By my third and last day at the Asclepius' Sanctuary, I slept little, talked even less, and stopped eating completely. Even if my stomach didn't turn whenever I smelled food, it would be hard to push food or even water through my clenched teeth. The smoke over the braziers lay thicker, choking me, until I tasted cedar and ash. Something sweeter blended with those two smells, but it was cloying, malicious. Mold? Decay? Mushrooms?

I would have stirred the coals, to try to get rid of the miasma, but I was too exhausted.

While Victor's soul lingered in his body, he lay motionless. Every time a soft breath filtered through his slightly parted lips, I feared it would be his last. The next one came, and my chest eased for a split moment. One more...

One more, and that would be it. He would expire and the priests would command me to carry his body to the graveyard, the way I had carried the rich girl. It would be my fault too, because I didn't figure out what I must do.

"Praise Asclepius. Praise. Asclepius." Hoarse whisper tickled my throat. Shivers replaced a hot flush, then another wave of inner heat replaced shivers, making sweat ooze through my skin.

Feverish, I saw a shadow separate from my body, an exact copy of me. I followed the apparition with my gaze to the exit from the Sanctuary, where it vanished. Victor's body was on the pallet, motionless. I squeezed his hand, and a weak pulse trembled in his wrist. No change.

Mithras' bull, I was losing my mind. As painful as going mad felt, I prayed for the hours to slow down. I wasn't ready to let Victor go. I clutched his hand tighter. My fingers were so swollen and calloused from carrying buckets of refuse and water, scrubbing and purifying, I couldn't tell if his skin warmed or if I was deluding myself.

The weak light that precedes dawn, lined the entrance. How bright would it have to become for the priests to exile us from the Sanctuary? The muted red of the rising sun or the white of the full day? Whatever their trigger was, the dawn was coming too soon.

Victor didn't wake up in time. Maybe I should have said my farewells, when I had a chance, because now... now it was too late. The light was gaining both strength and color. Lo! The screen's outline glowed crimson.

"Stop!" I yelled at the sun. I was so mad at Apollo who drove it. I was mad at everything, even Victor. "Fight, damn you! Stop pretending that you're not a fighter. You are my champion! You can't just die!"

My shouts woke the biggest snake I had seen so far. Even in a temple full of snakes, this serpent stood out as something monstrous, so I had no idea how I had missed it before.

It glided out of the north-western corner of the Sanctuary without a single hiss. It didn't have to shake its rattle to draw attention; it was the King. The other snakes gave way to it. Unlike them, the Serpent was blacker than night. Its tail could have been smoke, never really solid enough to have an obvious end. The smell of cedar, tinged with the acrid one of burning cloth spread from it.

I should have jumped to my feet, raised an alarm, but weariness weighed my body down as if my bones became lead.

The Serpent came closer and closer, menacing me with its green eyes.

Green? All other snakes had purple irises slit with a black pupil.

It didn't behave like its minions either. Once it reached my folded legs, its triangular head lifted off the floor, higher and higher, extending its body until its eyes were level with mine. Like it was trying to make damn sure I remembered its eye color and wouldn't doubt myself afterwards.

As if I ever would! It made sense, Senators, that a green-eyed snake came for Victor's soul. I had no luck with green eyes all my life. Fragments of my past flickered in their depth, the ones I wanted to bury the most. Yet, I couldn't look away or lift a finger.

"Ugh!" My throat clenched, and somehow I broke the Serpent's lock on my gaze. A long shuddering sigh shook my freed chest.

I looked around the room, seeking something, anything that could help me defeat the green-eyed monster. Nothing was to hand.

The Serpent must have measured over thirty paces, because it undulated across the entire room. A wide coil of its body bypassed 'Rhea's' pallet. The tip of its tail had finally come into view from behind the two brothers' place. It was decorated with three rings, a green, a blue, and a gold one.

The Serpent rocked back and forth, spreading itself on my crossed ankles, my navel, then my chest. It rested its head on my shoulder, as if preparing to whisper a secret into my ear, but no sound came out of its mouth. Only its forked tongue flickered between scaled lips.

I yelled inside my head, ordering my body to move. It disobeyed my command. Maybe this Serpent could turn people to stone with its gaze?

The triangular head lifted off my shoulder, slithered past my cheek... Absurdly, I expected it to sink its fangs into my lips but it stopped again. I couldn't even flinch in disgust.

It moved again, past me, toward Victor. My heart pounded when it looped down my shoulder and started to coil on his chest. It was going to strangle him!

Mithras bull! If only my lips could move, I'd have unleashed the screams pent up inside my chest. No, no, and no! I wasn't there when the behemoth crushed him. But I was here now, and I was letting this Serpent steal his last breath.

I prayed to Asclepius for three days, but he didn't hear me. Mithra, give me strength!

I closed my eyes, flexed, braced, ripped through the phantom stone holding me down. Somehow, my arms lifted. My torso turned. Slowly, as if moving through liquid wax, I reached forward. My half-paralyzed body shifted hair by hair until both of my hands encircled the Serpent's throat and squeezed it. Strength, that I had always relied on, had deserted me, but I squeezed anyway.

The Serpent hissed and thrashed, winding itself around my legs and torso. Well, the joke was on the critter! Because I was so numb, I couldn't feel its iron grip tightening. I was senseless to everything but blood pounding in my temples, my chest... then, finally, into the fingers!

It was like I had ten bloated hedgehogs instead of hands, but I held on, when the Serpent lifted me to the ceiling, wrapped in its coils.

My eyes bulged out so hard out of their sockets, I thought they would pop. But below me, on the pallet, lay Victor. His body was stretched out with legs and arms parallel. A sob burst out of my throat. This was unnatural! No living man slept that way! How dared the priests lay him out for burial when our time wasn't up yet?

As if in response to my thought, the red light of Victor's last dawn dimmed. It should have gone white, everything was wrong. Fire, it was a funerary fire!

"No!"

The red winked out to black and I crushed out of the sky onto Victor's bier. They wanted to bury him like he was a Fidelis, and he wasn't. This was wrong!

The light strengthened again, no longer tinged with red. No fire, praise Mithras! The painted snakes on the walls danced around me, because the familiar priest was shaking me awake. I struggled drowsily, looking for the dead Serpent, and ready to atone for slaying the temple's guardian.

Except... There was no sinuous corpse on Victor's chest.

"What have you seen in your dream?" the priest asked.

A dream? My heart, my breath stopped. Of course, it was a dream! It had to be, and... and I had slept through Victor' death. How could my body have failed me like that?

"Maximus?" The priest's interest in me was sudden, annoying and... important.

I blinked at the light of day, focusing. Run my parched tongue over my sloughing lips. The priests of Asclepius used the dreams to diagnose and heal. Which meant—

Hoarsely, I told the young priest about the Serpent, stumbling when I came to the part about strangling it. Dream or not, this had to be a sacred snake. But the priest smiled, nodding along. I braced to continue, except I couldn't just sit there and talk, when Victor hovered between life and death.

I twisted in the priest's grip to look at him, but a glimmer in the healer's eyes arrested my glance before I turned. I saw men's eyes lit up like this before with the glow of a victory. My heart hitched in my chest. "Does the dream mean what I think it means?"

"The signs are clear," the priest said breathlessly. "I dare say even a layman could understand them."

Maybe not every layman, but a gladiator, a fighter who came face to face with the Fates more often than most other men, certainly could. "Victor!"

After a dizzying moment, his chest rose and fell, expelling a groan of pain. His eyes opened. Murky purplish, instead of the clear blue I so loved, but they opened. He groaned again, something incomprehensible, likely not even in Latin.

I grabbed his hand. "Victor?"

"Where is the starlit wind? Only your ugly mug..." Each word came out of his mouth with a whistling echo that terrified me. I'd heard sucking lungs in my day and it was an end to a man, no matter what the healers tried.

"You... you lost your right to judge a man's beauty when you let a fucking behemoth top you," I grunted.

Let the young priest drag me out of the Sanctuary by the ear for profanity! It would be a small price to pay for Victor's laughter. There was no blood foaming on his lips, scary whistles or other signs of failing internal organs.

"Don't joke... laughing hurts," he complained.

"I won't," I promised, "and it wasn't a joke."

"I'm not dead."

"No."

He stroked my hand, the one that was clutching his all that time. It wasn't much, only a feather-light movement of his thumb on my skin, but I wouldn't trade it for a height-of-passion embrace. At the same time, my heart ached seeing him so weak, until tears stung my eyes. He was alive—and it also made me want to cry. I was a damnable mess!

"I think..." I said, side-eyeing the priest whom Victor couldn't see without lifting his head from the ground, "I think I'll have to leave soon."

"Stay another moment," Victor asked.

The priest and his snakes would have to remove me bodily, if they wanted me gone after that, and I would love to see them try!

"Just another moment..." I repeated, "just one more moment."

I said nothing else. I hung onto his hand and stared at his sharpened profile. It seemed ungrateful that I didn't chant a prayer of thanks to Asclepius immediately, but the priest was there. If his God wanted it, he'd have nudged me.

It didn't take long for Victor's head to loll. I held my next breath, until I heard enough of his deep, even ones, testifying that he had drifted into a healing sleep. Then I cradled his limp hand to my chest and looked up at the young priest.

"Asclepius worked through you," he said.

Who was I to argue with a priest? "What of the snake? The three rings on its tail? Does this mean anything?"

He ran his tongue over his teeth. "You saw Asclepius' will done, and this was not a part of it. Perhaps, it was a message from another God to you. You can always ask the augers if you wish."

I glanced at the sleeping Victor. "I'd already gotten everything I prayed for. My future? Come what may, I wouldn't dodge it, then why bother the Fates with questions?"

He shot me a curious glance. "That's a wiser answer than I expected from one in your trade."

I only shrugged in response. "You don't get to be the oldest gladiator in Fidelium without a bit of wisdom."

"Hmm, I suppose so." He got up and stretched, "We'll take Victor to the Healing Commons now. You're welcome to rest there till tomorrow."

"Thank you, but I must return to Fidelium on my owner's orders," I said and sighed in regret.

My exhausted body wanted nothing more than to collapse in a quiet corner and sleep. I was also thirsty, hungry and sore. However, Rufius Fulgentius warned me not to be late, and my every instinct whispered that disobeying would hurt me far, far more than the worst fatigue. Not because of Rufius Fulgentius, even though he was a prick, but because of the Empress.

"If you say so," the priest said.

Before I left, I glanced at Victor once more. "Can I... can I come to visit him later?" And 'Rhea'. Albus' brother and even Albus himself. I couldn't help it. My heart swelled with the desire that these strangers would recover like Victor did.

"You'll be welcome here," the priest said matter-of-factly, as if he wasn't handing me the greatest gift I had ever received.