Arjuna had asked to see, and now he could not stop seeing.

A moment ago there had been only Krishna — his friend, his charioteer, holding the reins in two ordinary hands. Then Krishna had touched Arjuna's eyes with a divine sight, and the world had cracked open like a seed.

Now the chariot, the battlefield, the two armies — all of it had become small as a grain of sand. In its place stood a form so vast that Arjuna's eyes could find no edge to it. And inside that one shining body, he began to recognise faces.

There, glowing like sunrise, were the Adityas, the gods of light. There were the Vasus, the gods of earth and sky and water. Arjuna saw Indra with his thunderbolt, Agni wrapped in flame, Vayu the wind, Yama the keeper of endings — every god he had ever prayed to, all of them living inside this single form.

And not only gods. He saw great thronging crowds of beings of every kind — creatures of the forests, the rivers, the deep places of the earth, beings he had no names for, pressed together in countless multitudes.

High above them all, seated upon a great open lotus the way a king sits upon a throne, was Brahma himself, the four-faced creator, the one who shapes the worlds at the beginning of time. Around him sat the rishis, the truth-seeing sages, their faces calm and luminous, the ones whose chants hold the cosmos steady.

And coiling through the bright spaces between, Arjuna saw the divyas, the divine serpents, the great nagas, jewelled and shimmering, the guardians of hidden depths, gliding within the Lord's body as fish glide through a sea.

Arjuna's breath caught. Everything was here. Every god, every sage, every creature, the maker of the worlds and the worlds he had made — all of it inside the body of the friend who, only this morning, had been steadying the horses for him.

"I see them," Arjuna whispered, hardly daring to speak. "I see them all, in You."