“So the”—I wiggled my hands in the air to illustrate the idea of this nebulous power—“did that too? It made you out of a doodle I put on the page?”

“That’s how I exist.”

“And I guess that’s why the gandaberunda has one golden eye instead of the four green ones I gave it? The magic created a way for me to collapse this world?”

“That’s what Brahma told Ashwini.” He shrugged. “The more time you spend here, the more you’ll see that not everything is totally filled in. If it wasn’t a necessary part of a living, breathing world, the magic didn’t waste itself on it. Like, there are houses in this Mysore with incomplete stairs and no roofs. And of course, there’s that.”

I followed his gaze up through the net of banyan branches to my castle in the clouds. Utterly out of reach because when I drew it, I never stopped to think, You know, Kiki, this might be real one day so maybe you should draw an elevator or a really long flight of stairs.

“Why didn’t the magic just erase that?” I asked. “It’s the definition of unnecessary.”

“It can’t get rid of stuff, only add to it. This world came from your sketchbook. No god’s or Asura’s power can unmake what you’ve made.”

I considered that for a moment. Lej continued gazing up at the castle, which gave me an opportunity to look closer at him. He had a livid white scar on the back of his left hand that I hadn’t noticed before, like a claw had cut him almost to the bone. A heavy stone sank deep in my stomach. Had I done that to him by making this world so cruel and treacherous?

“What was it like when you came to life?”

“We didn’t know we came to life,” Lej said. “It’s not like we felt the moment this world became real. We just were. For you, on the outside, this world has only existed for however long it’s been since you started filling up the sketchbook. But for us, inside this world, we feel like it’s always existed. We have memories of friends, families, our entire lives. We have history. We remember stories our grandparents told us. We remember years of trying to fight Mahishasura. We don’t feel like we were once just ink on a piece of paper. We feel as real as you do.”

Just then, footsteps echoed across the dusty stone of the courtyard. I could have cried with relief when Ashwini ducked under the leaves of the banyan tree.

I jumped up and flung my arms around her. “You’re okay!”

“Of course I am.” She laughed in surprise, patting me on the back. “You made me tough, remember?”

“What happened back there?”

“We fought,” she said merrily. “I escaped.”

“You’re amazing,” I said in awe.

“Did they follow you?” Lej asked.

Ashwini scoffed at that suggestion.

Inspired by how brave Ashwini had been, I was determined to be brave, too. So I said, “Let’s go break that golden eye.”