Samudra: Dwaraka Submerges

The ocean claims the city

Arjuna races to Prabhasa upon hearing Daruka's terrible news, only to find the aftermath of annihilation, the Yadava warriors dead, Krishna and Balarama departed from their mortal forms. With Vasudeva dying of grief and the city of Dwaraka promised to the sea, Arjuna performs the funeral rites and organizes the evacuation of sixteen thousand women and children. As the survivors' caravan departs toward Hastinapura, the ocean rises to reclaim the golden city. What the Yadavas built in glory disappears beneath the waves in a single night, completing Gandhari's curse and closing an era.

Arjuna Receives the News

In Hastinapura, Arjuna was the first to see Daruka's chariot approaching. Even from a distance, he could tell something was terribly wrong. The chariot bore no banners. The horses were lathered and exhausted. And Daruka himself, as he stumbled down from the vehicle, looked like a man who had witnessed the end of the world.

Which, in a sense, he had.

"Arjuna..." Daruka could barely speak. His hands shook. His eyes were wild with a grief too large to contain. "You must come. You must come now. Dwaraka... the Yadavas... Krishna himself..."

Arjuna caught him as his legs buckled. "Speak clearly, Daruka. What has happened?"

The story came out in fragments, the pilgrimage, the drinking, the brawl that became a massacre. The eraka grass. The thousands dead. Balarama's withdrawal and departure. And finally, most terribly, the news that Krishna himself had been struck by a hunter's arrow and departed for the heavens.

"He told me to find you," Daruka sobbed. "He said you would know what to do. The survivors, the women, the children, the elders, they wait at Prabhasa. Dwaraka itself will be claimed by the sea. He said you must come quickly."

Arjuna stood frozen. His dearest friend, the one who had guided him through his darkest moments, who had spoken the Gita on the battlefield, who had been his charioteer and confidant and the closest thing he had to a brother outside his own blood, was gone.

For a long moment, he could not breathe. The world seemed to tilt, and he understood for the first time what Balarama must have felt when he said that something had broken inside him.

But Arjuna was a Kshatriya. Grief could wait. There was duty to perform.

"Prepare the chariots," he commanded. "We ride for Prabhasa at once."

The Devastation at Prabhasa