” I felt compelled to point out. “I drew it.”

“You see the two heads of the eagle? Each with two eyes?”

“Yes?”

“What else do you notice?”

For a moment, I had no idea what she was talking about. Then, as I kept squinting into the telescope, I realized that three of the gandaberunda’s four eyes were emerald green, just like I’d drawn them, but the fourth was bright gold.

“I gave the gandaberunda four green eyes,” I said.

Ashwini grinned. “The golden eye is the answer, Kiki. All you have to do to stop Mahishasura is break it.”

“All I have to do is go up to the statue and break the golden eye?” I repeated dubiously. “That’s how we save this world from Mahishasura?”

“Exactly!” she said triumphantly.

“But how? And why do you need me if all you have to do to stop him is break a statue’s eye?”

Lej let out an impatient groan before Ashwini could answer. “We have to go,” he said to her. He was still squinting at the sky.

“Just one more minute,” she insisted, and turned back to me. “We need you because you’re the only one who can break the gandaberunda’s eye, Kiki. Remember what I said about how you have more power over this world because you made it?”