There had been a moment in the dialogue that Sanjaya would never, ever be able to explain in ordinary words. He had tried, when reporting it to the king. He had reached for the grandest comparisons he knew, the light of a thousand suns rising together in the sky, and even those had felt far too small.

For there had come a point when Arjuna, longing to see Krishna as He truly was, had asked to behold His real form. And Krishna had granted it.

In that instant the gentle charioteer had opened out into something boundless. Sanjaya, watching from afar, had seen it too. Countless faces, countless eyes, blazing in every direction. Whole worlds turning inside that single, endless shape. Gods and stars and oceans, the past and the future, all gathered into one living, shining vastness. It was beautiful beyond beauty and terrible beyond terror, all at once.

Even Arjuna, the bravest of warriors, had trembled and bowed his head and begged Krishna to become gentle and ordinary again. And Krishna, kind as ever, had folded the whole cosmos back up into the form of a smiling friend holding the reins of a chariot.

Now, days later, sitting beside the blind king, Sanjaya found that vision rising up inside him once more.

"And that, O King —" he said, and had to stop, because his breath caught. "That form. The most wonderful form of Hari. When I remember it — and I cannot help remembering it — I am filled with an amazement so great that I have no name for it. My mind cannot hold it, and yet I cannot let it go. Again and again the wonder rises in me, and again and again my heart leaps with joy."

The old king sat in his darkness, listening to a servant describe a light he himself would never see. And Sanjaya, eyes shining, simply let the wonder wash over him one more time, grateful past all telling that he had been there to behold it.