"As he set foot on the arduous path fate had called him to, neither the splendor of the kingdom nor the peace of the palace could stop him. To uphold his father's word and the universal order (Dharma), he left behind everything he knew and went deep into the wilderness, into a world of giants and mysteries. For the true hero is one who can sacrifice comfort and return transformed at the end of the journey." Ayodhya Kanda 18–19.

Before we begin to tell of the hero's transformation, let us first put ourselves somewhere heroism is possible. We are in the midst of the Second World War, at Stalingrad, El Alamein, Iwo Jima. A grenade lands in our midst; some of us throw ourselves on it, sacrificing ourselves to save the others. In the real world, people perform acts like these to save comrades-in-arms with whom they have formed profound bonds. We were not there, so let us not try to analyze what those who made such a sacrifice felt or thought. We will leave that question respectfully alone. We are concerned with our own myth of heroism.

We can continue with those readers who did not throw themselves on the grenade that landed among us. So that those who sacrificed themselves for us can continue reading as well, we will, as we always do, freeze the text later and go back for them. For now, let us continue with the survivors—or at least with those whose injuries are minor enough that they can still read and write.

Ori is a young woman getting on with her horizontal life. She works as an engineer for a car manufacturer. Then a crisis arrives to set our hero in motion: one of the Bracelets of Eternity, lost for thousands of years, falls into the hands of the Evil King Scar. Ori quits her job at Opel. She immediately regrets it. A mentor briefs her on the journey. Ori first finds the remaining bracelets, then confronts Scar, defeats him, and returns with the Evil King’s bracelet—her reward. A magnificent transformation for a young woman who works as an engineer at Opel.

By now, almost everyone will have realized that we are not interested in Ori. The hero who interests us is the reader who threw themselves on the grenade in the scene above. Let us rewind the story and freeze it at that exact moment. We should give those who threw themselves on the grenade a little time to read everything they missed between the explosion and this point. Then we can all continue together from just before the blast.

A normal person, lying on top of that grenade at this point, would generally have their eyes shut and their teeth clenched, and would therefore be unable to read the story. So they need to be sure that, for the moment, the grenade is not going to explode. Then they should ask themselves one question: “Why did I throw myself on this grenade?”

A strange temporal rupture occurs: the reader who asked no questions before throwing themselves on the grenade finds, once we freeze it, that the questions come one after another. Two of them sound as though they belong to other universes. The reader looks around and sees the terrified eyes staring back at them, wide with fear, and realizes that the least frightened person there is the one who is going to die—the reader themselves.

Now, with your permission, I will lift this reader off the grenade and place them to one side among the onlookers, then ask my editor to throw themselves on it—after all, my editor gets to read this story before you do. Is our reader still the least frightened person here? Perhaps they are still in shock. We move the story forward by the span of a few wingbeats. Then we examine once again the face of the reader who threw themselves on the grenade a moment ago. They stand there blank-faced, looking at my editor. Thenthe grenade explodes and no one can correct these spelling mistkaes.