Krishna described a forest.

Not the kind of forest you walk through on a path, with sunlight dappling the ground and birdsong overhead. He described the other kind — the kind where there is no path, where the undergrowth is so thick your legs disappear into it, where the canopy closes above you like a ceiling and the light turns grey-green and damp. The kind of forest where you cannot tell which direction you came from, and every direction you turn looks exactly the same.

"That is delusion," Krishna said. "Moha-kalilam. The thicket of confusion."

Arjuna knew this forest. He was standing in it. For the past hour, his mind had been thrashing through the undergrowth — should he fight or should he flee? Was duty more important than love? Was killing his cousins righteous or monstrous? Every answer he grabbed turned into another question, and every question split into two more, and the forest grew thicker with each step.

"You are trying to think your way out," Krishna said. "You are reading maps of the forest — what the Vedas say, what your teachers said, what Bhishma told you, what Drona taught you — and each map shows a different route. One says go left. Another says go right. A third says stand still. The maps are not wrong. But you have so many of them now that they have become their own kind of forest."

A fly buzzed near the white horses. One of them twitched its ear but did not move.

"There is a clearing ahead," Krishna continued. "Not a place on the map — a place beyond maps. When your intellect pushes through the last of the undergrowth, when the tangled vines of opinion and counter-opinion fall away, you will step into open ground. And there, in the light, something strange will happen."

He looked at Arjuna.

"You will stop needing to hear more. You will stop needing to hear the next teacher, the next scripture, the next argument. Not because you know everything — no one knows everything — but because you have found the thing that all the teachings were pointing toward. The finger has done its job. You no longer need to stare at the finger. You are looking at the moon."

The battlefield was quiet. The armies waited. But inside the chariot, something was shifting — the undergrowth was thinning, the light was growing stronger, and Arjuna could almost sense, just ahead, the edge of the trees.