“I hate that we left her.” I got the words out between gulps of air. “And the old man, too.”

Lej raised one eyebrow. “You didn’t exactly protest at the time.”

I bit my lip. Truthfully, I was woefully disappointed in myself. I had always loved stories about adventure and magic and epic showdowns between good and evil. And in spite of my fears, in spite of my anxiousness, I had always hoped that I would miraculously become brave and heroic if I were ever in a story like that. Unfortunately, it seemed that neither pluck nor heroism came naturally to me.

“I should have tried to help her,” I said guiltily.

“How exactly would you have done that?” he asked. “How many Asuras have you slayed in your world?”

“I could have done something.”

“You still can,” came the curt reply. “We’ll wait here for her.”

We had stopped under the shelter of an enormous banyan tree in a quiet courtyard, its limbs drooping around us like curtains. I touched the nearest leaves and remembered sketching their shape, again and again, until they looked like this.

I had made this tree.

I was never going to get used to this.

I sat down on the ground, back against the tree, mostly because I wasn’t sure my sore feet and wobbly knees would hold me up anymore. My hands were still shaking. I had put every detail of Mahishasura down on paper a hundred times over the past couple of months, yet nothing could have prepared me for seeing him stand in front of me, looming above me. A cruel king, a monster who punished the people around him just because he could.

Lej paced restlessly a few feet away. I could tell he hadn’t wanted to leave Ashwini behind and that made me feel guilty all over again.

“Um,” I said. “You know, I didn’t create you.”

“And as someone who has seen the things you’ve created, I am eternally grateful for that.”

I must not punch him. I must not punch him. I took a deep breath. “I guess what I mean is, I don’t understand how you’re here. Ashwini said this whole universe was created out of my sketchbook. So if I didn’t create you, how come you exist here?”

To my surprise, Lej actually answered me. He screwed his forehead up like he was still trying to make sense of it himself, which was understandable considering he was pretty much the same age as me. “From what we understand,” he said, “Mahishasura used his power to transform your sketchbook into a real place. His power comes from the heavens, the same place all the gods and higher Asuras get their magic from, so it’s almost an intelligent, living thing itself. To make your world real, Mahishasura’s magic had to fill in the gaps.”

“Gaps?” I screwed my own forehead up. “What kinds of gaps?”

“Like, for example, the people in the streets. They were just doodles in your sketches, but a real world is full of real people with real histories and real lives, so the magic fleshed out thousands of them. You drew Mahishasura’s enormous army”—I winced, the unspoken thanks for that, by the way only too clear—“but you didn’t give faces and names to all of them, so the magic did that. You created your version of your ancestor Ashwini, and made her the leader of a group of kids who spend our lives resisting your fictional version of Mahishasura, but you hadn’t yet created each of us individually by the time the real Mahishasura stepped into his fictional avatar’s hooves and rewrote the story.”