Svargarohana Parva

The last and shortest book closes the epic with a final test. Yudhishthira arrives in heaven to find Duryodhana enthroned there and his own brothers nowhere in sight, and refuses the place offered to him. Led down into a road of horrors to hear his family crying out to him, he chooses to stay in hell with them rather than take a heaven without them, and the illusion dissolves. The gods explain that the vision was the last residue of his own half truth about Ashvatthama, and the Pandavas, Draupadi, Karna and the great warriors of both sides return to the divine forms from which they came.