POV:Mahabharata war
The eighteenth day of Kurukshetra died with the triumphant cry of conch shells and with the solemn chanting of priests, with a silence so immense that it seemed to press against the skin like a suffocating shroud. The battlefield, which had once thundered beneath the hooves of restless horses and echoed with the clash of celestial weapons, now lay broken and exhausted under a bruised sky, its soil churned into a dark mire of trampled banners, shattered chariots, and blood that had long since lost its warmth. The air itself felt diseased, heavy with the metallic scent of blood, death and the bitter smoke of extinguished ambitions, and above this desolation circled vultures who had grown fearless in the presence of fallen kings.
It was upon this vast grave of dynasties that a solitary figure walked with deliberate, unhurried steps, her white garments brushing against the corpses of princes, her bare feet unflinching as they touched the cold remains of sons who would never rise again. Her white garments turned blood red with each passing bodies which shook her motherly heart. She was Gandhari, the Queen Mother.
Gandhari did not require sight to comprehend the devastation before her. For decades she had embraced voluntary darkness, binding her eyes in cloth so that she might share in the blindness of her husband, choosing shadow over light as an act of loyalty and defiance against destiny itself. Yet the darkness that enveloped Kurukshetra was of another kind entirely; it was not the darkness of covered vision but the darkness of annihilation, a moral eclipse under which righteousness and ambition had devoured each other until nothing recognizable remained. The wind that moved across the field carried to her the faint whispers of names she had once spoken with tenderness—Duryodhana, Dushasana, Vikarna, and ninety-seven others—names that had once filled the halls of Hastinapura with youthful arrogance and now lingered as echoes in a world that no longer had room for them. Each step she took felt like an intrusion into the silence of their extinguished lives, and yet she continued forward, guided not by sight but by a mother's unerring instinct, drawn toward the body that lay at the center of her grief.
When her trembling hands at last found him, she did not cry out. Her fingers traced the contours of a face she had memorized through touch since infancy, a face that had once tilted upward in pride and defiance, now slack in the indifference of death. Duryodhana, her firstborn, her flawed and stubborn son whose ambition had been both his crown and his undoing, lay broken upon the earth he had sought to rule. She knelt beside him, her palms resting lightly upon his cold brow, and in that moment the vastness of the battlefield seemed to shrink until it contained only the space between a mother and her fallen child. Tears threatened to rise, but they did not fall freely; grief had calcified within her, transforming from sorrow into something denser, something heavier, something that trembled on the edge of becoming wrath.
It was then that she sensed another figure approaching her. Before a word was spoken, before the faint sound of approaching footsteps reached her ears, the atmosphere shifted as though the wind itself had altered its allegiance. The stench of blood and decay parted subtly around a different fragrance—sandalwood and distant rain—an aroma that seemed almost sacrilegious amidst so much ruin. She did not need to be told who stood behind her. The presence was unmistakable, serene and unbroken, carrying within it the stillness of someone untouched by the chaos he had orchestrated. Krishna had come to the field not as a warrior stained with the dust of combat, but as the silent witness to destiny fulfilled, his garments unsoiled, his gaze steady, his countenance bearing neither triumph nor remorse but an unfathomable calm that, in that hour, felt like cruelty.
For several heartbeats they remained thus—she kneeling amid her sons' corpses, he standing amid the consequences of his counsel—while the world around them seemed suspended in anticipation. When Gandhari rose to her full height, the cloth that bound her eyes fluttered in the restless wind, appearing less like a symbol of devotion and more like the banner of a kingdom permanently lowered. Her voice, when it emerged, did not tremble with hysteria; it was measured and controlled, but beneath its restraint lay a depth of anguish that threatened to fracture the very air between them.
"Is this," she asked, her words heavy with restrained fury, "the righteousness you spoke of? Is this the dharma you so eloquently defended while guiding my sons and their cousins toward slaughter?"
Krishna did not immediately respond. He did not offer consolation, nor did he retreat behind philosophical discourse. His silence was not ignorance; it was acknowledgment. Yet in that acknowledgment lay an unbearable weight, for it suggested that everything that had transpired—the humiliation of Draupadi, the exile of the Pandavas, the dice game, the vows, the betrayals, the celestial weapons unleashed—had been threads woven into a design he had foreseen and permitted. To a mother who stood upon the ashes of her lineage, such foresight was indistinguishable from complicity.
"My sons were not without fault," Gandhari continued, her voice deepening as memories surged within her like a tide determined to drown restraint. "They were arrogant, consumed by pride, blinded by envy and ambition. I will not deny their flaws, for I know them more intimately than any court historian ever shall. But they were mine. Each one of them carried my blood, my hopes, my prayers whispered into the silence of nights when I feared this very end. And you, who possessed the power to halt this descent into annihilation, chose instead to guide it."
The wind rose sharply, lifting ash from the ground in spirals that circled them like restless spirits unwilling to depart. Somewhere in the distance a vulture cried, its harsh call slicing through the stillness. Krishna's face remained serene, yet there was a subtle sorrow in his gaze, as though he bore not only the burden of the war's outcome but the inevitability of it. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft, resonant, carrying the cadence of someone who had long contemplated the fragility of human choice.
"Devi," he said, "what has unfolded was bound by time and the accumulated deeds of many lives. The wheel of dharma turns beyond the will of any one being."
At this, something within Gandhari fractured irrevocably. "Do not speak to me of wheels and time," she replied, her composure cracking to reveal the rawness beneath. "Time did not cradle these children within its womb. Time did not teach them to walk, to speak, to wield weapons in the hope of protecting their heritage. I did. And now time stands before me in your form, asking for understanding where there is only emptiness."
Her grief surged forward, no longer content to remain contained within the boundaries of reason. It expanded outward, drawing upon the ancient authority of a mother's anguish, upon the sacred power vested in one who had borne and nurtured life. In that moment, she was not merely a queen bereaved of heirs; she was the embodiment of a sorrow so profound that even the cosmos seemed to lean closer to hear its articulation.
"As my lineage ends upon this field," she declared, her voice resonating with a force that caused the earth beneath her feet to tremble subtly, "so too shall yours know extinction. The Yadavas, proud in their strength and intoxicated by their invincibility, shall not fall to external enemies nor perish in honorable battle. No. They shall consume themselves, driven mad by arrogance and discord. Brother shall raise arms against brother, friend against friend, until your clan lies scattered like these bodies before us."
The sky darkened imperceptibly, as though clouds unseen had gathered in response to her words. Krishna listened without interruption, his expression unaltered, yet within his silence lay acceptance rather than defiance. Gandhari continued, her voice now threaded with the terrible clarity of irrevocable decree.
"And you, Vasudeva, will witness it. You will stand amidst the ruin of your own kin as I stand now, powerless to prevent what unfolds. The grief that consumes me shall find its reflection in you. This is not vengeance born solely of anger; it is the decree of a mother whose womb has been emptied by destiny's cruelty."
For a fleeting instant, the battlefield seemed to hold its breath. Even the carrion birds paused in their descent. Krishna closed his eyes, not in protest, but in acknowledgment of the force she had unleashed. When he opened them again, there was neither resentment nor fear in his gaze, only a solemn recognition of the truth that sorrow, once invoked with such conviction, becomes woven into the fabric of fate.
"I accept your curse," he said quietly.
There was no challenge in his tone, no attempt to counteract her words with divine power. His acceptance sealed the pronouncement, granting it passage into the realm of inevitability. In distant Dvārakā, though none yet perceived it, the seeds of destruction stirred within the hearts of the Yadavas, dormant but destined to awaken. The ocean that caressed the city's shores shifted restlessly, as if sensing that one day it would reclaim what stood upon its edge.
Gandhari turned away then, her strength nearly spent yet her resolve unbroken. She did not seek further discourse, for there was nothing left to say that could restore what had been lost. As she walked back across the field of the dead, the wind carried with it the faint echo of her curse, embedding it within the currents of time. Behind her, Krishna remained standing amidst the fallen, a solitary figure beneath a darkened sky, bearing in silence the knowledge that the end of one dynasty had sown the beginning of another tragedy.
Thus, upon the blood-soaked plains of Kurukshetra, a mother's grief transcended mortality and reshaped destiny itself, ensuring that the wheel of destruction would turn once more—this time within the house of the very one who had allowed it to spin. And in that solemn acceptance, the future of the Yadavas was sealed, their doom not delivered by enemy hands, but by the inexorable fulfillment of a curse born from unbearable love. .