“I guess that makes sense,” I said. “But I don’t get how breaking the eye will stop Mahishasura?”

“Brahma told me to think of it like an emergency exit,” she explained. “He said that if the golden eye is broken, the magic that brought this world to life will be undone. This pocket universe and everything in it will become just ink and paper in your sketchbook again. Except for you and Mahishasura, of course,” she added. “Neither of you came from this world, so when it becomes un-real again, you’ll both be sent back to where you came from. So you’ll go back to the real world and Mahishasura will go back to the Nowhere Place.”

“So all I have to do is break the eye and this whole thing will be over?” I asked. “This Mysore won’t be real anymore?”

“Nope.”

“And you don’t mind that you won’t be real anymore, either?”

Lej made a weird sound in his throat at that, but Ashwini shrugged. “We were never supposed to be real,” she said pretty cheerfully. “It’s right that everything should go back to the way it was.”

“As easy as that,” I said doubtfully.

She grinned. “As easy as that.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Lej snapped, his patience obviously at an end. He ignored me and addressed Ashwini directly. “Now we really have to go. We’re standing next to the crack between worlds, with the one person Mahishasura thinks is a threat to him, so we are absolutely not safe. Frankly, I’m amazed there weren’t any Asuras guarding this place when we got here, but I doubt our luck will last. I don’t particularly care if she gets snatched by Mahishasura or one of his minions, but you seem to think she’s our only hope.”

His tone told me he was by no means convinced of this. I couldn’t exactly blame him, not when I wasn’t convinced, either.

“He’s right,” Ashwini said to me, with a comical grimace like she hated to admit it. “Let’s get going.”

I followed them off the balcony and into the shade of the room inside. There, I barely had a chance to take a breath or let my eyes adjust to the indoors before I was whisked away through a maze of crumbly hallways, down several flights of stairs lined with plants in terra-cotta pots, and finally into the bright sunshine of the street outside.

For a moment, I felt the world tilt and lose focus. Right beside me, the words PRETTY CORNER MARKET were carved into a cute, rustic wooden signpost, like something straight out of an Animal Crossing game. And for some reason it was the sight of that signpost, an object I remembered sketching about a million different times before I found a style that felt just right, that made the impossible world around me suddenly feel completely and totally real.

Unlike the pictures in my sketchbook, this world was more than just something I could see. I could smell it, hear it, touch it.