Ravana

Flush with his conquest of Kubera, Ravana was crossing Kailasa in the Pushpaka when the craft stopped dead in the air. He found Nandi blocking the way, a guardian who told him the mountain was Shiva's own playground and forbidden to everyone. Ravana mocked the guardian's monkey-like face and pushed on toward the peak regardless, so Nandi cursed him on the spot: for the insult, monkeys as strong as Ravana himself would one day bring him down. Undeterred, Ravana reached the mountain, thrust his twenty arms under it and, boasting of his own strength before Shiva, wrenched the whole peak up by its roots, deer, trees and beasts of prey still clinging to its slopes.

Shiva only smiled and pressed the mountain back down with his big toe. The weight crushed Ravana's arms where they lay trapped beneath the rock, and his scream tore through the three worlds so loudly that gods, animals and men alike thought the world was ending. Far from angry, Shiva was delighted by the strength and daring the howl proved, and freed him, giving him a new name on the spot: Ravana, the one whose cry made the worlds reverberate. His own ministers, astonished, watched their king stand humbled but renamed, carrying out of Kailasa the very title he would answer to for the rest of his story.

Hearing that the thousand-armed king Kartavirya Arjuna was the mightiest kshatriya alive, Ravana flew to his city of Mahishmati and demanded to know where he was. Arjuna's ministers refused to say and stood in his way, so Ravana's rakshasas cut them down in moments, eating many of the dead before more of Arjuna's soldiers arrived and were slaughtered in turn. Ravana then found Arjuna himself downstream on the Narmada, sporting in the river with his wives while Ravana was still setting up a golden Shivalinga on the bank to worship. Arjuna, showing off for his women, had stretched all one thousand of his arms bank to bank across the river like a dam, and Ravana's scouts came back frightened, describing a stranger with arms like tree branches holding back the whole current.

The two kings fought with maces that struck like earthquakes. Arjuna's blow should have killed anyone alive, but it shattered to dust against Ravana's chest, which Brahma's boon had made impervious to gods and demons alike. Even so, Arjuna beat him down, seized him in his thousand arms as Garuda seizes a serpent, and carried him bound into Mahishmati while the city showered its returning king with flowers. Ravana's grandfather, the sage Pulastya, heard of the capture in heaven and travelled down to plead for him, telling Arjuna that he had won fame enough already in binding a grandson before whom the sea and wind themselves stood still. Arjuna freed Ravana without condition, loaded him with gifts, and swore before a sacred fire that neither would ever attack the other again. Ravana went home to Lanka bound by that oath, with no king left anywhere who dared stand against him.

Fresh from a string of conquests, Ravana met the wandering sage Narada in the sky and was told that mortal men fooled themselves into thinking they were immortal, when the only true lord over them was Yama, god of death. Subdue Yama, Narada said, and real fame would follow. Ravana had already planned to conquer the netherworld and churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality, but Narada turned him instead toward Yama's own city, and Ravana set out at once with his counsellors, declaring he would put the tormentor of all living things to death.

Arriving in the kingdom of the dead in the Pushpaka, Ravana watched the souls of sinners reaping the fruit of their own deeds while Yama's servants tormented them, and he attacked those servants outright, forcing the souls free with a roar that echoed from all ten of his heads. The freed dead cried his name in gratitude as Yama's legions swarmed the Pushpaka in their hundreds of thousands, battering it with every weapon they carried. Only the protection of Brahma kept the flying palace aloft, and Ravana's own counsellors fought on beside him, bleeding from every limb. When Yama heard that his army had been destroyed, he called for his golden chariot and rode out with the kaaladanda, the staff of time, blazing at his side, and a burning noose in his other hand. Ravana's own ministers fainted or fled at the sight, but Ravana did not move.

Yama raised the staff to strike him down, but he could not: Brahma's boon protected Ravana from every god, and no blow could land. Yama set his weapon aside. If he could not kill the rakshasa, he said, there was no reason to fight on, and he vanished from the field with his chariot and his horses, leaving Ravana the victor. Ravana's roar of triumph shook the world. He flew home in the Pushpaka covered in his own blood, gashes torn across his arms and broken bones showing through his skin, yet he only smiled, and his ministers and commanders roared his name to the sky as the rakshasa who had conquered Death itself.

After his sister Shurpanakha fled to Lanka with her nose and ears cut off and told Ravana how Rama's brother Lakshmana had maimed her, and how their own cousins Khara and Dushana had died with fourteen thousand rakshasas trying to avenge her, Ravana brooded on the insult. Shurpanakha pressed him further, telling him Rama's wife Sita was the loveliest woman alive and that whoever won her would win everything. Ravana decided the only way to destroy Rama was to take his wife where he could never find her, and he flew to the hermit Maricha to demand his help. Maricha begged him to leave Rama alone, warning that the prince was no ordinary man and that the attempt would end in Ravana's own death, but Ravana would not be turned aside. He threatened and cajoled his uncle in turn until Maricha, trembling, agreed to become a golden deer and lure Rama away from the hermitage at Panchavati.

The deer, dappled in silver and gold, wandered close to the hermitage until Sita saw it and begged Rama to catch it alive for her. Enchanted himself, Rama went after it with Lakshmana close by. Disguised now as a wandering ascetic, his head shaved and carrying an ascetic's three-poled staff, Ravana made his way to the undefended hermitage and there took Sita. As his chariot rose into the sky with her aboard, the old vulture Jatayu, who had long watched over the hermits, spread his wings across its path and fought Ravana in the air, tearing at him with beak and talon until Ravana's sword cut through one of the bird's wings and sent him tumbling to the earth below. Ravana carried Sita on to Lanka.

By the time Indra sent down his own chariot and charioteer Matali to even the fight, Rama and Ravana had been duelling for what felt like the whole day. Rama began to get the better of him, cutting off Ravana's central head with a single arrow, only to watch another sprout in its place before the Rakshasa's scream had even died away. Ravana struck at Matali himself rather than at Rama, which only drove Rama to loose arrow after arrow until the seas themselves seemed to boil with the force of it. Still, every head he severed grew straight back, and Ravana fought on with each fresh head as if he had only just entered the battle. Through it all his mind ran on his own griefs: Surpanakha's bleeding face, Hanuman's mockery, the burning towers of Lanka, Vibhishana's desertion, his daughter-in-law Sulochana on Indrajit's funeral pyre, his brother Kumbhakarna's dismembered body, and his queen Mandodari's laments, and every memory fed his fury higher.

Then, with no warning the omens could explain, Ravana's own strength began to fail him. His aim went wide, his hands shook, and it seemed to those watching that every curse and every debt of his whole life had finally come due at once. Matali told Rama plainly that heads alone would never finish this enemy: only the Brahmastra, Brahma's own weapon, could end him. Rama called the astra into his hands, Vayu its wings and Agni its head, heavy as the mountain Meru, and with Sita's face before Rama's own eyes, he loosed it at Ravana. The weapon struck home and killed him instantly, and for the length of one thunderclap it was daylight again over the battlefield, though the sun had already set.