And I found another box inside of the first.

“What is this?”

Bowen stared inside the box. “Clever. Of course a troll would think of that.”

“Well, it wasn’t necessarily the troll’s doing. This was a gift for him, after all. Any one could have done this. Oh well, no point dizzying ourselves over who came up with the box-in-the-box idea. Let’s open the next one.”

So I did. And found yet another box.

“Oh, now I’m just getting annoyed,” I said. But I tore into that box, and then unbelievably, into the next one, and the one after that, and so on.

The boxes got smaller and smaller, impossibly small. Until I came to the last one. I lost count which one this was. The twentieth? The thirtieth?

I opened the last box and inside there was a scrap of paper. I pulled it out carefully and held it in my hand.

“What is that, Lailah?”

“It’s a piece of paper. Oh, look, there’s some writing on it. I can’t make it out.”

Bowen took the paper from me. “It’s in Dervish script. There’s a name written here. Pandora.”