Indra, fearing for his son Arjuna's life, comes disguised as a Brahmin to beg Karna's invincible birth-armor and earrings. On the tenth day of the war, Bhishma at last falls - pierced by hundreds of Arjuna's arrows shot through Shikhandi's screen - and lies on a bed of arrows waiting until the auspicious hour to die.

On the thirteenth day of the war, the boy Abhimanyu is killed inside a formation that only a handful of warriors could break. Arjuna swears to kill the man who blocked Abhimanyu's rescue - Jayadratha - by sunset the next day. The fourteenth and fifteenth days hold the most desperate fighting of the war: a night battle in which Ghatotkacha consumes Karna's invincible spear; Drona's brahmastra loosed upon ordinary soldiers; and the half-truth that finally lays the master of arms in the dust.

After Karna's death, only the Madra king Shalya remains to command the Kauravas. Tricked into the war long before, he falls to Yudhishthira; the twins Nakula and Sahadeva finish the captains; Shakuni dies at Sahadeva's hand; and at last Duryodhana, having watched his hundred brothers die in eighteen days, hides at the bottom of a lake until the Pandavas taunt him out for the mace-duel that ends the war.

On the night after Duryodhana's death, the last three surviving Kauravas - Ashwatthama foremost - sneak into the Pandava camp and butcher every sleeping warrior. The next morning, Gandhari, walking the battlefield with her surviving daughters-in-law, lays a curse on Krishna that will, thirty-six years later, kill his entire clan. Yudhishthira is crowned in a kingdom of corpses.

Fallen but not yet dead, Bhishma lies on a bed of arrows for fifty-eight days waiting for the sun's northern turning. In those weeks the new king Yudhishthira sits at his grandsire's feet and receives the longest body of statecraft, dharma, and royal philosophy in the epic - the Shanti Parva and Anushasana Parva. When the auspicious hour arrives, Bhishma chooses his own death. And later, when Arjuna confesses to Krishna that he has forgotten the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna repeats it in his own way as the Anugita.

To consecrate the new dynasty, Yudhishthira releases the white horse of the Ashvamedha - the sacred rite by which a king claims sovereignty over every land the horse touches. Arjuna follows. Across half the world he fights every king who tries to detain the horse. At Manipura his own son by Chitrangada, Babruvahana, kills him in single combat - and his Naga wife Ulupi resurrects him with a gem from the underworld. And just before the rite, Parikshit is born in Hastinapura, the line continued in the very moment the line nearly ended.

Having broken a rule of the brothers' shared marriage by interrupting one of Yudhishthira's private hours with Draupadi, Arjuna sentences himself to twelve years of pilgrimage. Along the road he meets three women who will become his wives - Ulupi the Naga princess who pulls him into her underwater palace, Chitrangada the princess of Manipura, and Subhadra of Dwaraka whom he carries off with Krishna's quiet help.

After twelve years in the forest, the Pandavas must spend a thirteenth year unrecognized or the exile starts again. They enter the small kingdom of Matsya in elaborate disguises - Yudhishthira as a Brahmin gambler, Bhima as a cook, Arjuna as a eunuch dance-teacher, Draupadi as a queen's maid. On the year's last week, Duryodhana raids Virata's cattle and the disguise is broken in a single afternoon by the bow of a dance-teacher who reveals himself to be the world's greatest archer.

King Drupada of Panchala, defeated and humiliated by his old friend Drona, performs a desperate sacrifice and brings forth two children from the fire-pit: Dhrishtadyumna, born to kill Drona, and Draupadi, born to ignite a war. Far to the east, the princess Amba - long ago abducted and rejected by Bhishma - performs her own austerities, dies, and is reborn as Shikhandi to finish what she could not finish in her first life.

Before the war, before Hastinapura's quarrel, there was the long line of the moon. Pururavas loved the apsara Urvashi, Nahusha ruled heaven and fell as a serpent, Yayati borrowed his son Puru's youth and learned that desire is never quenched, Shakuntala shamed King Dushyanta with the truth, their son Bharata gave the land its name, and Kuru made the field of Kurukshetra holy, until the throne came at last to King Shantanu. The epic tells some of the oldest of these tales only briefly, and their fuller telling comes from later tradition.