The cosmic form spoke, and Its voice was not loud. It was steady, the way the turning of the seasons is steady, and it filled the whole sky.

"Kālo'smi," it said. "I am Time."

Arjuna had asked who this fierce being was. Now he had his answer, and it was the one answer he had not expected. Not a king. Not a god with a name from the old stories. Time itself — the thing that turns morning into night, the green leaf into the brown one, the baby into the old man, the mountain, given enough ages, into sand.

"I am the destroyer of worlds, grown mighty," the form continued, "and I have come forth here to gather all beings to their end."

Arjuna thought of all the things he had ever loved and lost. The toys of his childhood. The summers that ended. The people who had grown old. He had always felt that something invisible was carrying everything away, quietly, all the time. Now that something stood before him with a face, and it was telling him the truth plainly.

"Even without you," Time said, "none of these warriors standing in the armies before you will remain alive." It was not a threat. It was a fact, spoken gently. The men on that battlefield, the brave and the cruel alike, were already inside the turning of the wheel. Their hour had come, whether Arjuna lifted his bow or laid it down forever in the dust.

Arjuna understood, then, that he had been carrying a weight that was never his to carry. He had thought that everything depended on him — that he, with his small arms and his one bow, was the one deciding who lived and who died. But the great work of endings did not belong to him. It belonged to Time, vast and mighty, doing what Time has always done.

The knowledge did not make Arjuna proud. It made him humble, and strangely, a little lighter. He was not the centre of the wheel. He was only a spoke in it, like everyone else.