The book that follows the fighting, the Stri Parva, is the book of the women, and it is the strongest answer the Mahabharata gives to its own war. Gandhari, who has worn a blindfold since her marriage so as not to see more than her blind husband could, is led out over the battlefield and describes what is on it: the wives and mothers of the dead going from body to body, jackals, the sons she bore identified one by one where they lie.
She then turns on Krishna. He had the power to prevent the war, she says, and he had the standing with both sides to be heard, and he let it happen. She curses him: as her hundred sons destroyed each other, so his own people, the Yadavas, will kill one another, and he will die alone in a wood. Krishna accepts the curse without protest.
It is fulfilled. In the Mausala Parva, thirty six years later, the Yadavas fall into a drunken quarrel at a festival, kill each other with reeds that turn into iron clubs, and Krishna is shot in the foot by a hunter who mistakes him for a deer. Dvaraka goes under the sea.
The hundred sons are therefore not finished when the last of them dies. Their mother's grief is made the cause of the destruction of the winning side's own people, which is how the epic refuses to let the victory stand as a victory, and why the last books read as an unwinding rather than as a settlement.