For a long moment after Krishna stopped speaking, Arjuna said nothing at all.

The two armies waited on the great field of Kurukshetra, banners hanging in the still morning air, a million eyes fixed on the small chariot between the two hosts. But Arjuna had forgotten the armies. He had forgotten the coming war. He was looking at his charioteer — his cousin, his lifelong friend, the dark-skinned cowherd-prince who had grown up racing him through the forests of their boyhood — and seeing him, truly seeing him, for the first time.

Krishna had just told him: I am the source of all; from Me everything flows. And something in those words had finally fitted together every strange and wonderful thing Arjuna had felt that day. The friend who held his reins was not only a friend. He was the spring behind the river of all things.

Arjuna's bow Gandiva slid from his hands and rested in the chariot. Slowly he stood. His knees were unsteady. He brought his palms together before his chest, the way one does only before what is utterly holy, and bowed his head.

"You are the Supreme Brahman," he said, and his voice shook. "The highest reality, behind and above everything that is. You are the supreme home — the place all things rest in and return to. You are the supreme purifier, that washes every heart clean."

He looked up. Krishna sat quietly, the peacock feather stirring at his brow, listening.

"You are the eternal Person," Arjuna went on, the words coming faster now, pouring out like the silk of Draupadi's endless sari. "The shining one, the divine one. You are the first God of all the gods — there was no god before you. You were never born, for you are the one from whom birth itself comes. And you are everywhere, all at once, filling all the worlds."

The wind picked up. The banners stirred. And Arjuna stood with folded hands in his war-chariot, no longer a frightened soldier but a son gazing up at the boundless thing he had somehow, all his life, called friend.