Arjuna's first questions had poured out like water from a tilted jar. But his last question came slowly, the way a deep thought rises from the bottom of a still pond.

"Krishna," he said, and his voice had changed. It was quieter now. "There is something more I need to understand. You speak of sacrifice — of the fire, the offering, the giving. But who is the one behind all of it? When a priest pours ghee into the flames, who truly receives it? And stranger still — you say that this Lord of sacrifice lives inside the body. Inside me? How can the vast One who receives every offering in the world also be sitting here, in this small frame of bone and breath?"

Krishna listened, his gaze steady on his student.

Arjuna looked down at his own hands — the hands that had drawn the bow ten thousand times. "And here is the question I am almost afraid to ask," he said. "When my life ends — and on a battlefield, that hour may be very near — how will I find you then? The ones who train their minds, who hold themselves steady like a lamp in a windless room — how do they keep you in their thoughts at the very last breath, when everything else is slipping away?"

The plain was silent. Even the horses had stopped stamping. It was as if the whole field of Kurukshetra leaned in to hear.

"All my life," Arjuna went on, "I have practised. I practised the bow until my arrows flew without thinking. I practised the sword, the chariot, the war-cry. But no one ever taught me how to practise for the last moment. How does a person prepare his heart so that, when the body falls away, the mind does not panic or scatter — but rests on you, calm and sure?"

Krishna's face softened. This was the question he had been waiting for — not a question about winning or losing, but about what a person carries when there is nothing left to carry but themselves.

"Arjuna," he said gently, "you have just asked the question that every wise one, in every age, has finally asked. Not 'How do I live?' but 'How do I remember what matters most, all the way to the end?'"

He gathered the reins. A warm light seemed to gather with them.

"Sit," said Krishna. "I will answer each one. And the answers are simpler, and kinder, than you fear."