Arjuna smelled sandalwood smoke before he saw anything change.

One moment they were standing on the dry earth of Kurukshetra, the chariot wheels still, the horses flicking their ears at flies. The next, a ripple passed through the air — like heat shimmer off summer stone — and the battlefield was gone.

In its place stood a tree.

But not like any tree Arjuna had ever climbed as a boy in the palace orchards of Hastinapura. This tree was upside down. Its roots reached upward, pale and silver, threading into a sky that had no end — no clouds, no sun, just light, vast and steady and impossibly old. Its trunk descended from that brightness, thick as a temple pillar, its bark the colour of dark honey. And its branches — thousands upon thousands of them — spread downward and outward in every direction, each one heavy with shimmering leaves that caught the light and hummed.

Yes, hummed. Each leaf was singing.

Arjuna stepped closer. The sound grew. It was not one voice but millions — overlapping, braiding, echoing — and he recognised fragments. The Rig Veda. The Sama Veda. Hymns his mother Kunti had chanted at dawn. Prayers the priests had sung at his wedding. Every sacred word ever spoken seemed to rustle in those leaves.

"Krishna," he whispered, "what is this?"

Krishna stood beside him, the peacock feather in his hair perfectly still despite a wind that seemed to come from everywhere. "This is the ashvattha," he said. "The tree of everything. Its roots drink from Brahman — the source that has no source. Its branches become the world you know. Every creature, every desire, every lifetime hangs from it like fruit."

Arjuna reached out to touch a branch. It was warm, alive, pulsing with a slow rhythm — like a heartbeat, but deeper. Through the bark he could feel the hum of the leaves, the pull of the roots, the whole living engine of creation trembling under his fingertips.

"It's called ashvattha," Krishna continued, "because nothing in it stays till tomorrow. The leaves fall, new ones grow. Worlds are born and dissolve. Yet the tree itself never dies."

Arjuna looked up into the roots, into that endless silver light. He looked down into the branches, where shadows gathered like sleeping animals. Somewhere far below, he thought he could hear rivers, and children laughing, and the creak of cart wheels on a dusty road.

"The wise," Krishna said, "are the ones who see the whole tree — not just the branch they are sitting on."