Arjuna's new eye opened, and the world he knew fell away.

He had expected, perhaps, a brighter Krishna. A taller one. A king in golden armour. What stood before him instead could not be counted, measured, or framed.

Faces. There were faces everywhere — not two, not ten, but more than the grains of sand on a riverbank, more than the stars he had ever tried to number as a boy. Each face was turned a different way; each was alive; each was looking. And in every face, eyes — thousands upon thousands of eyes, some calm, some blazing, some closed in deep peace, all part of the one vast being.

Wherever Arjuna turned his gaze, a new wonder rose to meet it. A mouth here speaking words too great to hear. An eye there holding a whole sky inside it. Sights he had no names for kept appearing and appearing, as if the form were a painting that painted itself anew the instant you looked.

And the ornaments! Garlands of light. Crowns within crowns. Bracelets and necklaces that shone like a hundred dawns, each one divine, each one different, none of them ever still.

And the arms — so many arms, lifted, holding weapons of every kind. Not lowered in rest, but raised, alert, ready, gleaming. A discus turning. A mace. A bow. A blade of pure fire. Power held in countless hands, all at once, all awake.

Arjuna tried to take it in the way he took in a battlefield — counting, measuring, finding the edges. But there were no edges. Every time he thought he had found the boundary of the form, another world of faces opened beyond it.

Far away, Sanjaya pressed his hands to his own forehead as he described it to the king. "Countless, my lord," he kept saying. "I have no other word. Countless mouths, countless eyes, countless wonders, countless raised weapons. To count them would be to count the universe itself. Arjuna is not looking at a god. He is looking at everything."