She stands on the fallen buffalo, eight arms fanned wide like the spokes of a wheel that will not stop turning. The lion beside her is mid-roar. Mahishasura looks up — not in fury now, but in something closer to recognition. Her face is entirely still.
There is a kind of power that does not announce itself. It simply arrives, composed, adorned, unhurried — and the thing that thought itself invincible finds it has already lost.