"Are you sure you don't want any more boar? You've only had two."

Although they had been traveling companions now for a full night and half a day, Latraviata still wasn't comfortable calling the big Gaul Obelix by name – it felt like an intimacy she hadn't earned. She wasn't sure why, either. Perhaps it was his voracious appetite or his curiously remote quality – odd to call such a man such a thing, but she felt he was full of secrets, for all he seemed openhearted.

"No, thank you." Obelix seemed to have a similar reticence about calling Latraviata by her own name. "I think I'll just have a nap."

Once the large figure was snoring, curled up in the grass, she wasn't surprised to turn and find Caesar's little worm waiting. Silent as a ghost; or perhaps, like shamans, he had the ability to obscure the natural little sense that alerts us when another is near. "What now?" she asked, just this side of imperious. He might be the envoy of the Emperor himself, but she wasn't about to let him order her around like last night.

Which he immediately did. "Get away," he said. "I need solitude."

"Solitude?" She jerked her head towards Obelix, not budging an inch. "With him snoring like a cart-horse?"

"I need solitude with the Gaul."

Latraviata looked closer at the little spy. She'd been so busy being defiant, she hadn't noticed how weary he sounded. Not commanding at all. Almost… broken. He stood before her issuing instructions, but his shoulders were bowed. Like Atlas. "All right," she said, like a woman granting a request, not obeying an order.

After all, she wasn't obeying. Not this time.

As Caesar's envoy waited, Latraviata slipped around the caravan, trying to look demure and obedient. She planned to make sure he felt completely safe before she came back to find out just what in Minerva's name this Caius Insidius was doing with Obelix the Gaul.

Insidius slipped into Obelix's dreams. It became easier the more you did it.

His 'feet' slid out from under him. Around him, in his nose, in his mouth, was slimy mud. For a moment, he couldn't breathe.

Panic consumed him. He opened his mouth and gasped, summoning all his will for air. Finally, he breathed. It didn't help: there was a weight crushing his chest, pressing down like a boulder on his heart. His limbs were numb. It reminded him of when his Mater had died, when he had spent a year and more in mourning, when the world had lost its meaning and the darkness had been closing in. That was when he had thrown himself into his work, when he had sought to find meaning in defending his Empire.

But try as he might, he could find nothing to defend in the grief that lay before him. "Obelix," he whispered, trying to find something to hold onto. "You will do well. You will succeed."

For answer, he found nothing but dirt. Doing well meant nothing; success meant nothing. Everything was death. Where there had been sunlight and colour, there was only grey. No plants relieved the sterile earth, colorless as the sky above it. There had been loving hearts, smiling faces: now, everything soft and beautiful and bright was gone with Asterix, only a feeble hope, writhing and flopping about in the dirt like a worm, aching to see him after Obelix's life's journey was over, when he went under the dirt, became one with it.

And Insidius found himself flailing. Normally, faced with sorrow, he attempted to tease out some thread of baser human emotion – pride, offense, greed, lust – that the flesh was heir to. But he could find none of this in here. Not for the first time, he wondered whether Obelix was just too different from the men he had worked on before.

Desperately, he fell to his knees in the dead land. He plunged his hands into the earth, seeking something to hold on to. "Asterix is better with women than you," he whispered, only to be hit with a wave of grief so intense he ended up flat on his back in the dirt. Let him find joy with a beautiful woman, came the desperate wish. Let him be happy.

Caius Insidius pressed his hands into his temples, tried again. "Asterix is more successful than you." He had given up completely on the self-loathing, and was seeking only some motivation for Obelix to want to be apart from his friend. "He is more respected."

Obelix's poignant love groaned through the painful air. Of course he is. He's everything that's perfect. Oh, how I wish I could see him again just once more. I hope he's happy. Please, please let him be happy and safe, please that's all I ask please please please.

On his back in the dirt, Caius Insidius stared up at Obelix the Gaul's sunless mind-skies, and was forced to admit what he had sensed before, but ignored out of loyalty to Rome.

The Dream Whisperer had whispered into men's minds for Caesar – not many, not few. He had whispered to senators and generals, to commanders and tribunes. In these men's minds, he had teased out the threads of treason. He had blandished at them with jealousy, desire, self-pity, lust, and love – yes, love, for even corrupt men could love. He had found a handhold wherever a handhold could be found, and struck deep. But none of them, he realized now, had been pure. Purity, he had found out, did not equal virginity. Even the one time he had penetrated the mind of a virgin, he had found darkness: hatred, resentment, loathing. He had turned her against her Iberian beloved, caused her to betray him and steal his secrets, because her heart was not pure.

But in this simple, uneducated Gaul, this man enamored of his food and his simple pleasures, barely able to learn his lessons, was a purity of emotion and a selflessness of spirit he had not encountered before, not in generals, not in warriors.

And Caius Insidius was finding that this was something he could not withstand.

"Obelix!" he cried desperately. "I am your conscience!" His words were thrown back at him, mocking, by the hurricanes of poison that were the big man's pain. It was like screaming into slime, choking, every untruth an agonizing spike in his chest. "Leaving Asterix was the right thing to do!" His voice was sand, gravel that burned through his throat like a sickness. "You did the right thing! It was for the greater good! Listen to your conscience!"

Latraviata crept around the tent. The Roman lay like a man in a trance, Obelix breathing in unison with him. She would have said it was a shamanic healing ritual, only Obelix bore no injuries, and she was willing to wager the shaman meant him harm.

She glided closer and listened to the broken words coming from Caesar's agent.

And what she heard made her blood run cold.

Caius could speak no more. Nothing could stand in the face of the love he had destroyed. Desperate, overwhelmed, he lay on his back and stared at the slate-grey skies of Obelix's mind. All he could see was slate-grey grief. All he could feel was the steaming, slimy heat rising from the still-warm corpse of Obelix's heart, writhing in agony in and under the barren dirt of the once-flowering garden of his soul.

Asterix, was all Obelix's broken heart could say. Asterix.

Caius sat up. He plunged his hands deep into the soil of Obelix's heart, and recoiled: there was a decomposing cadaver under it. His hands squeezed blood and dead flesh, and such pain as he could not have imagined. He swept his hands under the superficial topsoil, seeking corruption: he found no seed of jealousy or resentment, no desire for anything under the sun but Asterix's health and happiness. He dug his fingers into the bloody earth and scooped up heaping handfuls of spongy loam, closing his hands into fists and crumbling them back into powder. Where had he gone wrong? His entire plan had been to use Obelix's love for Asterix! Nothing had changed. He was on course, his plan was on track. "I knew this was so," he muttered to himself desperately, squeezing and crumbling more handfuls of earth. "I knew his mind, I knew it! How could his love come as a surprise to me? Why, I traded on it! I used it!"

But he was just now discovering that knowing about love in the abstract, even using it as a weapon, was no preparation for encountering a spirit filled with nothing but selfless love. And now he was inside the mind of this innocent man—now he was feeling this love that still survived, untainted, unsullied, in the still-warm corpse of a murdered soul and a shattered world— Caius Insidius realized, with a shock, that he could not continue as he had before.

His hands, still scrabbling in the soil of Obelix's mind-world, hit smooth ceramic. He scooped up the object and swept the dirt off it, soft and moist and crumbling beneath his palms. With a cry, he saw in his hands a small bowl he, Caius, had lost in childhood.

He recognized it: it had been made by a Numidian potter who had hailed from his village. The delicately glazed surface was the pale blue of a bird's egg. Halfway between mug and drinking-bowl, it had two handles on either side. One side bore his name; sure enough, when he turned it over, the other side bore his mother's. But he had betrayed his mother, betrayed the gift of healing he had from her bloodline, had used it to hurt, not to heal. He was no longer worthy. He trembled as he looked into the receptacle, fully expecting blood. The damned had only blood to drink.

Instead, his cup was filled with clear, pure water.

Caius Insidius sobbed aloud. His vision blurred with tears at the mercy he had been shown from the gods. To ignore it would be to rupture the bond with his Mater forevermore, to be barred from seeing her in the afterlife. He drank deep of the blessing he had been given, then fell back, looking at the sky, knowing what he would see.

He saw her face, her beautiful, loving brown eyes. But it was not angry, but smiling and gentle. "My Caius, my beloved child," she murmured. He cried out and wept to hear her voice. It carved fresh cracks in the parched earth of his heart. "It is not too late. Do what must be done."

He leapt up, supplicating. "What? What is it?"

"I cannot say, my Caius."

"But how can I do it if I don't know what it is!"

"It will be shown to you."

"Mater!"

She was gone.

Beside himself, Caius Insidius jackknifed up from the dream, fully awake in an instant.

It only lasted an instant. Latraviata swung her spade. It impacted the back of his head, and Caius fell into a blackness where no dreams could reach.