It came without warning.

One moment Arjuna was standing in his chariot, the reins slack in his hands, the dull orange sun of Kurukshetra pressing down on the dust and the armies and the nervous horses. The next moment, the battlefield was gone — peeled away like the skin of a fruit — and he was standing in a place that had no ground and no sky and no edges at all.

Only light.

Not sunlight. Arjuna knew sunlight — the way it poured through the palace windows of Indraprastha, the way it burned the back of his neck on a summer march, the way it painted shadows behind every tree and pillar. This light painted no shadows. There was nothing for it to fall on and nothing for it to fall from. It simply was, the way silence is in a deep forest at midnight — not the absence of sound, but a presence, a fullness, something that fills every corner of the world without being poured.

He raised his hand. No shadow fell beneath it. He turned in a slow circle. There was no source — no golden disc hanging in the east, no torch, no flame. The light came from everywhere, or perhaps from nowhere, or perhaps — and this thought made the hair on his arms rise — from the place itself. The place was the light.

He could feel it on his skin, warm as the first sun of spring, but softer, steadier, without the sharp edge that makes you squint. It did not flicker the way fire flickers. It did not wax and wane the way the moon does across the month. It had no dawn and no dusk.

"Krishna," Arjuna whispered. His voice did not echo. It was absorbed into the light the way water is absorbed into warm sand. "Where are we?"

Krishna stood beside him — or maybe he had always been beside him. In this place it was hard to tell what was near and what was far.

"This is My home," Krishna said. "The sun does not light it. The moon does not light it. Fire does not light it. It is its own lamp."

Arjuna felt something he had never felt before — a stillness that was not empty but full, the way a cup of warm milk is full, the way a mother's arms are full when they close around a child. There was nothing to want here. Nothing to fight for. Nothing to lose.

Then the battlefield returned — the dust, the conch shells, the smell of sweat and iron — and Arjuna blinked in the ordinary sunlight, which now seemed, for the first time in his life, like a dim and flickering candle.