Tarakasura’s boon was specific: he could only be killed by a son of Shiva. The logic was tactical — he had correctly calculated that Shiva, sealed in asceticism and grief after Sati’s death, would not produce a son in any reasonable timeframe. The boon was effectively immortality, dressed up as a specific condition.
For the period between Sati’s death and Parvati’s marriage to Shiva, Tarakasura ruled the three worlds with the particular arrogance of someone who believes they have found a permanent loophole. He drove the gods from their positions. He disrupted sacrifices. He imposed his will on the natural order with the thoroughgoing enthusiasm of someone who has been told they cannot be stopped.
The son who could stop him was Kartikeya.
He was born from fire — literally. Shiva’s seed, when released from his meditative state, was too powerful to be contained by any ordinary vessel. It passed through Agni the fire god, who could not hold it fully and passed it to the Ganga, who carried it to the reeds of the riverbank, where six divine women — the Krittikas, the stars of the Pleiades — found six simultaneous babies in the reeds and each fed one. When Parvati arrived, the six babies merged into one child with six faces and twelve arms.
This is Kartikeya: also called Murugan in the South, Skanda in the Sanskrit tradition, Shanmukha (six-faced), Subrahmanya. He is the general of the divine armies, the god of war in the specific sense of righteous war, war in service of dharma.
He grew quickly in the way that beings with purposes to fulfill tend to grow. His weapon is the vel — a divine lance given to him by Parvati, a weapon that finds its target with the inevitability of divine purpose rather than the guidance of physical aim.
The war with Tarakasura was the war that had been waiting for him. Six days. The gods fought as an army for the first time in ages, led by a commander who combined the fire of his birth with the strategic clarity of someone who knows exactly what they are there to do.
Tarakasura fought with everything the three worlds had given him. His power was genuine; the boon had been earned. But the lance of Parvati — the weapon of the mother’s concentrated love — cannot be stopped by boon-armor or demon strength. It finds the gap in every defense.
Tarakasura fell on the sixth day. The seventh day was silence and the slow return of the worlds to their proper order, the gods taking back their positions, the rivers running in their right directions, the sacrifices resuming.
Kartikeya remained. The general of the divine armies is not a temporary appointment. The forces that Tarakasura represented — the using of genuine power for conquest rather than for order — don’t disappear with one demon’s defeat. They recur. The general who can face them recurs too.
In Tamil Nadu, the devotion to Murugan is among the oldest and most continuously alive devotional traditions in India. The hillside temples of Murugan — Palani, Tiruchendur, Swamimalai, and the others — are approached by pilgrims on foot, the ascent itself understood as service to the god who stands on the peak.
The six faces look in all directions simultaneously. The lance is always ready. The peacock is always spread for flight. The general is always at his post.