Just before the great war begins, Queen Kunti approaches Karna, the great champion of the enemy forces, to reveal a devastating secret: he is her firstborn son. In an emotional confrontation, Karna must choose between the mother who abandoned him and the friend who crowned him.

After Duryodhana falls, the war is officially over. But Ashwatthama, driven mad by the deceitful murder of his father Drona, launches a horrific midnight raid on the sleeping Pandava camp, turning a righteous victory into an absolute tragedy.

After years of training under Guru Drona, the Pandavas and Kauravas display their skills in a grand tournament at Hastinapura. The event, meant to showcase Arjuna's supremacy, is interrupted by a mysterious challenger who changes the course of history.

During their final year of exile in disguise, the Pandavas live in the kingdom of Virata. When the Queen's brother, the powerful General Kichaka, attempts to harass Draupadi, Bhima must take a deadly risk to protect her without revealing their true identities.

As war becomes inevitable, Krishna travels to Hastinapura as a peace envoy for the Pandavas. When Duryodhana rejects his proposal and attempts to capture him, Krishna reveals his awe-inspiring cosmic form, showing that the fate of the world is already decided.

Told briefly in the epic and at length in the Puranas: hidden from the tyrant Kamsa, the divine child Krishna grows up among the cowherds of Vrindavan, slaying demons sent to destroy him, taming the serpent Kaliya, lifting Mount Govardhana on his finger, and finally returning to Mathura to fulfill the prophecy of his birth.

Princess Rukmini of Vidarbha is to be married against her will to the malevolent Shishupala. In a tale the epic mentions only briefly and later tradition tells in full, she sends a secret letter to Krishna, who arrives at the wedding's eve and carries her away by chariot - a theft that would become love, and that fixed Shishupala's ancient enmity in stone.

King Shantanu of Hastinapura meets the goddess Ganga on the riverbank, marries her under a single strange condition, and watches in silent agony as she drowns each of their children in turn - until, on the eighth, he breaks his vow and learns the curse that bound them all.

King Pandu, hunting in the forest, looses an arrow at a deer and discovers he has killed not a beast but a sage in the act of love. The sage's dying curse forces Pandu to renounce his throne, retreat into the mountains with his two queens, and ultimately father his five sons not by his own seed but by the gods themselves.

The five Pandava brothers and the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra grow up together in the palace under the wary eye of Vidura - until the arrival of the master Drona transforms a princely education into a forge of rivalries, vows, and the small, lethal injustices that will one day burn the world.