How it is told
Why did Shiva and Parvati follow Kartikeya to Srisailam?
One fruit, two sons
Narada arrived at Kailash with a single fruit, said to hold the whole of wisdom in it, and would not allow it to be cut. Shiva and Parvati set a contest instead: whoever circles the world first takes it. Kartikeya left immediately on his peacock. It is a fair race and he was the faster of the two by a long way.
The circle Ganesha drew
Ganesha did not leave. He walked once around his parents, sat down, and said that for him they were the world and he had just been round it. The argument is unanswerable and everybody present knew it. The fruit went to him.
What it is to be beaten by a definition
Kartikeya came back from an actual circuit of the earth to find the thing already given away on a point of language. He did not stay to argue. He went south, to the Krauncha mountain in the Nallamala hills, and told the gods who came after him that he would not be returning.
The parents who came anyway
Shiva and Parvati went to the hill themselves. In most tellings Kartikeya moved further off when he learned they were close — the sulk holds — but they did not turn round and go home. They stayed within reach of him, and that is the whole point of the shrine: a place parents come to because a child will not.
Mallika and Arjuna
The name joins them. Mallika is jasmine, which is Parvati's; Arjuna is the tree Shiva is worshipped under here. In the local telling a woman of the forest offered jasmine every day on an arjuna tree until Shiva took the tree as his own, and the two names fused into one.
The hill that holds both
Srisailam is one of the twelve jyotirlingas and one of the eighteen Maha Shakti Peethas, with Bhramaramba in the same courtyard as Mallikarjuna. Nowhere else do the two lists overlap on one site. For a story about a family that would not scatter, it is a fitting address.