There is a moment, when a heavy worry has finally been spoken aloud, when a person stops struggling and simply turns to the one who can help. Arjuna reached that moment now.

He had laid out the whole shape of his fear — the sincere seeker who slips, the cloud torn apart, the soul that ends with nothing. And having said all of it, he did not try to answer his own question. He had learned, this long morning, that he could not trust his own churning mind to find its way out of a knot like this.

So he turned and faced Krishna fully, the way you turn to face someone when you have decided to trust them all the way.

"Krishna," he said, and his voice had gone quiet and steady. "This doubt sits in my heart like a knot pulled tight. I cannot loosen it myself — every time I tug at one end, the other end pulls tighter. I have tried. I cannot."

He let out a slow breath.

"You must cut it for me. Cut it clean through, all of it, so that not one thread of it is left behind. Not half an answer that leaves me wondering in the dark again tonight — the whole thing, cut away completely."

Krishna held the reins lightly and listened, and there was no impatience in him, only attention.

"And I am asking *you*," Arjuna went on, "because there is no one else who can. I have had teachers. I have heard wise men and learned priests. But a doubt as deep as this one — about what becomes of a soul, about whether a good effort can ever truly be lost — no ordinary teacher can reach the bottom of that. Only you. Anyone other than you simply could not cut a doubt like this. So I bring it to you, and I lay it down, and I will listen with my whole heart to whatever you say."

For a long moment the battlefield itself seemed to hush — the horses still, the banners slack, two friends in a chariot with the whole army waiting around them.

And Krishna, who had been waiting all along for Arjuna to ask with exactly this much trust, drew a breath to answer. What he was about to say would lift the fear away entirely.