Arjuna had been overwhelmed by the faces, the eyes, the weapons, the light. But now, as his divine eye grew steadier, he began to see what the form held — and it stopped his breath.

The universe was inside it.

Not a picture of the universe. Not a map of it. The thing itself. Arjuna looked into the vast body of the God of gods and saw the whole world resting there, all in one place, yet still spread out into its countless separate parts.

He saw the green river-plains of the earth, the very fields his people farmed. He saw mountains he had crossed as a boy and oceans he had only heard of in stories. He saw the high heavens where the gods live, shining like cities of gold, and the deep dark places below. He saw forests, rivers, villages, distant kingdoms whose names he did not know — all of it gathered inside the one form, the way a thousand reflections gather in a single drop of dew.

And it was not jumbled together into a blur. Each part was still itself. The rivers still flowed. The fires still burned. The gods still moved in their high halls. People he had never met went about their small, ordinary days. Birds flew. Children slept. All of it, separate and alive and in its own place — and all of it, at the same time, held within one body.

"He sees it, my king," Sanjaya said, and his voice broke a little. "The whole world, every part of it, resting inside the God of gods. Imagine looking up one night and finding that the sky, the earth, the seas, the homes of the gods, and your own small house too — all of them — were rooms inside a single being who was holding everything at once, and had been holding it all along."

Arjuna stood very still. He was no longer thinking of the war, or of his cousins, or of who would win. A much larger thought had taken hold of him: everything I have ever loved, and everything I have ever feared, lives inside the One who is standing in front of me.