The mist had thinned. A pale gold light was beginning to seep over the eastern edge of Kurukshetra, turning the dewy grass to scattered glass.

Arjuna looked up. The sun was rising.

Krishna noticed where his friend's eyes had gone, and a slow smile touched his lips. "You are watching the sun," he said. "Good. Let me tell you a secret about him."

Arjuna said nothing, but he listened.

"The path I am teaching you now — this calm, steady way of acting without being torn apart by fear and greed — is not something I made up this morning to comfort you. It is older than this battlefield. Older than your grandfather. Older than kingdoms and crowns."

He lifted the reins, and the white horses settled.

"When the world was young," Krishna went on, "I gave this same teaching to Vivasvān, the lord of that very sun you are staring at. He carried it across the sky, day after day, for ages. Then he gave it to Manu, the first great king, the one from whom all the laws of fairness and kindness flow. And Manu, when he grew old, called his son Ikṣvāku close and whispered it into his ear, the way a father gives a child the one thing he most wants to keep safe."

Arjuna frowned a little, turning the words over.

"Think of a lamp," Krishna said gently. "One lamp is lit. From its flame a second lamp is lit, and from the second a third, and on and on through a thousand dark nights. The flame never grows smaller for being shared. Each new lamp burns just as bright as the first. That is how this wisdom has travelled — sun to king, king to son, teacher to student — never fading, never running out."

The light spread across the field. Spear-tips that had been grey a moment ago now glinted like a river of fire.

"I am not handing you something fragile, Arjuna," Krishna said. "I am handing you a flame that has crossed the whole long age of the world to reach this single morning, and your two open hands."

And the sun climbed a little higher, as if it too remembered.