I’d been having so much fun with my weird, perfect, patchwork Mysore that I didn’t really want to ruin it by introducing Mahishasura and his army of demons into it. But all good stories need an enemy the heroes have to fight, right?

I started with his head. Mahishasura was a buffalo demon, so I drew a pair of thick, curled horns. It took me a little while to get the pencil lines just right, but once I was happy with them, I inked them in with bold, black strokes.

And that was when the real world got weird.

At first, it just felt like I was on a train. A bit rumbly, but fine. Then the rumble got rumblier and my whole bedroom shook. I looked up in time to see an empty cup rattle violently on my desk. My colored pencils rolled away from me. The cup crashed to the floor.

The sky outside my window went dark. Not nighttime-dark, but the dark of storm clouds. They gathered and swept across the sky, churning in time to the rumble of the earth.

Somewhere below, Mum’s voice called my name in alarm. I looked out of the window and saw that beyond our back garden, the river was choppy and frothy, like the waves on an ocean. A boat rocked back and forth while water splashed over the tall sides of the riverbank.

Then, abruptly, it stopped. Just like that. The room went still, the skies cleared, the sun came back out, and the river went quiet.

“Kiki?” Mum was out of breath as she appeared in the doorway of my room. “Are you okay?”

“What was that?”

“An earthquake, I think,” she said, perplexed.

Of course, it hadn’t been an earthquake at all, but we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know that the furious churning of the earth, water, and sky had been a warning.

This was the point at which I should have thrown my beautiful yellow sketchbook into the river, but I didn’t know that, either. Instead, I threw away the broken cup, made myself a grilled cheese, and kept drawing.

2

Fast forward three months to October. Emily and I went back to school, Emily’s mum told us the new baby was going to be a boy, and my not-so-new-anymore sketchbook was almost full.

“Kiki?”

It was Mum’s voice, but I didn’t answer her. I was in the middle of a really detailed, delicate sketch of one of my characters’ battles with an Asura and I just couldn’t stop now, not when the strokes of my pencil were coming so quickly and I was so close to capturing the look of glee on my heroine’s face.

“Kiki!”

A swoop of my pencil for the swish of her hair as she leaped at the Asura, a sword shining in her hand.

“Kritika. Kallira.”

Uh-oh. Mum had used The Voice and my full name.

I tore my eyes away from the paper. “Yes?”