The Duke, The Baron, His Madonna & Her Monster - Chapter 4 - DarthPeezy - Dune (2024)

Chapter Text

Intercepted Communiques between Ducal Heir Paul Atreides and na-Baron Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen

As presented by the Office of Imperial Intelligence

Recorded in the Year 10191

By Hasmir Fenring

To my future prey,

Did you escape your writing committee somehow and pen such foolishness alone?

Of course Giedi Prime has seasons. What fool made you believe otherwise? The escaped slaves in your employ should offer better information than that. Which they have, undoubtedly, and so you merely wish for my rage however momentary.

The seasons are not so extreme as Caladan. It is, after all, mostly a desert world. The coldest months are between May and July, where the recorded low is 270K and the average 280K. No adverse weather conditions are found here, and I am forced to endure the swelling of tourists—yes, people visit for the business opportunities, the artisans, but mostly for the pleasure slaves—each year.

The heat peaks in August, dry and with hardly any wind to cool you. Anywhere from six to eight weeks of weather in the where a cold day is 310K. And then come the dust storms. Like an arrow loosed from a bow, a stormfront of wind begins from the equator and sweeps from east to west. The weather is slightly cooler but now you must contend with winds that can shred flesh from bone. And dust everywhere. A marker of wealth is how pristine your home remains during this season—shield walls are useful in this endeavour but running them so long is measured in the decagrams of spice.

The New Year was traditionally marked by an outpouring of rain. You do not know petrichor until you have smelt it on Giedi Prime. The water sinks deep, so deep under the earth, down every crack and crevice to fill the grand voids that define the world. Buried under the sand and soil are the seeds carried by the windstorms. When water caresses their shells, they undergo a rapid metamorphosis and begin the next stage in their lives. Half will die trying to escape the sand, buried too deep for newly formed limbs to emerge. But those that do prove their strength will claim the planet as their ancestors did three million years ago.

Their great procession heralds the New Year, millions of them together sounding like the crackling or a perpetual thunderstorm. Upon their backs, flowers bloom, and they fill the sky. You cannot avoid them. Trying is a fool’s dream if you lack a personal shield.

You are likely confused at my description, the blending of seemingly different evolutionary trees. They are not truly plant, not truly insects. A hybrid creature, our flowering cicadas are. Subject of millennia spent debating the existence of aliens to seed such strange lifeforms. As though this odd mixture doesn’t appear across the evolutionary spectrum of Giedi. Fools are always predisposed to loving their conspiracies.

The flowering cicadas see hair as an appropriate place to deposit their seeds. Our hairless nature is not because of pollutants or the dark sun, merely an evolutionary trait—most visitors will chemically remove their hair during this time if poor, or wear shielding systems if willing to burn wealth.

I imagine you Atreides have some evolutionary traits to survive a water world like Caladan. Do you know how strange it is to hold your breath underwater for minutes on end?

More importantly, they feed on carbon dioxide, the ash clouds that belch from volcanoes, and the emissions from sulphur geysers active this time of year. For the rest of the year, the temperature is cool. The sky will turn grey as the engines of industry are set to work with starburst of rainbow colour as floating flowers bloom, consuming their ejecta. Do you understand, Atreides, the careful balance of nature and industry that is Giedi Prime? Did the images of flare stacks because you to think us barbaric fools destroying a world? One that we mastered over ten millennia?

I know you did and I know you for a fool.

But to other matters. It confuses me that you had not taken part in your duties as Duke until recently. Did you mean to suggest Caladan a world of such abundant bounty and plenty that no crime has ever taken place? If you did, then I offer congratulations to your Lord Duke; his propaganda teams are immaculate to have so fooled you. They are legendary within the Landsraad.

Remember this, all men must die. You choose whether men live or die. It will be you who decideds the place your retainers die and for what cause they believe they die for. You cannot fool yourself in thinking there is any cause other than your will. They die where you command for you have commanded it and for no other purpose.

I was four years of age when I first gave the command. Four as I watched bodies sway in the blistering winds. They were men with wives, children, and family. The reason for their deaths matters not at all. It was done by my command, in my name, for their lives were mine to do with as I pleased. Glory or ruin, desecration or honour, I determine their final moments.

It is my right as the firstborn son of Härkä, the death-ox, god of judgement and the afterlife. Trace the lines of this embossed letter and you will know his sigil. Only I am blessed to wear on Giedi Prime. Only I may truly bring mortals before their god.

Death is part of me. An inescapable aspect that defines me. I first read the Assassin’s Handbook in the darkest places of the Siridar’s Palace when I was perhaps five. Made my first poisons as well. I was too young to realise that such well known poisons would be well defended against by nobility. Oh, but there were other targets for my blade. Other throats to slit. Every kill was a lesson, and it is thus:

Honour neither found nor made, it is enforced by strength alone.

I was not born Harkonnen and yet I am na-Baron. I have risen in station by blade and deception till I became strong enough to dictate the nature of my battles. You may think otherwise, but there is great honour in drawing blades in the fighting pits. On the knife-edge, with death stalking my wake, I find my place in the universe, and with each I slay I prove my supremacy to the universe.

Remember this, you will wield power. You will decide which men die honourable deaths. But if you are not strong, others will dishonour you.

Remember, should you use your power wisely or use it foolishly, I will remain to judge you. Take heart, Atreides, in knowing that in me proof of your existence will remain long after your defeat.

Remember.

Your hunter eternal,

Feyd

Dearest Feyd,

It is spring and the flowers bloom like a rainbow turned ocean. The air of lemongrass carried on the breeze as pundi rice ripens. Caladan exposes its bounty to her most beloved children who sing and dance under the gentle light of our yellow sun. It is a time to rejoice and be merry—please, hold your disdain for a few seconds more.

More importantly, spring is the time for marriages. I am told upon Giedi Prime you set the atmosphere alight with explosives for great events. Such a queer custom. Paper lanterns will fill Caladan’s skies for months to come. The designs drawn upon them are works of art. Mastery takes decades. Perhaps when I am grey and weathered, should I remember you, I shall gift you one. Do try not to get cut down in the arenas.

I will attend three wedding ceremonies this year. Even my duties a Judge Paul the Merciful (and many other titles besides) could only get me out of so many. But better three than a dozen. I even had the opportunity to select the ones I wished to attend—technically, my attendance to the wedding of a principal bannerman is mandatory and so I shall not count it out of sheer spite. Would it surprise you to learn I go to the weddings of three commoners? Oh yes, they are important: the eldest son of the Muadh sect, the largest extant religion on Caladan; the double wedding of the sisters running our largest mercantile guild; and my favourite, a fellow judicial official who I came to know well last summer, and whose vows I will officiate on the shores of Isle Baqi, a quaint island off the coast of the Agammenon Canyon of no political import, and to whom her story is a local legend amongst the peasantry. For the latter, I personally commissioned her shawl. She is permitted to wear the hawk in glory and beneath its wings are the scales of justice.

Yes, these are strategic marriages, and my presence is a statement. But I think it is a statement I can accept. Paul the Merciful remembers the people and cares not at all for your station, only that you live well. In your head, you call me weak for caring for peasants. Your love for straightforward engagements blinds you. The strength of Atreides is the strength of Caladan, and her greatest bounty will always be her sons and daughters. Forget it at your peril.

Do you remember the sunset bleeding red as I told you the nature of Caladan’s weddings? I hope you have not forgotten the words I spoke to you. The vows we Caladanians speak to our gods, the promises we make to distant powers in hopes that our union would be bountiful. Drowned gods and firebirds, frozen gods and death-oxen. Do they hear us equally or is it only in retrospect, evaluating the actions we took, that we make them hear us?

You told me that under the black sun you would raise your hands in veneration for the lifegiving darkness, slaughter the living effigy of Harka, and drink the blood of your counterpart. Life and death brought together for a promise. You do not ask the attention of your gods. They are indifferent figures never meant to answer. You live and you die, what greater proof is needed of them?

Tell me, Feyd, whom do you mean to marry?

The simple answer is a lady of the highest station but how boring an answer that would be. You are many things, but boring? No, you would rip the throat out of anyone who dared suggest such. Would their blood show up under your dark sun or is your reputation such that everyone would understand, without words, that you walked drenched in the blood of your enemies? What wife could survive you? Your rage, your violence, your cruelty. Only an equal could survive you.

I ask again, whom would you name as your bride? Whose blood would you drink under the black sun?

I suspect I know the answer.

I hope you do not forget it.

In your remembrance,

Paul

P.S. I do, indeed, know what fireworks are. I merely wished to annoy you a while longer.

Sister,

My lord husband confirmed that they had physical relations and that theirs is an obsession not easily broken. Navigating such an unstable mess is to wade through a minefield with nothing but faith. But it represents additional levers to control the two.

I suspect I should not mention this but there is great activity in the Harkonnen camp. I will investigate and ensure the survival of your favourite boys.

More importantly, expect a visit from the Mother Superior imminently. The Harkonnen and Atreides lines are of great import. Plans within plans reveal themself and I worry that by placing yourself so centrally you have defied older imperatives.

Hold true to your training. Hold true to the Sisterhood. Hold true to yourself.

With greatest faith,

Margot

Paul Atreides woke achingly hard, torn away from crimson dreams and pale hands. Awareness came instantly and he recognised a servant opening his shutters. The servant bore a scar on the back of her hand, a jagged thing that Paul inflicted whilst lost in dreams of Feyd kneeling before a bloody altar, leaving profane offerings, and making holy an endless war in Paul’s name. Ever since, no one dared touch him that could help it. He regretted the harm he inflicted, hated how she still chose to serve loyally despite his failings because Paul had been kind time and again, kind enough to remember her brother’s illness and kinder still to ensure she had the time and means to attend his wedding.

It was the currency of Atreides loyalty, this love unending. It cut and bit at his soul, this person he was becoming. A master manipulator, bound to kindness, infected by malice so potent it withered Atreides loyalty and left behind a hollow thing made of glass shards and metal spikes. He could name that poison Feyd but that would only name the excavator of truth.

He stayed still and allowed her to place his morning spice-tea, exactly one drop as prescribed by Yueh. Waited agonising moments for her to say, “Young master, you are expected for breakfast with the Duke after training,” before leaving.

Paul rose from his bed, greeting the barioth skull above his headboard, and went to the tray. He drank spice-tea and the future revealed itself to him once more, golden curtains sweeping aside to show him sand and blood. There was Paul, half-blind, blood seeping down from his ruined throat. Endless voices chanting the name Atreides. The world rendered in monochrome, Feyd invisible to him as always, death closing in.

The vision faded unceremoniously. The visions had grown short. He gleamed less and less information with each attempt to view this partition of the future, the one everything converged to, and the future grew bored of his attempts to see.

Spice-tea left him jittery, five senses alight, compensating as his prescience faded. He felt his arousal keenly, the heaviness of his co*ck against his thigh. The gentle glide of silk along his length, thighs tensed. His schedule meant training with Duncan. Such close proximity with a sword between his legs would not end well.

Inside his closet, hidden within a military jacket, lay a scent he felt desperate to enjoy again. Paul Atreides held a silk tunic in his hands. It was stained along the hem, crusted over with seed from a mishap. He could not bring himself to wash it. It fit him better now, two years on since he last saw its owner. Paul has grown into his full height, shoulders broadened against his will.

Sometimes, he wore it with a wide belt, intrigued by the way it softened his silhouette to something resembling his mother. Carried himself differently in the privacy of his room. Playing at daughter when he should be a son training at arms.

There was a thrill at those thoughts. A sureness he did not wish to address but felt anyway. A warmth that felt like joy, only sharper, and more persistent.

He took himself in hand and thought of that night they spent together. Their union at the forefront, a great betrayal to the blood in their veins as he tugged his erection. A victory most splendid. Worth it despite the cost. Worth it for phantom hands touching his flanks, a tongue licking his scarred wrist, mouthing kisses on his waist.

That night had sustained him this last year. Brought him relief when his bones felt like they were molten and took him over the edge when fist alone could not succeed. He had not, in the year since, managed with anything else. It was necessary to recall the pain in his hips, the pounding he endured, and five fingers curling within him.

Just as today, he came with thoughts of teeth on his neck and a fullness that fingers alone could never replicate. He ate of his seed, yearning for snow and sulphur, settling for the acrid aftertaste instead.

Truly, Feyd makes a whor* of me.

He took his concoction of pills, ranging from hormone regulators to vitamin supplements, washing away those thoughts with bitter medicine. His father spared no expense in his training and the same was true of his health.

A bit later, he found Duncan in one of the training halls cleared out for Paul’s use. They greeted each other warmly.

“Paul Atreides, up and alert before breakfast. Will wonders ever cease?”

Paul made a rude gesture and drew the blade of his ancestor, delighting in how the edge reflected dawn’s light. The kindjal’s edge had yet to falter a year later. “Just for that, no shields. I’ll make you bleed today, Duncan.”

“You can try.”

Their initial clash was brief, blades locking but for a moment. He skittered back before Duncan’s dagger could disembowel him, flicking his kindjal in a complex pattern. Attack even as you retreat, Gurney’s voice echoed. They may argue but Gurney’s training was true and honest. So he stalked the perimeter of Duncan’s defensive sphere, careful not to let his eyes wander.

There was a difference in skill and experience that couldn’t quite be bridged by hopeful dreams. There was no future he’d seen where he fought Duncan and won.

“If you won’t—”

Paul dashed in, blade sweeping low. Duncan jumped over it casually, his sword coming down. Paul pirouetted to the side. Hearing metal sing too close for comfort, he kicked out instinctively and parried Duncan’s dagger thrust. One clash bled into another, Paul pushed to his very limit. It was intentional on Duncan’s part. He knew Paul was strong in offensive footwork but terrible in his defence, always willing to take needless blows for a chance at victory.

Attention wavered for a split second. Too easily, Duncan stepped into his guard and elbowed Paul in the gut. He gasped, crumpling to the ground. Raised his arms to protect from a blow that never came. Duncan’s disappointed look hurt as badly as any wound.

“Focus, my boy. Focus. Now up, we’ll go again till I’m satisfied. Your defence, or lack of it, is going to get you killed.”

Duncan was not satisfied with Paul’s performance. He was exacting in his assault, forcing Paul to confront the many gaps in his defence. In truth, he doubted Duncan would be satisfied until Paul could claim the title of Ginaz Swordmaster, and that would not occur for many decades yet.

It was only at the end, when the world had narrowed to Duncan and his blades, that Paul manifested his true promise. Stepped forward with impeccable footwork, locking blades with Duncan’s knife. Twisting his wrist and forcibly flinging it aside. He moved, never stopping, lashing out with a wide sweep.

Good, he barely heard Duncan say, focused purely on Duncan’s hop back. The way he raised his sword in a high stance and meant to bring it down on Paul’s head.

Paul was faster, for once. Stabbing forward, going for the throat. Willing to take the sword to the shoulder if it meant victory.

Duncan was still a swordmaster for a reason.

Mind empty, Paul could see it. The trick of it. The dropped blade and the killing stroke to come.

He grabbed at Duncan’s wrist and diverted the blow, stepping into Idaho’s space. His blade came to rest at Duncan’s throat.

“I am not distracted, Duncan Idaho.”

“It only took an hour. And where did you learn that trick?” Duncan asked flatly, knowing the answer, staring at the necklace around his neck. A necklace he never took off.

They both knew the answer. Paul had fallen to it once already. Feyd-Rautha had shown it to him.

Secretly, Paul considered it Feyd’s victory that day before the allies of Atreides. After all, one could stem the bleeding of a sliced throat and even operate on it. But a knife through the liver, stomach and possibly the spine? No, he’d have died slow and painful.

Worse were those two moments where Feyd should have killed him. A quick, easy death, but he’d refused. Gave Paul another lease on life. It was the greatest insult of his life.

“Leave it be, Duncan Idaho.”

“Is that a command, my Lord?”

He bared his teeth unconsciously, furious at the challenge. Stepped back before he did something truly foolish.

“Do not mock me.”

“Your defence is poor, as usual. Don’t expose yourself so easily to questions. Your conduct must be beyond reproach. Don’t force your vassals to wonder if you are worthy of loyalty.”

Gurney’s name did not need to be said. Even in silence, it was an exclamation point. Paul was no longer on casual speaking terms with Gurney. They trained, and he taught Paul with exacting precision, but they shared not a word after. A thing did not need to be said for it to be known. Paul’s obsession with Feyd was self-evident and Gurney could not forgive that. A year had not banked Gurney’s fury. Only stoked it higher.

It was impossible to hate Gurney or even be bitter. Paul knew his history, knew what made a man so hard and unyielding. Love was complex and someone you cared for hating you wasn’t reason enough for Paul to let go.

Gurney would one day be forced to choose between his hatred of the Harkonnens or his loyalty to House Atreides. Paul was not eager for that day. Not simply for the consequence but because it meant his father would be dead.

He loved Duncan as well and so told him a truth he was slowly coming to accept. “I will become what I must for myself. I will be myself, and if that is reason enough to leave, then I give you leave to take up new oaths.”

Paul held steady, unwavering even as the possibility of Duncan leaving tore him about. Duncan was the closest thing to a brother he had. The mentor he’d always run to when he fought with his parents, when his lessons bore down on him like the cliffs of Caladan. It would hurt, terribly. But he loved Duncan enough to give him his freedom.

That was the poison of Atreides loyalty. Love, pure and without cost. Love enough to break a man. Love great enough to overcome any obstacle and accept any pain.

Duncan hugged him tight. Under the quickening dawn and protected by the roughhewn stone of Castle Caladan, Duncan held him. Paul did not shake but he only just. Sword oil and dried pinewood. Warmth that bled through freely. That was Duncan as Paul knew him.

“You’re not getting rid of me that easily, lad. Make sure you stretch properly. Don’t think I didn’t notice you struggling to move your wrist.”

The hug ended as quickly as it began. With what little dignity he had left, he fled. He showered quickly and dressed in a silky undershirt that reached his knees, a forest green vest loose at the chest, and a favoured pair of supple leather boots that reached his upper calves, exposing black pants. It was no military uniform. Softness of form was its only goal. It gentled any sharp lines, sanded away rough edges. Turned masculine to feminine.

Father stared at him with mild unease as usual. The questions of that night had never been asked but they were heard anyway. His actions, the way he walked and the way he dressed, were answer enough. Despite it all, Father loved him enough to accept a child who was not quite a son.

It took him an embarrassingly long moment to realise his parents were not in their regular seats. Usually, they sat on opposite ends of the table, Paul instinctually sitting at his mother’s left hand. Today, they sat opposite him, illuminated by the flood of light entering through the bay of circular windows behind Paul, warming his back. His hackles rose and he shifted slightly, the harshness of the light casting him in stark shadows.

The slightest quirk of the lips told him his mother knew what he was doing and approved, though she was disappointed he’d missed something. Another moment, eyes flickering across the room, before he realised that laid before him were all his favourite foods.

Father wouldn’t have done this to soften whatever blow was to come. He spoke bluntly, never deceived if he could help it. Glancing at him, Paul saw no deeper schemes. So, a scheme of his mother’s design.

How unaware is Father? He asked in the Bene Gesserit sign language, curling his fingers to shape in the space between taking utensils and reaching for the plate of sausage.

Speak candidly. Will deal with him later.

“You slept well, I hope. I don’t want to hear from Duncan you went to another lesson half-asleep.”

Paul took the peace offering and said, “I slept well enough, sir. Training was the same as usual. In Duncan’s words, I have excellent footwork, but I am too reckless with my defence.” He was not mentioning anything to do with his mobility. That was between him, his doctor, and his swordmaster. “I managed to win cleanly in the last bout, so I am learning, before you suggest I should try that.”

Father chuckled, sliding the plate of onion and cheese scones as an apology. “Reading me like an open book already. I wasn’t so cheeky at fifteen.”

“One of the books Irulan sent me was about grandfather’s rule. They say, quote, ‘his firstborn ran wild and was untameable by even the best efforts of his minders’. I don’t think I’m half as bad.”

“That’s because we don’t give you any time to sneak around. Otherwise, you get it into your head to singlehandedly save our House.”

“Leto,” Mother rebuked gently. The budding argument withered away instantly.

Paul chewed on his scone moodily, awaiting his mother’s revelation. It was not a fraught silence, but it was fragile. Simply the clinking of cutlery on plates and the irritating sound of food being chewed.

So many of their arguments had been stillborn. It was hard to bridge the distance between them, not when they pretended that Paul did not wear a bone necklace and that Feyd did not carry proof of Paul’s manhood on his wrist. That a son was not despoiled and did not adore a hereditary enemy. Any argument threatened to gut the truth from its fragile body.

Finally, Mother said, “A letter arrived for Paul.”

“Another so soon from the Princess? No, you wouldn’t have informed me now. From the usual source, then.”

“Much worse than a mere letter. Here.”

Father took the unsealed envelope with hesitancy, afraid of whatever was to come. Paul was used to his privacy being violated. The Known Universe traded his letters like they were prized commodities. He’d even seen a newspaper on Caladan analysing scraps from Feyd’s sixth letter, the one about the best ways to torture information out of someone. Informative as it was, he did not appreciate the way people looked at him in the weeks after. That information should have been in cypher, but Feyd wished to embarrass him, and so now some believed Paul an enthusiastic torture technician.

Father’s hand smacked against the table. Paul startled, reaching for his sword, thinking an enemy had made it into the room somehow. No, enemy. Merely the anger of a good duke pushed too far.

“I refuse. This will not happen.”

“My love—”

“No! Not this. Never this,” Father snarled, flicking the object away from him like a snake reared up to strike.

Paul caught it easily. A beautiful piece of foldable metal, dark and polished to a gloss finish. Textured like sandpaper, his fingers tingled to hold it. The words, short though they were, were made of diamond letters fused to the metal backing. This was not merely a letter. It was a work of supreme craftsmanship. Feyd had made this, he knew.

It read thusly:

To the only worthy Atreides,

I invite you to my coming-of-age ceremony.

The Guild Highliner for your retinue has been paid for

and will depart for the dark sun in six weeks henceforth.

This I do in my name as your

Na-Baron Harkonnen

Paul stared at the invitation and knew only dread.

This was it. The reason his futures converged upon a grey world. Paul’s death, delivered on metal paper and written in diamond ink.

There is an art to sending death letters and Feyd has mastered it, Paul thought hysterically.

A year he had been apart from his secret husband and this was how they were to be reunited. The love of his heart summoning him to die beneath the dark sun.

Paul felt true fear. He felt an equal excitement.

“Sir, I—”

“Will say nothing.” Father rose with all the gravitas of a duke scorned. “Jessica, attend to me.”

And Paul, he was left with nothing but the cooling tea and an invitation to his death.

Lady Jessica followed quickly on the heels of her Lord Duke. They barely made it into their bedroom before her Duke’s fury was unleashed. Jessica was quick to activate the noise bafflers as her husband raged at the world. Privacy was paramount. There were always spies lying in wait and even the most loyal could be made spies against their will.

“Madness,” Duke Leto told his wife-of-the-heart and concubine-by-law. “Rank madness. They will slit his throat, skin his corpse, and parade it under their profane sun. The Harkonnens know only perfidy in their blood. I will not allow him to walk to his death.”

“Paul invited him first. This was inevitable. We cannot be seen failing to reciprocate faith, we who bear the name Atreides. We have staked our reputation too greatly on our honour for that option. He must go and face whatever is to come.”

“I could—”

“Caladan must have a sitting Duke should the worst come to pass,” Jessica said relentlessly, allowing him no delusion. It was a cruel act of love. “You know this truth where you are Duke and not Father. How the power of a martyr can be used. I will go with Duncan instead. Paul will be safe.”

“And will you protect him?”

“I am his mother—”

“I do not ask the boy’s mother, I ask the Bene Gesserit,” Leto snapped, voice rising, words ringing in their bed chambers. Uncharacteristic and they both knew it. Onwards, then, into the uncertain territory of levelling anger at a senior member of the Sisterhood. “Will your order see to his safety on Giedi Prime? Will you protect your own?”

“The bloodline Atreides is not permitted to die out this generation,” Elder Sister Jessica said, the pronouncement heavy and relieving in equal measure. He did not dare question her further. So long as his son lived, her beloved would accept any cost. His life. Her life. They were matched like that. Softly, Jessica added, “When I gave you a son, I betrayed my order. Paul is my grand sin. Since the moment of his conception, I have held him above everything. Even you, my love.”

“You were always more pragmatic than I.”

“Never pragmatic, sentiment was always my grand weakness. You, dearest heart, have never compromised your beliefs, no matter the cost. I have ceded ground constantly. I do not regret it and I ask that you not grieve whatever loss you think I carry.”

“More your son than mine. I hope his sentiment doesn’t kill him. He would have made a fine daughter,” Leto added quietly, partly bitter, partly resigned, loving through and through. “Would that world have been kinder? She would have been wed to Feyd, legally and naturally. It would not… not have been so great a betrayal. Would she have lived a happier life?”

“It is not the world we have.”

“No, then.”

“Nothing would ever be easy for our child. No son and no daughter would have an easy road to walk. Time was unkind to us all. I am sorry for the hardships I gave you. I do not ask your forgiveness.”

“Never apologise. Our child is the greatest gift you could have given me. I cherish Paul no matter what. I just wish life could have been gentler for him.”

The weeks passed quickly as spring gave way to summer, the tension ratcheting with each passing hour. Gurney personally oversaw the composition of the retinue Lady Jessica would take to Giedi Prime. She was grateful for his loyalty. Every chosen retainer was a competent warrior, now undergoing emergency training under the warmaster. Six weeks would never be enough to satisfy Gurney but if they died allowing Paul to flee, they would serve their purpose.

Duncan trained her boy harder as well. Thuffir joined in on those sessions, forcing Paul to master his Mentat training while a swordmaster battled him. Sometimes, Thuffir literally joined those lessons, proving why he was an assassin as well. Quickly, Paul learnt to be wary of threats from all directions and was soon thrown into group battles with Gurney’s training cadre. He alone against three, sometimes a few defending him against a larger force. War games of every variety. Paul thrived as he did with most things, ruthlessly excising what weaknesses he had. Any teacher would be proud. For Gurney, it was barely enough.

The day of departure arrived all too quickly. Feyd would have been a summer baby on Caladan and that thought filled her with amusem*nt. She found Paul in his room, being assessed by Yueh under the gaze of the mounted skull’s empty eyes.

“My lady,” Yueh said without looking, focused purely on Paul.

“Please, continue. Don’t mind me.”

Speak later, she signed to Paul who blinked an affirmative and said his goodbyes to Yueh in their secret language when the examination was done. Mandarin, supposedly, but Jessica had found no one willing to teach her and the Bene Gesserit libraries were barred to her on account of siring a child with two chromosomes. She did not recall anyone speaking it on Wallach IX so perhaps it was truly secret.

“His body has changed in the last few months,” Jessica said as she walked with Yueh. It was always strange, seeing defined muscles on a frame so like hers. “The shape of his face softened. Fat in areas I would not expect in a male of his fitness. A rapid change.”

“Some things belong only to Paul,” Doctor Yueh said, smiling contritely. Endearing as it was, his loyalty to Paul sometimes irritated Jessica. She trusted him with Paul, but she was undecided if that trust extended to the rest of the family.

She needed to sort out those feelings soon. He would be coming as well. No one could work medical miracles as well as Yueh did.

“I am his mother.”

“Yes,” he agreed, saying no more, and passing another test.

She bid him a fond goodbye and returned.

Paul waited for her patiently in his room, his fingers trailing the edge of the wedding shawl he had never given back. It lay on his counter, a pretty lilac thing so vivid against the rough stone. Her beloved had not been pleased at Paul’s refusal to seal it in the vault and Jessica was forced to intervene. She loathed seeing them in conflict, but she had always indulged Paul.

“I know Gurney isn’t pleased with my defence. I don’t need the lecture from you as well.”

“Do you expect such trite commentary from me now?”

He shrugged carelessly, shirt falling down his shoulder awkwardly. It fit just six weeks ago. It explained the rush order of new clothes.

“I had hoped. Foolish of me, I know. What horrors do you mean to unleash with your words?”

“Focus,” she commanded, pitching to the frequency that let her cut through Paul’s defences. It was identical to the voice she used when she caught Paul making mischief. “I would have your ear.”

Paul blinked away the compulsion, but his focus narrowed on her regardless.

“I hear you.”

“There are things you must know. Things I hoped would never matter to you but now I have no choice. There is too great a chance I do not survive Giedi and leaving you without knowledge would be to leave you defenceless.” They spoke partly with words and partly in Bene Gesserit Sign. It was easier that way. Allowed Jessica to better suppress her doubts. Let her distant fears pass through her easier. “There was a plan, once, to seal the rift between Harkonnen and Atreides. A union between my daughter and the Baron’s heir who, I believe now, would always be Feyd-Rautha and no other. I suspect there were triggers placed in my genetic heritage, and your father’s as well, that would predispose our child to the Harkonnen scion.”

Paul shifted his weight, mirroring the way Jessica held herself. A strange echo of herself with the colouring of her beloved. The potential of what might have been stared Jessica dead in the eye, a daughter finding her mother lacking. It was one of the great lessons of womanhood. That a mother could never be all-knowing or all-seeing.

It terrified her, sometimes, this chameleon nature of Paul’s. So easily could she change her entire being, and though it was meant to protect her, Jessica wondered if it was a step too far. Even now, she could not shake the sensory deja-vu of her womb leaving the XX chromosome alone and siring a daughter. Could not unsee the afterimages of braiding that girl’s hair and sewing her first dress.

Time was never certain around Paul, never steady. It shifted and slipped, breaking in the wake of Paul’s passage. Such power. It would terrify her order should they discover it.

“That’s not all,” her daughter said, bright eyes seeing through all pretence. “Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“The product of that union had the potential to bring forth the one possessed of a mind capable of bridging time and space. The Kwisatz Haderach would lead us out of the dark and into a new future, one where humanity’s worst impulses could be tamed and nurtured into something greater. That child, your son, would have been Emperor.”

“One controlled by the Bene Gesserit, enforcing their will unconsciously. A Sister in a man’s body.” Paul’s expression fell as terrible understanding bloomed within her. “What have you made me, mother? Is this why I’m a freak?! An abomination! Was this always your plan? To glorify your womb by creating your mutant!”

“Paul—”

She stepped back, raising a hand in a warding gesture. “No! My skin feels like it isn’t my own. I barely know who I am, and you did this to me!”

Jessica stepped forward and took her daughter’s face in hand, calming her. Paul’s fear was true, hysteria deeply buried and forced to light. Jessica hated herself, then, for the fear in her child’s eyes. How easy it was to harm a child and never know it.

“Your father wished for a son. I loved him too greatly to refuse,” Jessica told her honestly, shedding her defences. Letting Paul read her freely. To be known so acutely scared Jessica but she did not wish to hide from the one person who might understand the gravity of her heresy. “Loathe me for my weakness but do not doubt that you were born from anything but love. Not pride, not glory, and most certainly not a plot. My darling child who is so stubborn and brave and unyielding, you are the worst person the Bene Gesserit could have in a Kwisatz Haderach for you cannot be tamed. Were you to become that idea, I would be branded a heretic in our histories. I would not regret it. Do you understand me? You are worth more than my faith and ideals.”

“Why did it have to be this? Why me? Why us?”

“Time is irrational and cares little for those battered by its waves. You were simply the confluence of a thousand thousand decisions.” She wiped away her daughter’s tears and held her tremulous gaze. “You are no mistake. No mutant. You are my child and you were destined for greater things.”

“Father only wanted my happiness,” Paul said bitterly.

“He is a kinder man than I,” she agreed. “But he does not know what it means to be a woman. He cannot understand what it means to be bought and sold as a woman. As a bride. Not as we do.”

“I am not yet wed.”

“And yet you have already chosen a husband.” Jessica spoke the truth unsaid and saw harm it harmed her daughter to be known, to have her insides exposed so easily. “I do not begrudge you this. I knew it from the day you laid eyes on him that your fates would be inextricably linked. Everything I have done has been to give you the greatest chance for happiness.”

“My line would end with me.”

“Your happiness is worth it to me. Us. I cannot know the future, but I can hope it is a bright one.”

He laughed then, hauntingly cold. “Brightness? There is nothing bright about my future. I see so much of it. I already see the future. My mind feels like a rickety boat in a storm, and I can’t find a path beyond the swelling waves. I’m lost, mother, and I can’t find a path out.”

“Tell me what you have dreamt.”

“My death. My blood spilt under the black sun, seeping onto the sands. Thousands cheering the name Harkonnen as I breathe my last. I die so many times, in so many ways. Sometimes, I wake up confused because my lungs aren’t filling with blood.” Her smile was a small, bitter thing. Jessica felt a deepening discomfort. “I can see it, my blood standing out against all the black as Feyd wrote to me. My fate converges there, and my blood spilt is the only constant.”

There was more Paul was not telling Jessica. She knew her daughter to the bone and this thing he hid from her haunted him like nothing else. Though she knew not the details, she felt an echo of Paul’s nightmares.

“Will you still go?”

Paul clutched the necklace Feyd gifted him, the necklace she had never taken off. It comforted her more than her own mother.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

And though Paul did not say those words, Jessica saw the truth writ across the features she passed down, those bow lips so naturally formed to a pout that led to cheekbones sharp yet delicate, and those wide eyes revealing glittering jade. This is what Lady Jessica heard from her daughter without words needing to be said:

Because I am blind to Feyd and I must know if he is my betrayer.

Because he writes me letters that only I can decipher.

Because I love him.

“My daughter, know that history may not absolve you. Will you be able to live with it?”

“I am willing to bear that cost,” Paul said with the grim acceptance and a fervent desire to survive of every daughter sold as a bride.

Yes, she would do just fine.

Feyd-Rautha woke slowly, head throbbing, dreams of a boy who never looked back haunting him.

Dawn’s light seeped through vertical shutters, bleaching him clear of colour, threatening to leave him sunburnt if he did not move. Where even was Feyd? He did not recognise the vista of sculpted organs dotting the garden outside. As he looked around, he failed to recognise any of the people in the bed, their limbs tangled around their nude forms. He groaned, pain flitting across his head, and climbed over bodies and pools of human fluids—the quantity of blood surprisingly lacking. His robe snagged on a… his head hurt so badly he could not tell if it was a corpse or someone just a leg.

Just how much did I drink last night?

However much he drank, it was not a strange amount since his return from Caladan. A year had passed since Caladan and for a year Feyd had found thrill in the embrace of drugs and alcohol. Murder alone could not sate him. Could not fulfil him as it used to. Everything was dull, washed-out greys even protected from the light of the dark star. Drugs, sometimes, brought hints of colour back.

Nothing compared to golden flesh and emerald eyes burning like faerie lights. Small hands and bloody teeth that savaged mercilessly, words that made one obey, and a gripping warmth that could not be replicated by hand alone. Paul had unveiled to Feyd the joy of brutalising one you adored, the beauty of leaving a bedmate bloody and ruined. Now he sought fleeting glimpses of those sensations.

Paul had ruined him as well. Trapped him with vows before the green ocean, under the yellow sun. My intended, Paul had said, but not husband. Bride, Paul claimed so alluringly, but never once did he claim Feyd as husband.

Supposedly, Feyd was hidden from Paul. As though he had not exposed his heart and given it freely, placed the necklace that held his soul upon Paul’s neck, and sacrificed loyal sons of Giedi before Paul’s altar.

Yet he was unknowable? Him? Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen? The one who hid nothing because hiding was beneath his honour. He was the one unknowable when Paul spoke witchery with every word? No, Paul had made a fool of him and taken advantage of Feyd’s honour, all the while he meant to pursue Irulan for the throne. It could be nothing else, not for two rivals to the Golden Lion Throne.

Feyd was left with two terrible choices: betray his honour and kill Paul, or step aside and be discarded.

And yet, he still read each letter Paul sent. Read them with care unbecoming of death’s son and kept them safe, in the physical nature of ink on paper, and the ephemeral nature of true meaning that left scars in the bloody wasteland of Feyd’s soul.

Truly, you make a fool of me, he thought with great bitterness, forcing himself out of the estate and making his way to the palace complex.

It was audit season. Freyd was still technically Siridar of Lankiveil and thus he was ultimately responsible for its compliance with tax law, acting regent or not. The early hours of the morning quickly bled to the utter indifference of afternoon, flowering cicadas buzzing incessantly, only slightly less annoying than the hum of the shielding systems.

His darling assassins enjoyed themselves in Feyd’s study, making art of their bodies, filling the air with their cries. Their joining was a thing of beauty only revealed to him after Caladan. Feyd had been exposed, the nature of his obsession made physical. In turn, they showed him this aspect of themselves. They never invited him to join physically but he observed them freely, fiddling with the firepearls around his wrist.

By evening, he was bored and ready to kill the first person to irritate him. Unfortunately, he could not murder Baron Harkonnen quite so soon. The report he gave his uncle was quick, concise, and truthfully could have been summarised in a quick letter. But the Baron enjoyed looking at Feyd and so Feyd revealed more skin than usual, allowing the Baron to indulge his baser pleasures. Looking was all the putrid man had done in recent years, his perverse indulgences giving him an instinct for the type of man who would bare their teeth and rip a throat out instinctually.

“A boy becomes a man,” Baron Harkonnen rumbled menacingly, gaze locked unerringly to Feyd’s pectorals. “A day most Holy, dear nephew. A most auspicious day.”

Feyd pretended to pay attention to his uncle’s prattling, his dark gaze assessing every way he could kill the Baron before anyone could react—or, truthfully, before anyone worked through their conflicting loyalties and made a choice.

“Preparations progress apace,” Feyd said meaninglessly. It would be months before his birthday. “The arena master has promised only the finest selection of war slaves.”

“Good. Good. My nephew should want for nothing. Who have you invited?”

“The standard list of nobility that needs to be invited. No one of true interest. The Princess will send a representative no doubt.”

“And the Atreides boy? You have left him alive,” his uncle said wistfully, the hallmarks of lust infiltrating his pudgy features.

Feyd did not let his fury show. “Uncle, there are more subtle ways to have me killed than slaying a ducal heir on his ancestral lands. I rather enjoyed that contact poison you used on my mug the other day.”

“That was Rabban, you fool boy,” Uncle rumbled, annoyance flashing across his drooping features. These days he looked like a wax figure that survived a fire, drooping and slightly off. The oil baths and medical interventions were not enough to save poor health and old age. Feyd held the belief that the Baron would probably die taking a sh*t before someone ripped his throat out, spitefully denying Feyd the right to kill him.

Oh, right, he was speaking to the Baron. “Rabban sent the war slave with poison on their claws.”

“Your brother has learnt to have contingencies. A welcome surprise after twenty years of disappointment.”

“A miracle.”

“Why do grain prices interest you so?”

Feyd did not let his confusion show. Grain prices? Interest from him? Why under the black sun would he care about grain prices? Then he remembered the letters between him and Paul. The cyphers they used to hide their true meaning. Agriculture, governance, and political history were common topics in the apparent layer of their discourse. One needed to go deeper to decrypt layers of meaning from their conversation.

But only they knew the last cypher, that near-perfect simulacrum of Paul that existed in Feyd’s mind dedicated to recreating Paul as he wrote—the way he bit his lip when he was deep in thought, the care he put in each word, the grin he wore when mocked Feyd, and even the ghost of his Bene Gesserit mother influencing his words. He knew Paul had something similar. It was the only way to reach the truth that underpinned every moment they shared with each other.

“They do not.” He shifted, letting his gown slip slightly and reveal his nipple. The Baron lost all reason. “The Princess demands we communicate. Grain prices are… boring enough that they might put her spies to sleep when they intercept it.”

“Spite does not become your features, darling Feyd.”

He parted his mouth, revealing blackened teeth. Though some men had followed Feyd’s lead, mostly women blackened their teeth, and of the few men who did none did so quite as elegantly as Feyd.

“You should spend more time in the arenas. Your admirers have grown antsy with your absence. Why, some might worry you’ve grown weak in your absence.”

“They can say so to my face,” he countered, hoping the Baron would do so and give Feyd another reason to cut him down.

Feyd had little interest in the arena. The unknown hunter—that bastard Fenring—was always observing the killing grounds, seeking out Feyd. The golden gaze cast across space and, he suspected, the vastness of time. Always searching, always waiting for a single mistake from Feyd. The force of its observation was so powerful he thought everyone else was blind for not being able to see the golden veil that watched and watched and never stopped watching. At the very least, it was focused there exclusively. It never found interest in other parts of Giedi.

Instead, he had found a new home away from the vices of the palace where the Baron reigned supreme and Feyd was but a usurper manoeuvring for advantage. In the depth of the Giedi Prime, the underground party scene thrived with or without Feyd.

It was a lawless land of decadence and carnal vice, where violence and sex were secondary to the pleasures of drugs and music.

It had become something of a second home now that his preferred hunting grounds were stolen and so he made his way there now, pausing only to change into something more fitting. Layers of thin dark silk draped over his flesh, a hood veiling his face. He openly wore his preferred knife and made his way out of the palace.

Hyperaware of observers, Feyd noticed immediately when he was being stalked. It was common for people to stop what they were doing and stare at his passage through the world. After all, he was the son of Härkä, the living divinity of Giedi Prime. They revered him, they feared him.

They loved him as well.

This, though, was not the distant veneration of a supplicant before their god. This was a spy hunting him. How odd. He’d purged the palace of spies only a month ago. Like rats, they reproduced faster than they could be slaughtered. Human rats, bought with spice and coin, made dishonourable by family held hostage and leverage applied just right.

And so, he cast his immense senses out and laid bare the world around him. The usual mix of guards, petitioners, distant relatives, and the dross of slaves. Uninteresting. A new spy, watching from an alcove they always gravitated towards, sparing a moment to gesture at a palace guard to handle the matter. Finally, his senses alighted on one who was like a void—no, not a void, a shape that permitted all things to pass through it without issue, never affected by outside forces.

He knew his observer immediately.

Feyd did not trust the Bene Gesserit witch on this world. He did not know why she was present. What purpose had spurred her to come to Giedi six months ago? Already, she was a fixture in the politics of the world, enjoying an elevated place in the Harkonnen court. Now she followed him. Why, he could not say.

The undercity welcomed Feyd. Where the Palace complex was vast, cold, and made to intimidate, the undercity was uncomfortably warm and narrow. It shared the same organic design theme, the same adoration for darkness, but colour could be more carefully controlled without the worry of the black sun bleaching away all. Dark reds, royal purples, and blues like the night sky. Steel girders holding up vast caverns, narrow walkways lit in neon pinks, and not a cool breeze to cut through the smell of humans packed too closely together. The sounds of slaves sold and assassins bought, mercenaries preparing for their next job, people dying inside alleys and beneath dark arches. The unashamed cries of ecstasy from the pleasure houses, male and female alike, in every combination and variation.

It was all Giedi Prime, just as the expansive and ominous Palace was Giedi Prime. In the end, sex, violence, and control defined every strata of society. It was the freest land in the Imperium. No one at all cared that two men might f*ck, but they would judge whether they f*cked intimately in a bed or with cold indifference on the streets—more importantly, they cared who was free, who was indentured servant, and who was slave in these relations. That Feyd’s darling assassins were intimate was not remarked. Their lack of nobility or peerage had caused issues. Enough women lived by the sword and died by it, many who would have been named swordmasters if the war schools ever realised genitals had no bearing on how well you could penetrate a shield and slice a throat. Giedi understood the danger of a woman better than most.

These ‘lawless’ lands were the reason Feyd held honour so tightly. He was as he was, and no force could change him. He held pride in being an inviolable force in a universe where the rest of the peerage pretended to be different from the people buying whor*s and the whor*s being f*cked. Men died. Women died. There was no higher purpose. Even he, son of the death-ox, would die as well and embody the very aspect of death he represented. But unlike the rest, he would die without being compromised, living true to himself and his purpose.

With this great derision for the Imperium in mind, Feyd entered his preferred club. One where anyone could enter so long as they had the means. For Feyd, Giedi’s favoured son, that means was merely dropping his hood and revealing his face. For the wealthy, they paid copious amounts for membership. For the poor, they snuck in or bribed their way or stole passes from others.

Music assaulted him as he entered, deep percussive sounds that shook his bones. He was led to his preferred VIP area, something of a circular mezzanine in the centre of the club, casting a dark shadow over the dancing pits.

He was offered drugs by a servant almost as soon as he sat on the leather seat wrapping around much of the level. One did not merely drink or do drugs. One drank and did drugs to get into the mood for festivities. And Feyd, truthfully, needed more than most to calm his mind and dull his paranoia.

Many approached the throne he made of the couch. He enjoyed the games they played. Some with manipulation, others with simpering facades. Others, though, the prettiest or the most interesting, he permitted to stay for the main event. He rather liked the look of the dark-haired foreigner, lithe and hard, eyes the gentlest shade of green, but knew the true source of his fascination. Knew why he could not look away when the boy removed his jacket and threw it carelessly over the back of the couch. Had Feyd held slightly less honour, he may very well have taken the boy there and then.

As it was, he was left with merely watching as the boy fell victim to an older woman with a smile sharper than any blade Feyd had access to. The boy wouldn’t survive the night. But, well, he put on a decent show kissing the woman who showed him more gentleness than he likely received on Giedi where intimacy was a rarity. The boy was a fool not to recognise a mantis.

His great interest, of course, was the Bene Gesserit who found her way to the mezzanine, a stunning shock of cream and white that took on the colours of the lights. She kept a few bodies between her and Feyd, pretending to be interested in speaking to a poet who was quite decent at his trade. Decent enough that Feyd permitted his continued presence.

And so, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, king of the underworld, drank and enjoyed poetry made on the spot, added his own commentary, and suggested a violent seasonal theme here and there. He took some crushed drug and valiantly endured his erection as two women f*cked above him, the two intentionally minoring the soon-to-be-dead boy and the older lady, leather creaking as they made a glorious spectacle.

As the day died and midnight came, the main festivities began. Music silenced, the sounds of people and flesh suddenly overwhelming.

Lights came alive, blindingly bright. They illuminated the approach of men carrying a body on a table. They were efficient in laying the table and its body down in the center of the mezzanine. The slave on the table had been saturated with a mix of the spice melange and hallucinogenic drugs till the veins beneath his flesh glowed blue and his eyes were sapphire. Tied down on a central table, he was unable to move. An offworlder, Feyd observed, by the spiky flames of his hair, dressed only in a grey codpiece that jutted out to the sides.

A fine specimen.

An expensive offering.

The manager of the club supplicated himself before Feyd and unveiled a black carving knife.

Feyd was guest of honour in all places upon Giedi Prime. There was no home that would not open its doors to him, no club that would dare give him anything but the most exclusive viewing platform, no shop that would deny his request, and certainly no person who would give him anything but the best cut of human flesh.

He took the blade gleefully and staggered to the slave. This would be his first kill of the day.

The first cut was so perfectly executed that the slave did not feel pain until his eyes observed the slit running down from collar to waist. When he did, his screams resounded through the silent club observing the sacrifice. His pain echoed and echoed, a harmony all its own. Feyd added his own song to the screams, a deep lilting rasp like rattlesnakes preparing to strike, and made another incision. It was rare he sang but he was a son of Giedi Prime and knew her instruments.

Feyd was agonisingly hard, his erection straining against his underlayer. He could feel the damp stain developing, turning his robes glossy, and felt no shame in it. There was honour in this, in loving one’s craft so greatly. Now if only the boy watching him with glossy eyes and a blush would fall to his knees and make use of his pout.

He was careful to remove the intestines and laid them to the side, gesturing for someone to bring a bowl to catch them. It wouldn’t do for them to rip accidentally and hasten the slave’s death. It was a simple task, one he gave little mind to. He was most keen for the liver and so removed it next, making only the most careful incisions. He laid it upon a plate brought to him and instructed the resident surgeon to keep the slave alive.

Feyd gestured for the meal to be shared with all. This was his benevolence.

He cut a slice of the hot liver and presented it to the Bene Gesserit. To do so before tasting it was to elevate her, honour her as though she were a Baroness. The Bene Gesserit was eminently graceful as she picked up the slice of human liver with her eating sticks and brought it to her mouth. It was so filled with spice that it left trails of blue on her lips.

Feyd could only see Paul in that moment, a ghost of his true desire overlaying Bene Gesserit lies. He could not help the way his throat went tight or the strength of his arousal. Could not look away as the witch cut another slice and brought it to her lips.

Could not move as she leaned in with an offering caught between her lips.

Her lips were soft, gentle, stained in spice-saturated blood. Warm liver, warm lips, warm life. Cinnamon bloomed in his mouth as he was kissed, spice heightening his awareness. He felt the world reveal itself to him as his senses blossomed. It felt like he could bridge the galaxy with but a thought, folding space with nothing but intent. The stars, he felt them as they lived and died in glorious cataclysm. The cold of space, the warmth of living worlds. Life found a way no matter the implausibility. And where life bloomed, death stalked close behind. Millions dying every minute in their varied ways. From those falling in battle to those passing ignobly in hospitals, from children strangled by parents and brother poisoning sister, Feyd felt it all.

He came, then, the force of it pulling him out of his heightened awareness. His hardness throbbed as it spurted through his robes. The force of it did not surprise him when months had gone by since he last felt release. He was more confused that the Bene Gesserit could elicit this from him.

Feyd offered her something approaching a smile. Then, he allowed the others in the mezzanine to enjoy the liver as well while he descended to the throng of people. He saw the entrance was open, and through it, he saw the crowd extended much further, into the narrow streets. It explained the smell of street food slowly overlaying the smell of flesh. Food and blood and sex and drugs. Ceremony and sacrifice and music and dance. The full range of Giedi’s delicacies on display.

The world twisted with each step that seemed to take an eternity, lights running like syrup. The concoction of psychoactive drugs and the spice melange distorting his reality. He descended as a living divinity to be amidst his followers and accepted their prayers, his name spoken with reverence.

The press of bodies around him, the churn of sweating bodies and ecstatic minds melding to the beat of the music. It encompassed his existence. He was but a conduit for them to know themselves, to see divine perfection and to understand their inadequacy. To fear his animalistic grace, to love the fear he exuded, and to revere how easily he commanded it.

Many touched him, reverent and uncertain. Fearing a lost limb as punishment. Some were bold enough to kiss his flesh and taste a living god. Some licked his robes where his seed seeped through. But mostly, it became a festival of flesh and sex. One with Feyd at the very center of it all.

How long this went on, Feyd could not say. Not as he was showered by veneration and worship. Eventually, under the strobing lights that oscillated between neon pink and liquid gold, he noticed the fool boy with the green eyes watching Feyd, and beside him the woman who intended to kill the boy. Saw how easily he leaned into her every touch, fooled so easily by intimacy. Or perhaps this was a protracted suicide by one who journeyed across the galaxy for a place to be accepted and found it so different from the stories.

She noticed his observation. Offered to share her kill with a few glances. Feyd accepted gladly. Took the willing boy in his arms and danced with him, cared little as bony arms wrapped around his broad shoulders. The narrow column of his neck enticed, and so Feyd bit him there, suckling on the bite mark. Enjoyed the gasps he teased out of this overconfident boy looking for any intimacy, so alone that he would die for it. Feyd ran his hands up and down his flanks, prying the boy out of his tunic. Mouthed against his sweaty collar as Feyd worked to remove his pants and reveal his caged manhood. One leg first made its way around his waist and then another. The boy was plump where Feyd expected hard muscle, the shock of it pulling him back before he did something he regretted like kissing him on the mouth. He focused on his true purpose, ignored the sweet nothings the boy babbled as Feyd consumed him and held him in place, and signalled the very amused woman. She approached and crowded the boy, holding him with one arm around the chest. Laying gentle kisses down the boy’s neck, showing such sweet affection. When she entered the boy, the boy’s stuttering gasp was like music.

At the height of his pleasure, when he spilt through the bars of his golden cage, was his fate sealed.

Her blade was thin, glistening with poison, and cut through the boy’s abdomen so gracefully that he did not notice, could not with the drugs and alcohol consumed. She did so at the same moment she pulled out to mask the shock of pain. Feyd felt it, the boy’s shudder, and the slickness of crimson spilling rapidly, never slowing.

It was only near the end, when it was far too late, that the boy developed an inkling of his demise. The haze in his eyes falling away, flickers of awareness shining through. The boy was beautiful in his dying moments and so Feyd kissed him on his plump lips, tasted the blood he gurgled in those final seconds. Imagined, for a split second, how tight he would be around Feyd’s co*ck.

He lowered the boy gently to the ground. Held his neck and his hand as oblivion beckoned sweetly. Thought only of Paul and missed his conniving witch.

“You died well,” he said in the truest compliment he could offer.

Green eyes fluttered as the boy whispered something inaudible. Thank you, he imagined those plump lips would say.

Finally, he set the corpse down and rose.

The cheer that arose near startled him. So focused was he that he forgot the adoring crowd.

“Härkä,” they sang in a multitude of accents.

He had made beauty of death and they rejoiced in it.

They raised their clasped hands to him as they did to the black sun. Worshipped their living god who had consecrated this newly holy space with blood and sem*n and spice. He knew with certainty that this would become a pilgrimage site for the true believers.

(When Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen’s bones had become dust and the whirlwind blew the dust away, the most faithful acolytes of the death cult he founded would pilgrimage to the many locations he plied his trade. The Palace of Giedi Prime was a common destination but the bravest few would journey to the underground and discover the many spaces he consecrated. Observe the pilgrims journeying to a thousand planets and one can begin to understand the devastation he inflicted on the Known Universe.

- The Secret History of Empire, Book 4, Vol. 5, Ch. 9.)

When he rose, his focus was stolen by the witch who appeared unruffled, unaffected by all that he had done.

The Bene Gesserit was beautiful, that could not be denied. Beautiful as a shrike. It was the beauty Paul cultivated when they last met. Sharp, graceful, but strangely delicate. It invited one to trust and approach, intoxicated by the movement of long limbs, and the seductive smile that offered everything beyond pleasure if one dared approach.

He was curious enough to fall into her snare. To take her hand in his and permit her kiss. Did she think he yearned for intimacy as well? The sudden grip on his co*ck startled him, made him release a sound unbecoming.

“Is this what you enjoy?” she asked in a voice pitched to humiliate, holding him where he was most vulnerable.

“I enjoy many things. I enjoyed that boy. I might enjoy you as well.”

“Arrogant.”

“I speak only truth.”

“Follow me, na-Baron,” she breathed against his ear. He thought only of Paul whispering sweet manipulations. “I have a room nearby.”

The compulsion was powerful, neatly ensnaring his thoughts and nervous system. Not as powerful as Paul’s commands which could make Feyd lose time if he was not careful. Even when Paul was absent, he wormed his way into everything Feyd did. He missed his bride terribly.

“Lead the way.”

He would follow where she led.

The walk through the throng of people was not long. No one dared touch him now, barely any dared look for more than a moment. He exuded true menace, a willingness to kill any that dared interrupt him. There was a difference between observing a leopard as it walked its territory and one actively hunting. Giedi Prime’s underbelly knew it instinctively.

He knew nothing of the building she led him to, down many alleys and descending a flight of stairs. It was like a tower inverted, dark granite flecked with white, strangely inorganic for Giedi Prime. They entered, the Bene Gesserit speaking to the eyeless person overseeing the establishment.

The room she had booked was bathed in shades of black, endless black. His robes vanished in the dark cavern lit only by blacklight. Feyd’s alabaster skin glowed in the dark and she was like an illusion, limned in a strange glow. She sat on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs together imperiously, one knee over the other.

“Kneel,” she commanded and so Feyd did, intrigued. He ignored the flash of arousal that shot through him. “Place your hand in the box.”

He noticed it only then, so perfectly blended into the darkness as it was. A hollow box a deep shade of green. He could not decipher the meaning of the runes upon it. Feyd’s knees hit the ground as he made himself small before her. Placed his hand in the box. Did not startle when he felt a needle at his neck.

“What is this?”

“A poison needle. Instant death if you remove your hand. You will meet your father, Härkä.”

“Yes, that is trivial to understand. I meant the box.”

“Pain.”

“So be it.”

It began slowly, merely a prickle on his flesh. That prickle became a needle prick became a knife cutting apart his flesh became molten heat burning at him.

It was pain most exquisite. What a unique device to target the nerves directly? It truly felt like his hand was burning, flames scorching away layers of muscles and fat and eventually bone. Fire spreading from his hand to his shoulder, networks of liquid fire suffusing his nerves. It soon became Feyd’s world, fire and agony. And, of course, the attendant pleasure.

The witch, when he looked up, was affecting a seductive persona. Did she expect him to beg for freedom? For release?

“Had I known you had such an offering, I would have visited earlier,” Feyd rasped, showing his teeth in a mundane threat display.

The pain peaked and with it Feyd’s pleasure. It was so easy to let go, to unlatch his iron-willed restraint, and climax untouched but for the sensory glory of pain. The pain did not abate but Feyd had mastered it. Even as it spread through his body and became as pervasive as the darkness around him, Feyd did not permit it to control him.

“What purpose does this serve? If you wished to pleasure me, you could have approached me at any time. So why do you test me, witch?”

“Silence yourself. Ask no more questions.”

“Bene Gesserit tricks,” he said with growing amusem*nt, careful not to ask a question. “That voice of yours, I’ve always found it interesting how confident you are it will work. Why do you believe it infallible.”

She was annoyed now, he could tell. Uncertain whether she had chosen the wrong intonations or if Feyd was actively resisting. Too confident to realise she had never held Feyd under her sway.

“When did you meet a Bene Gesserit, na-Baron?”

He blinked away her compulsion slowly, catlike. Was that so? Paul had not been… he had not been a Bene Gesserit plant? Not an instrument of their strange agenda?

Was Paul truly not kin to these witches? Had Feyd been wrong all along? Was he merely a witch without a coven?

“Do you believe only Bene Gesserit can wield your powers?”

She said nothing, watching him as it felt like his hand had been burnt down to the wrist. He could smell it, so powerful was the pain—and it was no illusion, his nerves were being acted on directly. He felt no weight from his hand. This would be an excellent pleasure device, but the witches waste it on their games.

“Either kill me or leave me be. This has grown tedious.”

He slowly withdrew his hand, showing no emotion at all beyond boredom. Only now was she realising this had never been her test but merely a whim on Feyd’s part.

“Stay with me,” she tried one last time, affecting a bashful persona.

“I have no intention of f*cking you, witch. Your voice holds no sway here.”

Spice yet burned in his veins. Even now, he could feel its power affecting him, enhancing his already immense senses that let him feel across the galaxy. He allowed no higher thought to guide him, only the instinctual awareness of a predator seeing a trap and knowing how to outwit it. Across the breadth of the Imperium, he cast his senses out, and saw an aspect of the truth revealed to him.

“Tell your Mother Superior I will sire a child only on my terms.”

He enjoyed the flash of true fear that cut through her. There was no means for Feyd to know that. In that moment of surprise, his hand darted back and grabbed the needle by the tip. With his other hand, he torqued her wrist even as he rose, pulling away. The witch blurred, preternaturally fast. Feyd was faster still. He slipped behind her, wrenching her wrist against her back, between her shoulder blades.

The poison needle found a place beneath her jaw. She fell still. Feyd grinned.

“What is your name, witch? In full, none of this coyness.”

“Margot Fenring.”

Feyd was not foolish enough to reveal his sudden fear but it was close. This was the eunuch’s wife? She complimented him well, he supposed, but if there was even a hint of affection, that monster would find Feyd should he harm her. Feyd knew in his heart of hearts he could not defeat someone impossible to sense.

“Does the box provide greater pain?” he asked instead, projecting more desire than he truly felt.

“There are more diverse options, na-Baron.”

Already, she tried a different seduction. Her voice was harsh, pitched low. More a man’s voice than a woman’s. It was electricity sparking down his gut to hear her that way. It told Feyd that the eunuch had been spying on them, had likely followed Paul and knew of their physical entanglement.

Who did the eunuch work for? Whose agenda was being advanced? The Emperor? The Sisterhood? Irulan’s?

Too much remained a mystery, but he knew many of the players now and that his particular bloodline was important. The expression of his parents’ genes as seen through Feyd and not Glossu. Or perhaps they wished to cultivate an interest in female sexual partners and wed him to someone more suitable than a man. Maybe it was both and neither.

“Then perhaps you might live. I will be keeping your poison.” He let her go. “You live because you provided me with a new form of pain. Do not push your luck.”

“You would respect me less if I obeyed.”

Feyd scoffed and left confused. He did not enjoy these games when they ended without bloodshed. War was far simpler than this. Far, far simpler.

Flowering cicadas brushed against his personal shields when he ascended and was revealed to the night sky. They in their thousand and one colours, eating away the pollutants this world produced. Dawn would come soon and vanquish the chill. Before the dark sun crested the horizon, he would furiously craft a missive and dip dangerously in his personal accounts.

It had been a doubt held so deep he was blind to it. Unable to see the nature of his inherent distrust of the Bene Gesserit and how it outlined Paul Atreides. Feyd had dishonoured him, dishonoured them both with his unconscious bias, his unworthy fear.

He would see Paul again. He would offer his apology. Prostrate himself if need be.

He would do whatever it took for Paul to call him husband.

Giedi Prime revealed itself with the unfolding of spacetime. Waiting below was the death of Paul Atreides. To know a trap is the first step to overturning it but so much was still unknown to Paul. Walking towards one’s death was to walk the road of your untold potential and confront it, knowing that failure would consign you ever to the ignominy of history’s margins.

This would be Paul’s grand act of trust in another. She feared it would end in death. She held faith that there could be more, that past the uncertainty of his obsession and the strictures of nobility, there was a golden future awaiting him.

The journey had been a long one. The Guild Highliner had appeared as Feyd said. Their passage bought through official channels and was thus safe. Not even the Harkonnens could not bribe the Guild. The Atreides contingent was small but potent: a Ducal Heir and her Bene Gesserit mother, escorted by a Suk doctor, and defended by the foremost Ginaz Swordmaster in the Known Universe. The attendant servants would never be mentioned in the tale. The story would mention the necklace the na-Duke wore. It was dark and ominous, nothing of its like would be manufactured on Caladan. Let them see, the na-Duke would say were she asked. Let the world see the many choices she has made. The weight comforted her as a shield against the attacks of the outside world and the assault of his inner self.

The ship descended from the atmosphere with remarkable gentleness. Little more than a repurposed gunboat with shields as its only weapon, they would die should the Harkonnens choose to shoot them out of the sky. Such was the way of trust.

The final minutes were nerve-wracking. Beside him, Lady Jessica affected a mask of such serenity that Paul could not see past it. Whatever fear her mother held, it had long since passed through her and left only the Senior Sister of the Bene Gesserit.

Their fingers brushed, his mother twining their hands together. “Are you ready?”

“As ready as I must be.”

The doors opened and the ramp unfolded, revealing finally the Barony Spaceport of Giedi Prime bleached a painfully bright white under the light of the impossible black sun. Looming over everything like a furious god was the Palace, pitch black like stones from the very depths of the ocean. The spires were shaped like mounds of flesh, the connecting bridges looking like nothing more than a ribcage. The central complex reminded Paul only of a beating heart.

Had the Harkonnen’s killed a god and inhabited its corpse? Or did they build a god for their own ends and care not at all for the blasphemy they committed?

Waiting below were hundreds of bald Harkonnens in dark clothes, living shadow ghosts that watched with frightening intensity, all holding strange instruments. More than one member of the Atreides’ retinue gasped in horror. The Harkonnens truly did look monstrous arrayed like this.

Paul had lain with the greatest Harkonnen. Such lesser copies were nothing to her.

And so, she took the first steps out of the ship and allowed the strange warmth of the black sun to grace her features. Her skin turned ash-pale, as did her clothes.

It had been intentional, what she wore. She had always felt keenly that she was her mother’s child more than her father’s. More Bene Gesserit than Duke Heir. It is in how she walks now, a seductive glide across the stone plaza, the heels of her boots resounding sharply. The fit of her garments layered jacket and robes falling across her body almost like a gown, gold chains across the chest giving the momentary impression of breasts. Everything she did emphasized the ambiguity of the feminine, androgyny weaponised at her command.

Here, now, exposed to the black sun, the Harkonnens revealed the truth of the objects they carried. Music carried across the open space, a welcoming anthem for their hereditary enemies. Here we stand and here we rise, the music said.

The Harkonnen methods for music were as viscerally blunt and industrial as she expected. An entire section was dedicated purely to an acapella arrangement, rows of near-identical hairless humans intoning a violent and haunting dirge. They stomped their feet and beat their chests in unison, the vibrations altering the pitch and tone of their voices.

Underpinning it all was an electrical instrument of harsh industrial origin. Some strings strung over a wood board similar to a bassinet, plucked by their players. The sound that emerged from the speaker systems was complex, the time signatures varying so often. Slowly she recognised the pedals to be causing the odd clipping and distortions she was hearing.

Duncan was the living embodiment of tension following behind Paul, ready to jump on her and shield her from harm should that be necessary. She took comfort in that as she walked with her head held high, arrogance dripping from every pore.

I am Atreides and there is no call I do not answer! her countenance screamed; her presence equal to hundreds.

It was then that the music responded. Opened, in truth, the aggressive string instrument turning bright as starlight reflected against a crystal room. Airy, she dared call it, the sound twinkling as the strings were plucked with surprising gentleness. Pretty major-key arpeggios, clean and without distortion.

Paul had met the challenge and now she was… not welcomed, but they would not descend upon her in droves to tear her flesh from her bones.

Awaiting them at the grand doors was a Mentat of great renown. One Piter de Vries whom Thuffir had spent hours drilling Paul on, refusing to let him face such an enemy unprepared.

“An Atreides upon Giedi Prime,” the Mentat said, drawing out each syllable. Paul felt slimy. “Will wonders never cease?”

Mother smiled politely. “No more wonderous than a Harkonnen upon Caladan.”

Paul took the Mentat’s measure in that moment and dismissed him entirely. A dangerous man to be sure but not on the level of Thuffir. In his subtle malice, Paul saw the lessons Feyd learnt and eventually surpassed. No, this man was no true threat.

The force of her dismissal sent the Mentat reeling. It was foolish to draw attention, but Paul hated him just as she hated the Baron for the harm they inflicted upon Feyd in shaping him. Yes, the end product was beautiful, but it was the art of kintsugi, making glory from ruin. One needed to ruin something first.

“One would expect the issuer of an invitation to greet their guests,” Paul said flatly.

“The na-Duke undergoes his period of holy seclusion. It ends at the stroke of midnight.”

“Then I shall see him then. Make it so.”

Paul walked past the Mentat without waiting, dismissing the man who thought he could shape Feyd in his image. Let him know how weak he was. How inconsequential to the epic being written. The histories would not remember him.

A servant showed them to their suites. A set of rooms in the West Wing, overlooking a garden rendered in many shades of white and grey. The interior was dark like the rest of the Palace, as much living liquid as it was bioorganic stone. A strange mix that disquieted Paul.

“The Baron has invited the Lady Jessica to dine with him and members of Giedi Prime’s nobility,” the servant informed them when they were settled. “What message shall I bring him?”

Mother smiled mirthlessly. “I accept. Swordmaster Idaho shall be my escort. I hope the wine selection is adequate.”

“We can’t leave Paul alone,” Duncan said when the servant left.

“And you would abandon me to the Baron?” Mother countered.

“You know I do not mean it like that, my Lady. Merely that Paul has a way of finding trouble.”

“I am right here.”

“Shush, child, you do have that unfortunate habit. But we’ve trained you well. Promise me you will survive whatever foolishness you find yourself involved with.”

“I promise.”

Duncan sighed. “I don’t like this one bit.”

“You do not need to like it, you merely need to perform.” Mother kissed Paul’s brow. “Rest. You will need it.”

Paul truly did mean to rest and wait for his mother to return. Truly, he had no intention of sneaking out and possibly getting himself killed. This world held little interest to him without Feyd.

Fate, however, had found the adventures of Paul Atreides too entertaining to go without.

He had been dozing on a strangely organic couch after Lady Jessica and Duncan left. It was also incredibly comfortable, moulding to his body, and beckoning Paul to a deeper slumber. Yueh was pleased to have him sleep and dropped a blanket over his form before retreating to his assigned room to do whatever it was a Suk Doctor did in his spare time.

As comfortable as the seat was, he did not miss the guard approaching him and cracked open an eye.

The Ducal Guard bowed and whispered in her ear, “It is a Lady Fenring, young master. She requests a moment of your time.”

She stiffened to full alertness. That was not a name to ignore. Count Fenring was a close agemate of the Emperor and, some said, his true spymaster. A man too powerful to leave without a Bene Gesserit controller. Any Bene Gesserit given that role would be a senior Sister of immense skill.

So why was she on Giedi Prime? Had she been assigned here to further the Sisterhood’s purposes? Was her husband present at the Emperor’s request? Whose plot was afoot?

Not for a moment did he believe he was being paranoid. His mother and most loyal guard were both away. He was most vulnerable to manipulation in this moment. Any Bene Gesserit would recognise that weakness and… and if the Sisterhood desired a child of his seed, this would be an opportune time to acquire it.

“Tell her I will meet her in a quarter-hour. Over her refreshments and all possible courtesies.”

“It will be done, my lord.”

Paul freshened up quickly, washing his face and applying floral scents. He redid his hair quickly, accentuating the curls that fell down either side of his face. He considered makeup. Decided it would be worth it and applied the barest layer of foundation, dark eyeliner that made him look like a hawk, and a simple gloss that brought out the red in his lips.

Taken together, she did not look like a na-Duke, not her father’s son.

It would have to be enough for drinking tea in the parlour was the Lady Fenring. A stunningly beautiful woman who undoubtedly commanded every room she entered, dressed in layers of cream and sharp white. She stood out against the backdrop of the room.

They observed each other in that split second, their readings of fellow humans advanced and trained to a knife-edge. She saw in the Lady Fenring’s docile expression and the elegant arch of her neck the same deep, abiding adoration that Paul’s mother gave freely to her father. I understand your weakness, Paul thought, intentionally allowing a hint of natural nervousness to slip past her defence.

She followed that deception by breaking first, flicking her eyes away for a split second.

“Lady Fenring, an honour to meet such an esteemed Sister. I dared hope to take a moment of your time, but you have found me first.” Paul looked to the attendant. “Thank you, but I will pour for the honourable Lady.”

Greetings, Elder Sister. Danger near?

Lady Fenring’s smile was gentle as a silk garotte. They settled easily into a role, she the elder, Paul the uncertain younger sister. Not a viable target for her sexual prowess, unconsciously seeing a womb in Paul where there was none, and no possibility of plucking the Atreides' genetic material for storage.

“You honour this unworthy wife far too greatly, Lord Atreides.”

We are always under observation. Assume monitors present. Trust no one.

Paul refilled her cup and a respectful nod. “I suspect I honour you precisely as much I am permitted and not one iota more. And should I overstep, undoubtedly you shall correct me.”

Including you?

She trilled a laugh, sipping her tea elegantly. Paul did not know drinking tea with lipstick could be anything but awkward. “Yes, I believe you have the right of it. Walk with me, sister. I will show you my favourite place.”

Especially me. A sister is held captive. Lacking means to recover. Trust no one.

A chill swept through her as she rose. A Sister held captive on Giedi Prime? Her heart skipped a beat. That shouldn’t have been possible. What her mother taught her gave every indication that only a Sardaukar or a Swordmaster could take a Sister captive.

Paul waved away the guards before they could think to follow her. As if they had the numbers to stop a true assault. Their best plan of escape was in the catacombs filled with slave warriors and from there find a friendly contact. It was dangerous for Paul would stand out immensely, elfin features flush with vitality unnatural in this world of harsh lines upon pale skin.

So, she followed faithfully behind one of the most dangerous people to grace the world.

“Have you visited Wallach IX in recent years, Elder Sister? Is it truly a land of eternal spring?”

She flashed Paul a wistful smile, emphasising a point in her secret message with the click of her heels. “I have not been recalled in many a year. But it is truly beautiful. Much of the world is in a tropical climate. Rain was frequent but never harsh, and the extremes of weather that you know did not exist. I believe you would have enjoyed napping under the dappled sunlight of the Jacaranda trees dotting the monastery. It is a shame you were never sent.”

“Would the Mothers Superior have accepted me as a student?”

“Had I vouched for you? Most certainly.”

“Males have been trained in our arts but not on Wallach itself.”

“Exceptions can be made. Yours is a far stronger case for an exception to be made. Perhaps the strongest. I would have delighted in teaching you. It would have been a privilege.”

In that adjacent timeline where her mother loved Leto slightly less and held duty closer to her chest, Paul thought she might have enjoyed being trained under Lady Fenring. An accomplished and loyal Sister to finish Paul’s training and guide her through the perversions of House Harkonnen. To teach her how to survive long enough to fulfil a plan ten millennia in the making and usher the Kwisatz Haderach unto the galaxy, a wonder terror under the leash of the Bene Gesserit.

But that world is dead and instead, there is Paul, whose burgeoning prescience threatened to break her at every turn. What else but madness would bring her to this dark world where her death was prophesied?

“Perhaps it is not too late,” Paul added softly, drawing on her longing for that different world where she might have been born right.

“Raise your chin, sister. Even in despair, we show no weakness.”

They were, of course, followed extensively. Paul would like to know why those women in black leather stalked the Harkonnen spies following the two Bene Gesserit. Just how many factions were at play here? How divided was the Baron’s Keep? Beyond the Baron and the Mentat, there was Feyd and his older brother. But how many more factions were there?

“Why did you insist on seeing me alone?”

“I wished to see the one who stole the na-Baron’s interest with my own eyes,” she said honestly, revealing herself to Paul. Was that… was she using the same tricks on Paul? Had she managed to hide anything from her? “Without the protection of your mother. What you do with him is a difficult thing for any Sister. A dangerous thing. Our lives are so very often unglamorous and many of our order never know kindness or compassion in the line of duty.”

“I do what I must for the good of us all.”

“Were that you born a daughter.”

“Wishes do not change reality.”

“I wonder how true that is. Did your Lord Father not wish for the greatest retainers? That Swordmaster of yours, truly his legend touches the Imperium. And a doctor to match him.”

“Loyalty is the great currency of House Atreides.”

“A miracle it is so rarely broken even under the most torturous circ*mstances.”

Paul nodded in agreement, heart thundering. Yueh was part of this plot as well? She understood Sister Fenring wished to use Duncan as a weapon in freeing the captive Sister, but what role would Yueh play in this?

Duncan was going to shake Paul for getting into a scheme. Possibly shout himself hoarse. It would be entertaining, at least.

“Ah, we are here.”

Here was a set of double doors at the bottom of the wide staircase attended by creatures that might have once begun as humans but were quite removed from the idea now. Lady Fenring weaved compulsions and the creatures opened the great doors.

Paul had not thought there could be anything beautiful borne of Giedi Prime. Not a gentle beauty, at least. Feyd was the allure of violence, blood-stained teeth reflecting sunlight, the edge of a blade and the raw brutality of a crushed skull; the beauty of efficiently slaying one’s enemy and the bravado of screaming one’s victory across the cosmos. But that wasn’t a green sort of beauty, not vines climbing up support struts or the vibrant greenery swaying in a false wind. Violence did not map cleanly to flowering fruits exploding with colour, so sweet to the nose that Paul nearly gagged, and bravado could not explain the practised and calm ease with which pale hands plucked fresh produce.

“The hydroponics of Giedi Prime are the greatest in all the galaxy. Industry, after all, is the Harkonnen prowess, and agriculture is the oldest industry.”

Green as far as the eye could see. Food enough for a continent, growing in neat rows so long they narrowed to nothing more than a bright green dot.

“How far do they stretch?”

“Entire levels have been forgotten and rediscovered. New areas drilled from natural caverns and planetary voids. Many would have looked at Giedi Prime and baulked at its inhospitable nature but here, you see the elegance of brutal perseverance.”

Strange spider-like creatures roved along the ceilings and pillars, inspecting the metal hydroponics supports. Biological drones, she thought, surprised to feel no disgust in their leathery bodies that stretched oddly, glossy reflections under the blacklight. Did an ugly creation working towards beauty make it less vile?

“Why did you bring me here?”

“They do not speak of this place. Not out of shame or to hide a secret resource. They do so because it is expected and what is expected is not worth discussing. ‘Poisoning the air with your words’ is the Harkonnen saying. I brought you here in hopes you might understand that even in the darkest places, life springs forth eternal, and beauty is always to be found.” Gentle fingers brushed away her tears. When had she lost her control? “I believe you may need this wisdom to see you through this mission. Be brave, sister, and remember that duty is a reward unto itself.”

“I will,” she promised.

“May we meet again under the lilac canopies,” Sister Margot said, speaking of the Jacarandas that bloomed eternal on Wallach, and left him where he stood, underneath the greenery of industry put towards the great act of sustaining life.

Giedi Prime was a living womb. It incubated life and protected it from all. Only here, cocooned by such deep rock no atomic would penetrate, could it be known. People were not wrong to mention the savagery of this world, its lawless nature and lack of any restraint. But that was not everything. There was more to it and Paul was privileged to see these things never mentioned in books, never spoken of by former slaves.

When Paul sat upon the Lion Throne, it would be known. This, she would make certain of. This, she would gift Feyd.

For now, she would need to find her mother and inform her of the captive Sister. Mother could best parse truth from manipulation and set them on a path to survival.

The scrape of the door opening had him turning, reaching for the kindjal she carried at his waist.

The assassins. Finally. Paul had wondered how long until they took this opportunity. They were simpler to understand. Simpler to deal with.

He was a fool for thinking so.

They descended as wraiths, the two women, falling upon the assassin in a dance of violence. It was a set of quick, ruthless stabs that felled the assassins before Paul had reason to draw his blade. The bodies fell to the ground.

Feyd’s darlings hissed at him, partway challenge, partway reassurance. Paul stood calmly, ready to kill them and add to the bodies clogging up the landing.

“In your name, Atreides.”

Only one had ever said those words to him. Under the cover of night with blood pooling at their feet, Feyd-Rautha said those words. Made a promise to dedicate violence to Paul.

He has made a god of me, a cult of death in my name. Atreides will one day mean ritual murder and I have permitted this perversion.

Ancestors, forgive this apostate.

In the bowels of Giedi Prime, his ancestors could not hear him.

Feyd-Rautha emerged from his seclusion with grim determination, knowing that all things would come to a head over the coming hours. It was midnight and the moon’s radiance limned his form, flattening him to an ash grey he did not particularly care for. Not the crisp bleaching of the dark sun, this was a muting effect.

Months had passed since he penned the letter to Paul. Months without response as the Guild ship navigated the dangers of space and weeks after for the return trip. His worry had heightened yet left him more numb than usual. Without the arena, only the underground remained, and he grew weary of being king of the dark. He did not grow tired of drugs, violence, and spice, no, but they were washed-out greys compared to the vivid emeralds and glittering amethysts that Paul’s memory inspired.

This obsession would lead to ruin. There would be no House Harkonnen if Paul was faithless and Feyd fool enough to honour their vows. And yet, he could do nothing less. When the betrayal came, he would carve Paul’s chest open and eat his still-beating heart before consigning House Atreides to the dust of history.

Beneath the dark sun, upon the sand of the ancient combat arena, all would be made clear.

The temple he rested in was a small thing, built by the heroes of Harkonnen long gone. A holy place of meditation for those who bore the name Harkonnen, built with brick and cement, made of swooping lines that reminded Feyd of the body in motion, of hearts beating and the downward cant of a frown. It was not the focused design language that would dominate Gieidi in the millennia after the house was built, wild and unrestrained architecture. It was from a less stagnant age where heroes still roamed.

Here he would hold private audiences with invited guests. The audiences were intended to be short. This was not the true celebration. That would come after his victory in the arena. Giedi Prime would scream his name unto eternity.

The first visitors he received were his darling assassins who had stood guard outside the holy house for the week he spent with his thoughts. He’d felt their absence at one point and eagerly awaited some form of bloodshed. The universe, as usual, gave him no such entertainment.

His pets had trailed Paul Atreides as he met with the f*cking Bene Gesserit witch. It had been a near thing, Feyd’s control just barely holding him from rushing out and leaving bloody devastation across the planet.

When he’d recovered his rationality, they continued their report. In good news, they killed a host of Rabban’s assassins and staged an act of violence between Uncle’s arena masters and Piter’s loyal spies. A good day of hunting. Another total victory for Feyd. Slowly but surely, the loyalty of House Harkonnen flowed to Feyd. He could, if he wished, strike his uncle down but should he wait another four years, he won’t even have a civil war to contend with.

While Giedi adored Feyd as its truest son, there were enough nobles he’d made an enemy of and many more besides he intended to purge. They would lead an insurgency the moment he ascended. Best to wait until he was in place to execute them all at once.

“Kill whoever you must. I will not have this day ruined by any fool.”

“It will be done, na-Baron.”

Next came Irulan’s messenger. To no one’s surprise, the Princess had sent the ageing Count with slicked-back hair and a meaningless smile that revealed nothing. The eunuch Count. A genetic failure and the end of the Fenring lineage. Future children might hold the name, but none would hold blood that could trace itself to Butler and her Jihad.

He should not be a threat.

He terrified Feyd more than any enemy.

The Emperor had gone to war on his recommendation.

He entered without fanfare, carrying a case that he laid down at the offering table that bridged the waterway separating the small hall and the raised platform where Feyd’s throne was seemingly carved from the ground up.

Within lay an antique laser rifle in pristine condition, metal polished to a shine, wood stock glossy. A rifle and a stack of books on—

“The Palinisian Campaign,” Feyd read with true awe, “as observed by Sulo Abulard of the 3rdSniping Regiment. This dates back to Butler’s Jihad. This weapon cannot be from that time.”

“It is indeed. Restored with components of that age. The last of their kind. The Princess scoured the galaxy for them. A gift given to House Corrino as proof of Abulard loyalty now returned to its great scion.”

She truly does consider me a friend, Feyd realised with a lurch. It was not merely politics. Not merely duty and obligation that made her pen letters and indulge his rants on great battles of history. Friendship. How strange a thing for Feyd-Rautha to hold so casually in his bloody hands.

“Such a gift is beyond its weight in spice.”

“The Princess asks only that you write to her the political considerations the Butlerians were under during the Jihad.”

He blinked and, unable to resist, grinned with blackened teeth. “Ah, the gift is a curse as well. Does she expect me to die in the arena to avoid having to do so?”

“I surely could not say what amuses the Princess.”

In another life, another time, Feyd thought that maybe he might have gotten along with the eunuch. He likely would have made a more interesting mentor than Piter. What a dangerous man to make Feyd so easily forget the impossibility of him.

Feyd still couldn’t sense anything from the eunuch. His eyes saw the man, but they could not tell if he was excited or lying or relaxed. Usually, Feyd could tell where everyone in a room was but that was impossible with Fenring despite staring right at him. The senses that let him know how best to kill a man simply refused to work. He was realising that they hadn’t failed, merely that the signals were swallowed whole by the black hole of Fenring’s presence.

“I take it by your presence that the Emperor considers Giedi Prime a far-flung region he must pretend to care for,” Feyd said, recalling the last time they spoke, before this man’s words spurred him to duel Paul.

“Ah, not so at all. Arrakis is the fiefdom of the sitting Baron and so Gieid Prime will never leave the Emperor’s thoughts. In truth, I missed my wife and wished to visit her. There are not so many opportunities for our duties to intersect. Your ceremony was an opportune moment for us. For that, you have my thanks.”

Did the Count know of Feyd’s obsession with pain?

Had his wife spoken of their… trysts overstated it, though Feyd had climaxed more than once. He attended to her some evenings, played her games, and she showed him new forms of pain with her torture box. The witch tested him in every way she could and Feyd gave her reactions within a narrowly defined scope. He never gave away his sensory capabilities though she tried to coax it out of him and her attempts to coerce him into bed were the only times he allowed her Voice to fail against him. If she knew already, or even merely suspected that he laid with Paul, then that would be his shield to explain his resistance.

Feyd felt incredibly vulnerable to be known to a man who he knew so little about in turn.

“House Harkonnen is ever at the service of our Imperial overlords. Please, enjoy the festivities and all that Giedi has to offer.”

The dismissal was clear. The Count bowed, lower than Feyd deserved, but it could be excused for today.”

“Yes, I will greatly enjoy observing your holy day, na-Baron. Perhaps you will even hear my cheering in the stands.”

His next visitor is one he would have waited a lifetime to see again.

To witness Paul Atreides was to witness the glory of a stormy ocean shaded by the vivid sunset as the waves rose and crashed upon the coast, beautiful and dangerous in equal measure. Paul had grown into the image of his mother, his Duke father only in his colouring. Lithe and tall, strength hidden behind the delicate folds of his shimmering clothes. Long hair curling like ocean waves around his shoulders. He wore the bones of Feyd’s mother around his neck and did so proudly. Eyes dark like the hawk, kohl-lined and sharp. Edging the dark shape was lilac that reflected brilliantly in the light.

A girl, Feyd might have mistaken him for, if his senses were not so keenly attuned to such differences. It is instinct as well that reveals Paul to him. The near-prescient knowledge of Paul’s every movement, his every step and motion.

But in every other way, a woman stood before him. He stared at a na-duch*ess today.

“I greet you, na-Baron,” Paul said, dropping into a low curtsy, loose robes pooling like a dress.

“And what gift have you brought me, my na- duch*ess?”

“Myself.”

She was arrogant, Feyd gave her that. Arrogant enough to gift herself. Arrogant enough to style herself duch*ess against the strictures of the Imperium. Feyd would respect that choice. Always, Paul stayed true to herself. In all ways but the vows they spoke under the crimson sky to the gods they held dearest. Before Feyd stood his bride and yet Feyd did not stand as husband. Not yet.

When I have sacrificed every soul in the Imperium before your shrine, will you finally understand my devotion?

“A man might take that the wrong way. A bride offering herself as a prize. Whole armies would fight for your hand.”

“Would you permit anyone else to be victorious?”

He rose from his stone throne and crossed the threshold of running water meant to ward fae creatures like his Atreides. Feyd did not stop until barely anything separated them.

“I would leave a mountain of corpses before your altar. The galaxy would sooner burn before I let you name another husband.”

Paul demurred, looking away. Such pretty lashes she batted. “And were I to wed a woman? A Princess, perhaps.”

Feyd parted his mouth and showed his teeth. “Once, I swore to serve Irulan faithfully. She tricked that vow out of me. Would you have me break my vow and slaughter her for presuming so greatly? Would you make an animal of me, duch*ess? I would do it gladly.”

“You cannot say such things.”

He realised, in the calm way of one who was obsessed and spent years observing a subject, that Paul truly worried for him, truly feared what Feyd would do if his position in Paul’s life ever felt threatened. He knew, in the depths of his black heart, that there was no Bene Gesserit plot when it came to Paul. At least, not as the primary motive. Every contradiction of Paul that confused Feyd was nothing but the impossible challenge of being all things at once.

He relaxed and settled down. That his bride was uncertain, unsure, was Feyd’s fault. He should have made things clearer.

“Would you join me on the morn, Atreides? I would show you some of this world.”

Paul smiled, a brilliantly free expression of joy. It was the most beautiful thing Feyd had ever witnessed.

“I would be delighted, Harkonnen.”

They would have time enough.

Feyd slept fitfully. No more than four hours before he rose and dressed, stalking out of the small temple. He should have accepted more private invitations and made greater alliances for his eventual coup. Should have, but not a one mattered more than being ready for this.

It was a clear day, the sky a uniform slate grey as far as the eye could see. The factories had been shut down in the leadup to his birthday, millions of solari spent on atmo-scrubbers, merely so Feyd would have clear skies for his fireworks. Giedi Prime bent to the whims of the favoured son.

Awaiting him was a sleek vehicle, slowly being bleached out by the rising black sun. Arranging for this outing had stolen two hours he might have better spent sleeping in preparation for this evening. They were two hours well spent.

The vehicle had a glass partition fully raised when he entered. He saw only the vaguest outline of his companion, of his Paul. Flown by one of his assassins, it would give them privacy enough. Not that there wasn’t an Atreides handmaiden who looked strangely trained in combat arts, a concession to Paul’s security team. A dozen Atreides men would have scoured their landing zone, explored their route, and continued serving security to their beloved heiress.

“The easiest way to be spotted is to attempt to be inconspicuous.” Paul’s voice came past the glass muffled though her amusem*nt could not be softened. “Someone might very well shoot us down.”

“What is a violent crash but a more intriguing morning? Unravelling such a mystery would grant me more people to murder.” He pointed westward, firepearls clicking, knowing that Paul would sense it even if he did not see the motion. “There. Do you see the Champion’s Arena? That is where I will be anointed under the black sun.”

“Seventeen years of age to make a man. You Harkonnens grow slow.”

“Baseless mockery. I thought you a fan of my size. I heard no complaints last we were together. Not one.”

“Baseless arrogance.”

“Not without base.”

Paul scoffed. “When you are Baron, will you continue fighting in the arenas?”

“And when you are duch*ess?” he asked, stressing that word, enjoying it greatly.

“When would I fight in the arena?” Paul asked coyly.

“Must I invite you to shed blood beside him? Will you pry everything from me before you accept?”

“My amusem*nt matters more than your dignity.”

Feyd did not bother hiding his dark chuckle and settled into a near-comfortable silence. He wished to break the glass partition and put his hands on Paul, whether in violence-as-lust or lust-as-violence, he could not tell. That tension stayed with him until they landed in the shade.

Quickly, he exited the vehicle. He was not so far gone as to open the door for Paul. He had his own guard for that and Feyd would cut his hand off before pretending at decorum.

Feyd saw his duch*ess and very nearly died of regret for not opening the door.

In the shade, Paul was a vision of multilayered beauty.

The outer robe—or dress, he supposed, as that better suited a duch*ess—was a blue so dark it appeared black, tied loosely by gold knots at the waist. It lacked sleeves and a back, shimmers of reflected light revealing the textural quality of the circular patterning, like waves crashing across the curve of her body.

Beneath that layer, she wore a skirt that began as the deepest green at the hem and lightened to a bright seafoam where it was cinched high. Puffing out from there was a puffy white blouse adorned in the Atriedes falcons taken flight, bright red as the sunset as they flew down Paul’s wide sleeves, knots serving as the falcon’s talons and sealing the slit running from armpit to wrist. It exposed an artful degree of flesh. And above her heart was the dark necklace Feyd carved from the bones of his mother, like a deep-sea creature forced to light.

Her hair was tied in a complicated bundle of plaits, braids, and artfully loose hair, adorned by a gold net glittering with sapphires and emeralds. The bundle was held together by a barioth pin. The barioth was a creature of Lankiveil, an apex predator that Feyd had hunted once and gifted Paul its skull. It was a difficult beast to find let alone slay. Paul had defiled the gift he gave and fashioned two of its teeth to serve as the barioth’s signature tusks. The white teeth and pure white fur of the pin were a sharp contrast to her black hair.

Paul wore the marks of Lankiveil over the colours of Caladan. Giedi Prime did not adorn her and the message was clear to him. So long as another ruled Giedi Prime, she would not let it taint her.

A fabric train followed Paul, layers of silk emerging from seams down the back of his coat like gossamer thin wings, sky blue and seafoam merging to silver and lilac. It floated by means of a hidden contraption Feyd could barely hear the hum of.

It was extravagant, in truth. Utterly, mercilessly, extravagant. A devastating painting.

Why were Paul’s eyes so bright? Was it natural for them to burn like green flames? Had they always been quite so brilliant?

“I did bring you a gift.”

Those were words, Feyd recognised. Humans used words. Feyd was nominally human. He needed to use words soon.

“You did,” Feyd said, and realised only by Paul’s widening smirk she meant the box she carried.

He accepted the container. Saw golden powder within and raised a brow. It was not any substance he knew.

“The dye made from the scales of the Queen Hunter from Caladan’s reefs. One of the rarest dyes in the Known Universe. Even the na-Empress wears it.”

Feyd recalled it, that day he met Paul. The Princess in her dress that was too pastel for a true gold, but shimmering and metallic, like the refraction of light through glass but also not. Too many things all at once. What did Paul expect him to do with such a bright colour?

Feyd had reintroduced bleak minimalism and wore a black robe with a plunging neckline both front and back that looked artfully formless, exactingly tailored to his measurements. He’d enjoyed colourful and sheer silks for a while but things needed to change.

He did not mind the contrast the two of them provided, the inversion of former roles, he in dark blacks and revealing much of his flesh, Paul hidden by bright colours.

“I would have you wear my colours in the arena.”

Perhaps Feyd could stand to wear a bit of colour. Just a hint if his duch*ess asked. It would cost him little more than pride.

With the vestiges of his waning willpower, Feyd offered his hand, weighed down by firepearls. “Would you permit me to escort you, na-duch*ess?”

Paul laid her hand in his and, he saw for a moment, the jagged silver scar across her wrist. “I entrust myself to you, na-Baron.”

It took everything he had, every iota of discipline and strength, not to rip Paul out of her clothes and f*ck her in the middle of the road. Everything. But Feyd would hold true to the tiniest sliver of honour he possessed. He was entrusted a treasure. It did not do to destroy it.

So they set off, emerging out of the shaded carport and onto the open road. The road curved between buildings with no long sight lines. A precaution against assassination. Feyd observed Paul under the black sun. Her eyes narrowed against the harsh light, nose scrunched as the smells of industry and artisanry assaulted them even from this remove, chemicals and burning metals underpinning the dusty heat. Past an archway and a narrow walkway they went, past fluttering banners and down two flights of stairs. All that they journeyed before they emerged unto the main street of the artisanal district.

Giedi above ground was an ode to megastructures and the artisanal district was no different. Towering arches like ribcages held up a complex array of glass and cement, black light cascading down onto the narrow buildings that lined the streets, each building unique, some dating back to the earliest years of Harkonnen rule. Open stores with workmen shaping metal, customers haggling over jewellery and beautiful weapons and farming equipment. Observe long enough and one can trace the beginning of the web that binds the Imperium in everything being forged. From Giedi, all equipment could be made, and from Giedi it was flung out across the Known Universe with margins thinner than a blade-edge. The deeper levels, in the voids that never saw the sun, were where master artisans in intricate storefronts exposed to sunlight gave way to child slaves working in factory lines, perfecting one motion until they died where they stood and were replaced by the next slave.

It was this cacophony of craftsmanship and industry that Feyd revealed to his duch*ess for one day it would be Paul’s as well. One day, the tense hand in his, would walk these roads without trepidation and be welcome. Feyd would make it so.

Paul looked around, eyes alighting every which way, never able to focus on one thing. A sensory overload for someone so curious.

He walked forward and Paul followed, her steps clacking between the clangs of a nearby hammer. Feyd picked out their minders, half a dozen Atreides guards watching with lasguns, another few amidst the throngs of foreigners, using their foreignness as cover.

“Feyd-Rautha,” one brave woman said in awe.

It became a chant, another instrument in the cacophony of sound that was the artisanal district.

Upon Giedi Prime there was no difference between reverence, fear, and love. They were one and the same. You could not revere something you did not fear and love at the same time. And what purpose could love hold if you did not fear the love you held so reverently between your hands dying?

They would come to revere Paul as well one day. Here was Härkä’s chosen son walking with his chosen bride. Black death had found a match with this explosion of living colour. It was a story fit for epics and did they not indeed write an epic together?

“Is it always like this when you walk the streets of Giedi Prime?”

“Not always, no. But I am divine, and they know it. Do they not honour my duch*ess on Caladan?”

“Not the duch*ess, no.”

It was fury dark and unquenchable that he felt. When they ruled, when they towered over the Imperium, he would hold the world of Caladan to account for their heresy. It was nothing short of blasphemy to dishonour a Lady masking such glittering divinity with a paper-thin mask of flesh. Paul walked as a goddess. All should bow in her wake.

“Fools often die easily,” he promised.

Paul looked at him through those pretty lashes, observing, always observing. Feyd must have passed another secret test for Paul smiled and leaned in closer. Sweet lemongrass and brine overwhelmed him.

“In my name. How many more deaths in my name before you are satisfied?”

When they bow, one and all, before your divinity. When they kneel before you and recognise what I did long ago. If I must paint the stars red in your name, I will do it, and I will do it gladly.

He did not say this. Paul was not quite ready to understand this. Could not believe just yet in Feyd’s sincerity.

“Only as many as needed. Not one more.”

Feyd adored witnessing Paul shift between colour and greyscale as the sun peeked through the towering metal lattice. Ethereal and mesmerising, looking at Paul was to have your eyes play tricks on you. Unable to tell what was vibrant colour and what was true silver and black.

They walked together so easily. Paul and Feyd, Feyd and Paul. Harkonnen and Atreides walking together in peace.

Paul would be his bride. This he accepted with certainty. There could be no other for Feyd-Rautha. No one else was his equal and no one else would suit. He was bewitched and he knew it.

As they explored, moving from one store to another, her delight blossomed. It was a glorious thing. This was Feyd’s home, the place he wrote across the galaxy, and now he shared it. This was a privilege. This was a gift.

“Feyd, Feyd, look here,” she said, already dragging Feyd away to one storefront smaller than the others, cramped and dingy in comparison. No one dared get in her way, not when Feyd exuded the very simple aura of ‘touch her and die screaming’. Under a flickering lamp, Paul showed him a rack of knives. “These are beautiful knives.”

They looked ordinary to Feyd though he knew, in truth, that his eye for such things was poor. He needed to taste the edge, feel it part flesh to know it. With such poor light, he did not even understand how Paul had noticed this red-bricked building let alone come to that conclusion.

The smith eagerly gestured at Paul to try it. It was true eagerness, not for a sale, but for recognition of craftsmanship. Did Paul know how easily people fell to her soft smile and pretty eyes?

She held the blade, flipping it between her fingers elegantly. They were painted, he only now noticed, a clear coat that was black when exposed to the dark light of the sun. Such an inconsequential thing to notice when he could be listening to the questions Paul asked the smith. Feyd, however, could give no higher thought to the world when he could instead devour Paul with his eyes, undress her with merely a glance. Every tantalising glance of skin stoked a flame in his gut. The memory of that night they shared driving him to madness as he overlaid the golden boy unbothered by nudity over this duch*ess who wore such elegant layers. If only he could reach out and take Paul’s face in hand, steal her lips, and claim her flesh with eager teeth.

Paul threw the knife.

Feyd caught it between his fingers before it could stab into his chest. That was certainly one way to make Feyd behave. He laughed at Paul’s pout, testing the weight of the blade. Truly, an excellent knife. Half as long as the kindjal sheathed at Paul’s waist, much lighter besides.

She already had another knife in hand. Feyd only now recognised the threat approaching them, having slipped past their minders. He contemplated warning Paul but decided against it for it would be as needless as saying the black sun leached colour from the world.

And he was proven correct when Paul took a half step to the side and her blade cut through the shield shimmer, slicing a throat with nary a glance back. The assassin reached for her throat, bewildered to be dying. She tried, perhaps, to attack again, but Paul merely stepped aside and plunged the knife deep into the assassin's chest, retrieving it in the same motion. The body crumpled artfully, flowing crimson turning black in parts, blending into the brickwork in others.

Not a drop of blood had landed on Paul.

There was an art to death and Paul had the instincts of a master painter. Why was Feyd so blessed to have found Paul at so young an age?

He noted Paul making a gesture that was likely Atreides Battle Sign before his minders could interfere and set off the tension in the crowd.

No one would blink twice at Feyd killing someone. He was Härkä. This was his purpose and all lives upon Giedi Prime were his to sacrifice. Paul was Atreides, the ancient betrayer, the atavistic enemy. Death was not his right to inflict under the black sun. Even Feyd had not been so bold as to kill someone in broad daylight on Caladan.

But Feyd was more than human. It laid beneath his alabaster skin, the spark of something greater that spurred a boy of six to rise until he was the beloved na-Baron. It was seen, it was felt, it was known.

“You killed well,” Feyd said loudly, voice echoing in the quiet. Like the Voice but not, authority that reverberated, shook the world with his commandment. “She will greet Härkä.”

Hands were raised before the black sun, venerating the life the assassin had lived. Honouring her for being blessed by Härkä’s chosen. Feyd wondered how furious his uncle would be to hear that Feyd could make Giedi Prime love an Atreides. Or perhaps it would be his brother raging that nothing he did could shake Feyd’s status.

He nodded to Paul who offered a smile, first to him then to the smith. “My apologies for using your wares without permission. These truly are masterpieces. Were these forged by your hand?”

“I was na-duch*ess,” the smith said in halting Galach, her accent thick.

“I will commission your work. A set of throwing knives patterned with Härkä’s horns and the Atreides firehawk. Could you do it for me?”

“As Härkä’s beloved demands.”

“The na-Baron will pay,” his supposed beloved said confidently over a cooling corpse. “They will be his gift, after all.”

“You would make me pay for my own gift?”

“I would. You will cover the cost of this used knife as well.”

“Truly, you make a fool of me. It will be done.”

Foolish to speak so openly and reveal the depths of their affection. So foolish, and yet, Feyd found he cared less and less. Let those who disagreed come, raise their blades in opposition, and fall anyway. Feyd towered above all others.

He led Paul away when the details were sorted. Not yet noon. There were hours left before he would need to be made ready for the ceremony. Hours he could spend with Paul. He meant to spend them well. Damn everyone else, he had waited over a year to be so near his bride. The Emperor could come down, kneel, and present Feyd with the Imperium, and he would ignore it in favour of the greater prize.

They paused by a jewellery store where Feyd purchased glittering emeralds set in silver for his duch*ess. He enjoyed the process of slipping the silver bracelet over Paul’s hand. Loved how each ring connected to the bracelet by a chain complimented the silvery fabric train.

“You’ve behaved as a gentleman,” Paul said, not hiding his surprise. “It is quite unlike you to concede anything.”

“It is what you desired.”

“And you desire to strip me of my dress and have your way with me.” Feyd nodded. No point in lying when that truth was so obvious.

“You desire the same.”

Paul’s cheeks turned a shade of grey he knew mapped to pink. A blush, as though Paul was not already despoiled. Perhaps the chivalry of Caladan made it hard to admit such truths? Giedi had no need to hide such carnal realities. They had seen bodies tangled together in ecstasy many times already on this exploration. Only a foreigner might be surprised.

It was as Feyd led Paul through an insectarium displaying many unique cultivars of flowering cicadas that he decided it was time to force greater truths from Paul. He stopped pointing at the sapphire-hued cultivars with their bright blue shells and turned to face Paul. The space had been cleared out already at a simple gesture from Feyd, whatever occupants hastily forced out to appease Härkä’s living incarnation.

“You wish to ask something more of me.”

“I do. Yet, I do not know the words to make you trust me.”

“You spoke to me of faith once. That nebulous concept that your House adores. Have that be enough and speak to me.”

And so, Paul did, telling the tale of Bene Gesserit plots. He seethed to know Paul spoke with Margot Fenring and nearly roared realising that Paul genuinely, truly, liked that witch. Respected her as an elder. He did not consider the hypocrisy of finding the witch’s husband intriguing because at least Feyd knew the danger they both represented. Paul was a deer eagerly walking into the tiger’s maw. The plan she laid out was poor and liable to get many people killed.

It would be eminently foolish to agree.

“Every Sister can trust that another would aid her. Even I am extended that protection. I am honour bound to act,” she told Feyd, watching him carefully. “Will you aid me in this?”

Paul made a fool of Feyd as always.

“My darlings will act in my stead. Their support, I can offer you.”

“Under our glorious black sun, we welcome to these special activities our beloved leader Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. His presence today, watching over a spectacle of blood and honour, marks the Holy Birthday of our beloved na-Baron, Feyd Rautha.”

The coming-of-age ceremony for the Harkonnen Heir was a simple thing: victory in battle beneath the black sun. It was not enough to be cunning or manipulative, a schemer who could not stand up to the legacy of ancient heroes was not worthy of the title Baron. Thus it had been for ten thousand years and thus it would be for ten thousand more.

They painted the symbolic representation of the auroch upon his back: four vertical bars outlined in pitch black, the outer two longer, stretched into the curving horns of the beast by his shoulder blades, and the shorter inner two representing the snout. Upon his flesh, he carried Härkä, death itself, and claimed it down to his soul.

Death that was drawn in iridescent gold sparkling under the light as sure as scales the dye was made from. Filling the black outline was the dye Paul gifted him. He perverted his House, his heritage, and his world by adorning himself in the most prized colour of his enemies. Harkonnen and Atreides, Atreides and Harkonnen.

Let my enemies reveal themselves if they so dare, Feyd-Rautha thought as he emerged into the scorching heat of the black sun, the sweltering sands crunching beneath his boots, dual blades drawn.

The crowd went mad to see him. It was not merely the cheering of fifty thousand that deafened him, it was the stomping that shook the arena and rattled his bones, the drums beating to the rhythm of his steps, and the guitar shredding with anticipation for violence.

He raised his hands to honour the black sun and knelt for it was tradition. He did not kneel to the Baron whose viewing booth was backed by the sun, not in spirit even if it appeared that way. This was Feyd’s Holy Day. After this, no one would be able to contest his role as na-Baron. Not Glossu. Not the standing Baron. Not even the Emperor.

Sand swirled around him as the doors opposite him opened, a crack of true colour bisecting black stone. Like a creature of legend, Paul Atreides emerged onto the scorching sands.

Feyd-Rautha stared at Paul under the lilac wedding shawl of his ancestor and was struck so powerfully by desire he nearly org*smed on the spot. The lightning-fast heat that spread through him, the complete certainty that debasing himself before this glorious bride was not merely necessary, it was a holy thing. How could it not be?

It is a shawl bound into light armour she wore, exposing hardened biceps and her collarbone. A wedding shawl returned to House Atreided by Feyd, once an attempt to bridge their houses millennia ago.

And he wears it here under the dark sun? Does he know what he does to me?

Oh, but Paul knew. Feyd read it in the confident throw of his shoulders and the lines of thick muscles held loose beneath his pleated combat skirt that served as armour. She was confident that Feyd was drawn into the web he spun. Everything Paul did was a manipulation. Witchery right down to the bone. It entranced Feyd nonetheless.

“Heil him, the na-duch*ess Paul Atreides! The most honoured guest of beloved Feyd-Rautha, warrior and defender of Cladan! Chosen to stand beside death himself! Heil her!”

Desperation bled in the announcer’s voice. Feyd had threatened to castrate—or otherwise mutilate—every friend, family member, and ally the announcer knew if he could not whip the crowd into a frenzy.

The crowd roared wordlessly, baying not for blood, but with eagerness to see someone Feyd claimed as beloved. He was death incarnate. Such a claim was a powerful thing.

They did not know the depth of that claim. Lilac was one of the shades that revealed itself under the black sun. Feyd understood then why that colour had been chosen for the wedding shawl. It was a spot of colour that should not be, a bride that the Imperium would wipe away given half the chance.

And his eyes, damn him, rimmed in dark kohl to evoke the image of the hawk. To remind Feyd of that duel that Paul won handily despite the difference in experience and reach.

He raised his blade high in greeting.

“Atreides,” he intoned, drawing out the syllables until it sounded like a true Giedi name, one fit to grace Feyd’s tongue. He had imagined this moment, but in his youthful fantasy, he cut the war bride down.

Paul mirrored him, raising the cruelly curved kindjal, a vision of beauty leached of all colour. A study in contrasts, chiaroscuro made manifest. The sharp lines of her face, the strength of her smouldering glare, and the way the shawl cast rippling shadows upon her tantalising flesh.

“Harkonnen,” she said, sharp and clipped, saying it as a Caladanian word, sharp and clipped, like jagged cliffs rising from the earth.

“You are here. My gift. My bride. My Paul.”

“Surely I am not yours,” she said coyly, flashing her teeth. “Surely, you would be mine if we kept score.”

He revealed his blackened teeth, an inversion of hers. “Would I be your husband then?”

She said nothing but came to stand beside him. Always so sneaky. He hated her as much as he adored her.

The announcer spoke then. “Beneath the venerated black sun, our beloved Feyd-Rautha shall prove himself by blood and combat. Raise your hands before him, your na-Baron. Lift high your hands before his chosen, the na-duch*ess. Now, witness them!”

Two scions from enemy Houses fighting together. There will be paintings and songs, endless histories written for them. The agents of the Landsraad will pass this scene on and the galaxy will shake at the union between these two great Houses.

The chambers to the holding pens opened and the ceremony began. From the darkness, he saw a glint of horns. With lumbering steps, a beast taller than any man revealed itself. Hide thick and knotted with muscle, black as tar. It snorted great wafts of hot air, mouth frothing from a potent co*cktail of drugs. It was armoured as well, great plates of steel clanging together with each step.

And rising to the sky like towers were a set of ivory horns, wickedly angled, designed exclusively to kill.

An auroch. His uncle was having too much fun. This was a warbeast, not a grazing animal. The same kind of monster they used to conquer Gieidi, great legions of Harkonnens astride a bull weighing in nearly a tonne of raw violence.

Hooves tested the purchase of the sand as it prepared to charge, metal plates clinking together. Feyd stepped forward. Without words, Paul matched him. Soon enough, they broke into a run, two humans running headlong into the charge of an enraged and armoured auroch trained to kill dozens.

The sound of the stadium faded until all he could hear were the thunderous impacts of the charging bull and the pounding of his own heartbeat. Closer and closer. It knew the score as well as he did. It would kill them or die. Feyd would kill it or die.

The beast lowered its head when it got close enough, better to flip one of them into the air and break them from the impact. He’d seen it before and truthfully, he rather liked the sound of all the bones in a man’s body breaking.

But he held no fear. Feyd had hunted the barioth, the auroch’s natural predator, in its home habitat. He was fearless and this time he was not alone.

He could almost feel the waft of heat from the auroch’s great snorts when it became too late to dodge. The auroch raised its head in a great sweep, jagged horns ready to run him through or fling him to the sky. Feyd moved gracefully, jumping with the attack, curving his arm around the horns.

The impact wrenched his arm terribly, pain flaring as he swiftly found purchase between the beast’s plates. Across its broad shoulders, Paul matched him with a wide grin. They climbed as the bull bucked wildly.

In sync, they plunged their blades into both sides of the auroch’s neck. The beast roared. They pulled their weapons out and blood spurted wildly in all directions. Then they stabbed it again and again and again.

It wizened up and reared to its full height on two legs. Feyd laughed. He stopped laughing when it tipped over, intent on crushing him. That was a degree of spite he did not expect from an animal.

He kicked off its flank. Crashed heavily into the sand and spun to the side just moments before the earth shook and Feyd was lifted from the sheer weight of the impact. He landed with a rattle, groaning. Then he sprang to his feet, searching for—Paul had not jumped off, because she was surely mad, and had instead focused on mauling the auroch’s face, gouging its eyes out with her kindjal.

Feyd crossed the distance to the bull and slid, falling to his knees behind its head. Without any hesitation, he found the weakness of its neck plate and thrust his blades deep as he could, right to their hilts.

Not deep enough. He’d brought weapons to kill men, not war beasts. A mistake.

A shadow fell over him. Paul, rolling over the auroch’s bulk. With magnificent control, at the apex of her roll, she stabbed down with her longer sword. It penetrated deep between Feyd’s dual blades. He laid his hands over hers and pressed down, pushing until the hilt was against the beast’s flesh. Deep enough to cut the brain stem.

The auroch died quietly, twitching all the while, metal plates clanging against each other. This was how the symbol of his divinity was butchered. It was a beautiful thing to witness. Harka was the death-ox, the one who ferried the newly dead to their place in the many afterlives. This act of butchery was an act of worship.

Feyd withdrew his blades from the great bull. Where blood poured onto the sand, he placed his hands and cupped them together. Facing the black sun, he drank deep the thick blood of his household gods. Life and death joined as one.

When he looked to the side, he saw Paul as well drinking blood. It stained her chain, a dibble of blood running from lip to chin. He wished to lean down and lick it away. Wished, but refused to give anyone the privilege of witnessing his affection.

But this he would accept as enough.

Feyd kicked out his legs, stretching them as the announcer spoke and made the crowd go crazy, thunderous applause for so simple an act. It was time enough for Feyd to catch his breath and for Paul to clean his sword on her armoured skirt. She was beautiful with blood on her face and sand caught in her hair, eyes glimmering bright with an eagerness for battle.

And battle she would have as all three entrances opened and men lumbered out, shielding their eyes from the black sun.

A trial of group combat. Six at once.

Only four were drugged, he could tell, by the steadiness of their gait and how sharply they focused on Feyd, on Paul. The arena master had found someone who hated them both. A reasonable fight, then.

A fair number. Feyd twirled his knives and set off to meet the first group of enemies. Paul walked beside him.

The universe bound them as their battle began.

Feyd’s first swing was exploratory, a testing strike to see just how drugged the slave was. Not very for the slave fended off the blow with decent coordination, improving with the second and the third. Beside him, Paul blocked the other slave, kicking him in the gut and away from Feyd.

Playing with his prey was a bad habit Feyd cultivated. Oh, how he’d missed this dance of steel and death. A year away had dulled his reactions slightly but he was still faster, still better skilled than even prized war slaves. He stepped between blows easily, inflicting minor cuts. When he sensed the others approaching, quickly darted forward and laid both blades on the man’s neck like a cross and pulled them across his throat. Blood spurted, painted the air pitch black and pooled on the ground as the man died.

He turned just in time to see four approaching in a defensive pattern, swords raised high to cut any who approached down. Feyd stepped to the side in a wide arc around them, watching Paul mirror him. It forced them to go back-to-back against the threat the two posed.

Feyd flashed his black teeth and shuffled forward carefully. Wondering how he’d go about breaking their formation. There were ways, many of them.

But truthfully, Feyd did not think they were so skilled to need anything more than brute force.

Like lightning, he threw the knife in his offhand at the more lucid of the two he was facing. The knife was deflected with a metallic shriek but that did not matter. It was the opening Feyd needed to close the distance and with a wild leap, knee outstretched.

The force of his jump staggered the two back into their allies at the same moment that Paul snaked around them, moving so fast as to be a blur. Her kindjal was a vicious arc that struck true, lacerating one man across the thigh and another across the waist.

The injured men roared but Feyd shut him up with a punch to the throat that sent him reeling, then skittered aside before the lucid man could cut him down.

Foolish. Paul’s heel slammed into the man’s temple and sent him staggering to the side.

Their formation broken, this would be easy pickings for Feyd.

He kicked the lucid man he was left with, further separating him from the pack. He stalked forward, ducking a wild swing from the opponent with the thigh injury and gutted him in the same motion. He spared but one glance back to see Paul doing fine fending the last two off. Her footwork was impeccable. A mesmerising dance of steel and death where her training truly shone through.

He would leave her be. If she died to such, she was never worthy of him in the first place.

For now, Feyd’s opponent had recovered, sword held ready. He struck first for once. Feyd grinned, deflecting the swing high and kicked him again. He dashed forward and elbowed the man in the chin, satisfied to see blood well between his lips. Instinct told him to pull back before he approached and he just barely avoided having his neck sliced.

They moved faster, exchanging blows rapidly, never slowing for a moment. Any hesitation would spell death. Feyd allowed a blow to chip off his shoulder plate just so he could stab the man through the wrist. He screamed.

Feyd sliced down and the man rolled back, putting distance between them. Or tried to. The auroch’s great bulk stopped him in his tracks. Before he could understand, Feyd grabbed him by the hair and punched his blade straight through his neck.

When he looked back, Paul was mounted on top of one of her enemies, fighting for dominance over the kindjal. The other enemy was supine, bleeding from the sides. Either a liver or a punctured lung, Feyd could not tell.

He threw a knife into the leg of Paul’s enemy. The pain made the man lose grip on the kindjal and it plunged through his chest.

Paul shot him a venomous look even as the crowd roared. Feyd shrugged, smirking at his bride. It was not his fault Paul was so slow at killing. Out of spite, Paul found Feyd’s deflected knife and threw it at him.

A sloppy throw, emblematic of exhaustion, if how easily Feyd caught it told him anything. Paul barely aimed at a vital point. Concerning with one final bout remaining.

Even Feyd was tiring. These had been high-intensity fights, quick tempo, no rest between. Feyd was not at peak fitness and could not sustain this much longer. Paul had never lived through a long battle. There was real danger now that they were in the final stretch. This is where mistakes would be made and they would be lethal.

The last opponent who entered was like no other. A rough man with a scraggly beard and a drooping eye. On anyone else, it might look comical. This man moved with lethality. This was a killer who took pleasure in it. The way he moved confused Feyd. He’s seen that stalk before but where? Not a Ginaz school combatant. Certainly not any of the house soldiers from the nobility. Where had he—

“Sardaukar,” Feyd said, the word barely a whisper.

Paul heard him anyway, tensing. They activated their shields in sync. This wasn’t a game.

How the f*ck was this possible? The Emperor never gave out his personal soldiers. They were too valuable for this. Was the possibility that an Atreides or Harkonnen might marry his daughter so offensive he resorted to this? But no, that made less sense. He would have conspired with the Guild and had them killed in the depths of space with no witnesses.

He looked to the viewing booth where his uncle observed with that smarmy expression of his. Oh, the Baron had signed his death warrant.

“Focus,” Paul hissed, settling into a stance.

Feyd just needed to survive this gambit. He settled into his own stance beside Paul, an offensive one to Paul’s defence. Not that it meant anything.

Paul moved first, sweeping low, willing to risk everything to end it quickly. Feyd followed a split second later, intent on catching the Sardaukar during his hop over Paul’s sword. He did, technically, by catching a boot to the face. Feyd reeled, ears ringing. Instinct had him—no, that was Paul shoving him aside before a long sword cut his arm clean through.

Blindly, he thrust his blade. The screech of a shield stunned him just long for his legs to be swept aside. He rolled the moment his back hit the ground. Not a moment too soon. In the corner of his vision, he saw steel biting down where his torso once lay.

Paul was rising as well, her nose broken, bruises blooming across her face. This was not going well. They were trained better, bred better, but still, they were losing. Age, experience, and surviving a dead world were qualities that could not be so easily bridged.

Feyd drew in a breath and let his senses expand. The Sardaukar was not like Fenring. He could be comprehended, understood. In the same instant, the distant hunter turned his golden gaze upon the arena.

Feyd could… he could avoid the places the hunter’s gaze was strongest. He could work around this.

The next engagement went better. For one, they took no more hits even if they failed to land any on the Sardaukar. Sand kicked up around them as they fought for control, never letting up. He could almost tell where the Sardaukar would move next but he was too slow, always too slow. Even with Paul shoring up his defence, letting him attack with abandon, the Sardaukar was just one step ahead.

The Sardaukar ducked below Feyd’s swing and kicked a pocket of sand his way. He dodged instinctively, trusting Paul to take his place. Had he known what was to come, he would have kept advancing.

After the fact, Feyd reconstructed events in his head.

The Sardaukar biting down, straining his jaw.

A high-pitched whine that hurt the ears.

Their shields flickering and failing.

A parting cut, punctuated by an elegant flick.

Paul’s blood sprayed across Feyd’s face before he could even understand what was happening. Hot, rich blood turned black under the sun. A taste so sweet it sang like golden chimes in his mouth. A taste he loved and revered and never wanted to taste like this.

Paul dropped to his knees, clutching at his ruined throat.

NO!

He roared and closed the distance, blade deflecting the Sardaukar’s sword. Fury was all he felt, suffused to his very marrow.

Paul was his kill. No one but him deserved that right. His senses swelled, his focus narrowed, and he set his very soul to the simple goal of violently murdering his opponent.

There was no way to describe his assault as anything controlled or restrained. He attacked faster than ever before, with every ounce of strength he had. Even when their shields flickered on, Feyd was always attacking, making use of the versatility two blades provided him.

And still, he could not cut the Sardaukar down. As the black sun was his witness, Feyd-Rautha failed to penetrate the defences of his enemy. Neither blade nor boot gave his enemy pause. Did not so much as make the vile creature change expression.

He tripped on old blood and his enemy did not hesitate.

A blade pierced through his gut. The shock of it kicked him out of his battle high.

This was it, the convergence of possible futures. Atreides and Harkonnen dead by the hand of the Emperor. Imperial control reasserted for ten millennia more. The price merely the heads of two children.

Feyd grinned with black-blood teeth, gripping the Sardaukar’s wrist with all his strength. f*ck that nonsense. If he was to die, let there be two coffins: one for Paul and Feyd in eternal repose, and another for this fool Sardaukar.

He stepped forward. Pushed himself deeper onto the blade. Advanced on the Sardaukar who was curious, not fearful. A fool.

The agony was ecstasy itself. Feyd would not die like this. Not yet.

So when the Sardaukar punched with his free hand, Feyd blocked the wild blow with his remaining strength. Gripped the Sardaukar’s forearm. Death had never been so near. Feyd could feel the convergence of time, his fate contracting to an inescapable death.

He knew, in that fraught moment, the meaning of faith. The inescapable belief in something other than himself. That tether that bound strangers together to a higher cause and turned good leaders into the greatest of people. So, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen held faith and cast that faith into the universe that this would not be his end.

And beneath his arm emerged the curved kindjal blade of the Atreides, the shield-slow motion penetrating the Sardaukar’s protection. Faith answered with the blood of his enemies spraying across the hot sands.

It was beautiful to see his enemy fall with shock in his eyes, hands futilely grasping at his throat as blood gushed between the seams of his fingers. Feyd should have savoured the sight.

Instead, he looked to his bride.

Paul’s throat was a ruin of blood. A vertical cut from collar to cheek. It bled, but not as terribly as such a wound should. Even as it coloured her armour the deepest shade of black, it was not a life-threatening injury. Somehow. Impossibly. It was a miracle. Perhaps, it was witchery.

It was enough for Feyd to know his bride yet lived. He felt his knees give out.

Before he could touch the ground in disgrace, Paul caught him, dragging Feyd’s arm around her shoulders.

“Lean on me. You must not kneel.”

“I hate you Atreides,” he said, even as he firmed his legs and stood to his full height. “Remove the knife.” The blade sticking out his abdomen made standing awkward. If Paul could survive a ruined throat, Feyd could endure a non-lethal stab. He did not particularly enjoy the shock of it being pulled out but he was aroused by the sight of Paul holding a weapon that nearly killed him.

Or maybe he was just light-headed. It was so hard to focus. So hard not to pass out. But his bride demanded strength and so he would prove it.

Together, they lifted their hands up to the black sun and offered their victory to the life-giving sun.

“FEYD-RAUTHA!”

They screamed his name so loud it deafened him. The cheers of fifty-thousand spectators who had witnessed their na-Baron claim victory as the ancient heroes once did. Fifty-thousand worshippers screaming in religious ecstasy for their living divinity had risen to greater station.

“FEYD-RAUTHA!”

Fireworks scattered across the sky, a salute of great booms resounding louder than the crowd. They were like ink paintings with the sky as their canvas. Across Giedi Prime, every household would celebrate for a new hero had risen.

“FEYD-RAUTHA!”

But beneath the call of his name, he heard a new shout. One that constricted his heart and made him ecstatic.

“PAUL ATREIDES!”

He almost laughed at the corruption in the Harkonnen tongue. Pol Tree Dis. How beautiful to hear his bride be worshipped under the black sun.

Paul caught his attention. He was too exhausted to question why Paul raised the sword painted with Feyd’s blood. Too tired to understand the implication of Paul bringing it to her mouth until after Paul’s tongue darted out and licked a stripe clean from the metal. His brain very nearly melted because… because Paul was drinking his blood beneath the black sun. Just as Feyd’s mouth still held the coppery tang of Paul’s lifeblood and was bound to it, now too would Paul be bound to him.

(No accounts remain of the first wedding between Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen and Paul Atreides. They were wed in secret and what few observers spied upon them took the details of that union to the grave or were eliminated. Their second wedding was witnessed by fifty thousand on Feyd-Rautha’s Holy coming-of-age ceremony. Under the gaze of the Baron Harkonnen and the Lady Jessica, beneath the black sun of Giedi Prime, the scions of two enemy houses were united, and the course of history irrevocably altered. The ease with which they spilt blood together was but the first taste the Known Universe was to experience.

- The Secret History of Empire, Book 4, Vol. 6, Ch. 2.)

“PAUL ATREIDES!” “FEYD-RAUTHA!”

“FEYD-RAUTHA!” “PAUL ATREIDES!”

Under the black sun, his bride-to-be consumed his blood. Under the lifegiving sun, observed by thirty thousand supplicants, the truest daughter of the Atreides drank the blood of death’s envoy. With one final act, she sealed their union. Across two worlds they had been wed and across two worlds had the gods accepted their union.

Nothing, no one, not a thing across the breadth of the Known Universe and beyond its withered borders, would ever separate them.

“I will not let you go.”

“So long as I yet shed blood,” his bride said, eyes fever bright, ordained in blood and the black sun, a vision of beauty that belonged only to Feyd.

Paul was delirious as he was eventually taken by servants in Atreides’ colours. He laid his trust in Feyd to survive and let time slip away from him as pain and blood loss took hold.

It was some indeterminate time later that he returned to consciousness. He became aware immediately of an argument occurring moments after he realised he was hooked up to medical machinery, an oxygen mask needlessly strapped to his face.

That was his mother arguing with Yueh, Duncan drenched in blood between them. He did not like what he saw. Paul had trusted Yueh with aspects of himself he gave no one else.

He pushed the oxygen mask down and said, “Teacher, what is happening?” in the language they shared.

His words cut through their conversation like a knife through a throat. Paul would know. He now had firsthand experience. Mother came first, focused on him, blurring the lines between parent and Bene Gesserit in ways Paul did not like. Still, Paul accepted his mother’s fretting easily enough. Rested his head against her shoulder as she pulled him close. He’d missed her despite having seen her only hours ago.

“Was the mission a success?”

Duncan answered. “It was, my lad. The VIP is safe on the Guild ship. The Harkonnens can’t reach them. Good work in uncovering them. They represented a great security risk.”

Yueh’s face pinched and he looked away. Paul frowned. The good doctor was better composed usually.

“What’s occurred?”

“Some things shouldn’t be spoken in Gallach,” Lady Jessica said, but pointedly did not use Bene Gesserit Sign. She kissed his brow and stood. “We’ll leave you to Yueh. Rest up for once.”

Duncan laughed cynically at that idea, bowing slightly to Paul, before escorting his mother. Paul could never figure out whether they liked each other or simply learnt to manoeuvre around each other.

“I should check your injuries again before you sneak out.”

“You know me too well.”

His doctor placed his fingers on Paul’s face and neck, checking his vitals. He knew how to do the same but to nowhere near the same efficacy.

“The VIP was a relation of mine,” Yueh admitted in Mandarin.

“Your wife,” he guessed, for it was the only possible lever that could be used against Yueh. Had he been conditioned to prioritise her life over his training? Paul saw a shadow of that outcome, Atreides blood running endlessly. He was glad it was done away with.

“How long did you know she was taken?”

“I only learnt a Sister was in danger yesterday,” she whispered in turn, grateful for the painkillers and her training. Her mother’s teachings were all that saved her. That, and a spark of future sight that had her tilt back at the last moment.

“Forgive me my weakness, young Mistress.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” she swore, even as her throat ached and her head throbbed. “Loyalty must be returned. We owed you greater service than this.”

“All that I am will be yours till my dying breath,” Yueh vowed.

Paul smiled. “Then I have a task for you. Help me find Feyd.”

Yueh shook his head. “I hope he is worth it for you, young master. I pray that he is.”

He cleaned himself soon after and dressed in a simple yet elegant outfit. The time for pretence had ended. He had won beside Feyd under the black sun. Everything else was secondary. He mourned, for a moment, the lilac shawl he no longer had a right to wear and could not wear overtop his buttoned green tunic that came down to his knees. It would have been a nice compliment to the silver patterns of Caladan’s mountains. But he would wear the bracelet and rings Feyd bought him at the market.

Finding Feyd was more of a production than the stealthy approach he preferred. There was no true way to evade Ducal guards on high alert and the Baron’s own soldiers in a tense standoff with Feyd’s loyalists. Paul could see already the civil war brewing. People were not fools no matter what their betters thought. All could see the prowess of the final fighter, greater than any Harkonnen soldier, great enough to wound their Harka. The conspiracy was plain. The battle lines drawn and the world awaiting violence.

To his shock, Paul needed only to ask where Feyd was before he was led to a different part of the Palace. Servants bowed demurely and soldiers saluted him in their strange way, across the chest like a blade, giving respect to their ancestral enemy. Offering fealty to death’s chosen bride. He, an Atreides, granted honour upon Giedi Prime.

In one battle, Paul had won the greatest victory against House Harkonnen. By reaching out in good faith, he had cut the methods of fear they ruled through, and inserted a loving figure they could look to instead. He had neutralised House Harkonnen as an enemy by betraying the ideals of his House, committing the blasphemy that saw a future Duke wedded as a bride.

I will win by being me, he resolved.

Feyd’s personal chambers were guarded by his assassins as well. They appraised Paul like organ harvesters appraising their next haul. Appropriate, given the world.

“I would see Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.”

“You were given access to his estate and person when you completed the ritual,” she said carefully, slowly, making sure Paul understood the gravity of his acts.

Paul drank Feyd’s blood beneath the black sun to an audience of thousands. It was witnessed. He knew what it meant to drink the blood of the auroch beside Feyd. Did it deliberately just as he licked a blade clean of Feyd’s blood to bind them together.

“Then why do you not step aside. It is my right to see him.”

“But the one beside you was not.”

“I trust Doctor Yueh with my life. With my family.”

“You gift him a healer as well,” she rasped, amused. “As you wish, na-duch*ess.”

The title shocked him out of his mode of thinking. Yes, she would be duch*ess over Caladan and, perhaps, titled Baroness as well. She needed to be true to herself to win. It would not be worth it to commit all the acts to come and not even be who she chose to be.

Feyd was awake and lucid when Paul entered the vast room. It felt like being in a heart still-beating heart, dark walls undulating organically at the corners of his vision. A part of Paul found it amusing how often he visited a wounded Feyd as he lay in bed. One day, they might lay together without injuries binding them together.

“I don’t remember agreeing to a third party in my bedroom,” Feyd said with a rumbling laugh upon seeing them. Paul grimaced, explaining quickly. “We have healers on Giedi. We are not complete savages.”

“I would have him check you still. Who knows what diseases you fester in this dark room. Yueh, check him please.”

Yueh, who had survived the public affection between Lady Jessica and Duke Leto, did not so much as blink at their byplay. In fact, he was so composed he turned this into an impromptu lesson for Paul who learnt that Feyd’s amusem*nt did not extend past Paul. By the time they were done, Feyd’s abdomen rebandaged, Feyd was but a moment away from biting out someone’s throat.

“Thank you for doing this.”

Yueh nodded and said, “It is no trouble,” before taking his leave.

Leaving only Paul and Feyd alone. She circled the room, curious to note the artefacts Feyd kept close to him. Weapons, of course, displayed on a mantel. The blades he took to the arena and, curiously, the Sardaukar’s sword that nearly killed both of them. Paul had given it no thought, indifferent to such concerns. Paul’s letters, stored neatly in a simple box on a low table. They were crinkled, smudged, and thoroughly worn. Read and reread till Paul was undoubtedly a ghost over Feyd’s shoulder. A practical workstation took up a far wall, the table jutting out from the wall beneath the long slot that allowed filtered light to illuminate the many tools, from a grinding stone and drill set to a box of filing tools and different oils. Partially complete in the middle of these tools was a wood block carving made up of jagged shapes that tugged at Paul’s memory.

Hairs rose on the back of her neck though she heard nothing. Preternatural senses were the only reason she knew Feyd ghosted towards her. Hands closed around her waist, bringing her close, Feyd resting his chin upon her shoulder. She reached back and closed her fingers around his nape, delighting in the cool feel of his body.

“A carving of Caladan’s peaks,” Feyd explained, his breath warm against her neck. His hardness was oppressive against Paul’s back. “I had hoped to finish it before you returned.”

“I will forgive your failing.”

Feyd’s mouth was careful upon Paul’s neck. Tracing the extent of her wound, a deep gash from collarbone to cheek, with his tongue. She tilted her head to the side, revealing more of her neck. Feyd slowly unbuttoned Paul’s tunic. It fell down her arms as Feyd kissed her where it bunched up by virtue of Feyd refusing to let go of her. He bit down where she was uninjured, fiddling with the topmost button of her blouse. Then his fingers found the necklace she never removed, the bones of his mother. He traced around it with two fingers, leaving an impression of heat upon Paul’s flesh. He did it with the hand ornamented by the firepearl bracelet Paul gifted him.

With her free hand, she reached back to the space between them. Found the injury that nearly killed him and applied a light pressure. Feyd groaned and did not fight when Paul stepped outside his grasp, robe falling to the ground.

She curled her fingers around the wound. Blood welled between her fingers as Feyd’s eyes lit up, flickers of gold under the lightering filtering into the room. He looked at Paul like… it was more faith than Gurney placed in Father, more adoration than Father to Mother. Something that warmed Paul’s blood but burnt as well.

“A deep desire for pain. Sexually vulnerable honourable to a fault. Those were your levers to pull. I have manipulated you every moment we spoke,” she admitted, willing to die if it meant telling the truth finally. Refusing to live by any lie. “Your cruelty, your malice, your honour. I have taken them and used them for my ends for I was trained to be Bene Gesserit. You are to be the blade by which I cut through your House. The arrow I loose to take the throne and rule the Imperium.”

“I know, little witch.”

“Then why do you stay? What madness possessed you to do this? To be mine.”

“Because I desired the broken monster hiding beneath your loveable pout. Because you are the bride I chose. Because you are my wife under two suns. Is it manipulation if I knew it every moment we are together?” Feyd paused, working his jaw. When he spoke, it was threatening. “What more must I prove to you? How many more shall I slaughter before your throne before you understand the meaning of my devotion? Tell me, my duch*ess, and I shall do it.”

Honesty, she reminded herself. Be true to myself. Be true to him.

“It will require spice. More than is perhaps reasonable.”

“Greedy little thing, Atreides. Always demanding.”

“You will give it to me gladly, Harkonnen, as you are supplicant. Do not forget yourself.” Feyd’s eyes lidded in shameful pleasure. She added, “and, what is yours is now mine.”

Feyd raised his voice and gave a command that carried past the door. It was no more than two minutes before one of the assassins—truthfully, Paul could not tell them apart—returned with a durable case that they laid down on the table near Feyd’s bed.

How easily the na-Baron could produce spice on demand. The most valuable substance in the galaxy and he held private stores of it.

“Leave us. Kill any who try to disturb us.” He paused, dark thoughts on his mind. “Go feast on my uncle’s spies.”

“Yes, Baron.”

“Baron? They no longer pretend.”

“Mine was a victory for the ages. Our victory was a thing of legend.”

Feyd sat upon the bed and left no space but for Paul to sit on his lap. To feel Feyd’s hardness beneath her thighs, the depths of his desire. Even after Paul’s admissions, he desired her. Madness. Foolishness. But had she not feared Feyd would be her end not once but twice? And had she not walked towards that death willingly?

She trusted Feyd with her life but not her future. She needed to rectify that disparity and find a way to join them together in all ways.

Feyd rolled out his tongue. Upon it, he emptied the vial of the spice melange. A ruinous quantity. The scent of cinnamon exploded in Paul’s nose but mostly she was focused on blue against pink. His fingers carded in her hair and brought them together.

It was a kiss like no other, one that blurred the lines of reality. A kiss that burnt and froze, as past became present became future upon her lips.

The future unfolded before her, the golden threads of fate unravelling and allowing Paul the chance to see potential futures that held Feyd and her together, beside one another, working towards one purpose.

A shadowy blur tainted in shades of blue was what she saw first. Kneeling before Paul, between his legs, before a throne that Paul slouched upon. His thighs ached, bite marks peppering weathered flesh. Heart beating slow, the death stillness. Fire burning in his gut, co*ck aching terribly.

This was not the first time he had seen Feyd in his dreams, in the future. But just as all other times, he was a ghost, an impression, a negative space she knew only by the cold Feyd left behind.

“You are blind, Atreides,” Feyd hissed, so distant it felt like he was underwater. This was the first time his words breached the barrier of time. “Blinded by your fear of death, your morals, and your very prescience. Shall I show you the path out of the dark? A path without the Atreides name tainted by legions of jihadists? The way to avert the future that haunts you.”

What are you, Paul would think in the future to come, that I am blind to you?

“Show me,” Paul ordered in the eternal now, her voice birthing an endless wave of compulsion that bound the very concept of Feyd-Rautha to her will. She gave herself fully to her witch heritage and tore past every barrier Feyd had constructed. “Reveal yourself to me fully.”

And Feyd, he obeyed, letting his barriers slip.

It was like a veil was removed from her prescient gaze. The universe contracted, twisted, futures coming undone and converging all at once. It was everything. It was too much and so she fell into the depths where the suns were blotted out and only streamers of gold illuminated the emptiness.

There, Feyd stood, in every future untold, clothed in black robes so sheer they were every colour of the rainbow. Betwixt the golden strands of fate, he watched Paul in turn, black holes where his eyes should have been. His was a smile bright as blood freshly spilt, a predator’s gaze undressing her, teeth sharper than any leopard. Her monster stood before her, unmasked.

“How I have waited to see you,” said Feyd in the no-place, the nexus to nowhere, and the junction to forever, but in the now that Paul inhabited, he spoke with awe, “It was always you that I was looking to. You who was hunting me.”

“Explain,” she said, he said to the impossibility given form.

“I have dreamt of you since I was a boy,” Feyd said in that impossible space outside time, Feyd said beneath her. Unified impossibly across time and space. A man who refused to be changed. “You never heard my calls, never turned back to look at me. I wronged you by hiding from your gaze and fearing it. I understand now why you never called me husband. How could you trust me when I did not let you see me? And yet, you did. Somehow, impossibly, you still walked to your death holding faith in me. Can you understand now? It is you, Paul, and no other. There can never be another for me.”

Predator and prey inverted, reverted, one slipping to the next every moment. Paul did not understand fully what Feyd meant but she had a sense of it, the instincts of a possible Kwisatz Haderach speaking universal truth. Where the future was Paul’s hunting ground, Feyd knew the present—lived in it like no other, directed by powerful instincts that forever avoided the gaze of a future hunter looking back to extrapolate untold futures.

To be seen, to be known, was an act of trust. It was a signifier of love and faith and hope unending. Feyd had feared it but now, when she asked, he became vulnerable to her gaze and showed her the deepest truths of him.

How beautiful it was to know that the strange boy she danced with on Kaitan was the same as the monster awaiting her at the end of time. The same unchanging, uncompromising, ceaseless killer who chose her and only her.

She knew, then, the disservice she had done Feyd. For all her weakness, for all her hesitation and doubt, Feyd had never once wavered in his oaths. Bride, he said and wife he meant.

“You are my husband, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, and I will have no other.”

The darkness of that no-place fell away, Paul dropping once more to that throne room. His skin felt strange, ill-fitting. So much felt wrong. Was he the Paul who lived or was he a potential future soon to die? It had become impossible to tell the day he was exposed to future sight and these days he did not know if anyone was real or merely the afterimage of a collapsing timeline. Had he ever known?

“You allow yourself to be so lost in the future you forget the now,” Feyd-to-be said, knelt between Paul’s knees. Holding Paul’s co*ck as though a divine artefact that he could toy with at his leisure, assured it belonged to him. “It is not enough to own a resource; you must also own its means of movement. Only then will you control it.”

This, Paul-in-the-now, felt as a grand revelation reverberating through history. A shock of pleasure ran through her. Feyd’s smirk was a punch in the gut, and, satisfied with seeing Paul’s raw shock, he stroked Paul-to-be’s length. It was strange, this phantom sensation, ghost hands through time that burned as hot as Feyd’s tongue licking at her teeth. The budding realisation of her possible future that he was but a dream that must end soon.

“Spice alone will not bring your future, the ships will. A guildship to each Sietch, a tribe to each Highliner. Complete freedom to choose their paths. Perhaps they do worship their Mahdi who broke their chains and gave them freedom. But these are people who fought without despair for decades. People of the deepest faith. Order them to the depths of space, to the far reaches we never dared touch, and they will go at your command. And millennia from now, they will return in their changed form, carrying the spirit of freedom their Mahdi imparted.”

In the now, Paul was near feverish from Feyd’s touch upon her. A large hand around her neck, choking her, leaving her light-headed. The other in her long curls, pulling to the point of pain. And oh, how Feyd kissed her like he meant to devour all that she was. How she allowed it, brimming with joy. Her hope for a better future solidifying with every feverish touch and desperate gasp.

“It will be war regardless,” Paul-to-be said, lightheaded as Feyd took him in the mouth. Wet heat sapping rationality, making a whor* of him—this Paul who shed femininity and who Paul-that-is could not see herself as, not truly. The Paul who chose to enjoy the final moments of a dream and willingly gave her the information she needed. “The Great Houses will not accept my ascension.”

Feyd-that-could-be growled in amusem*nt around his/her co*ck. He pulled back with a wet pop and rose slowly, pushing Paul flush against the throne. Feyd took control, licking a stripe from collarbone to chin along the jagged scar that harshened Paul’s elfin features. Palms slammed heavily on either side of Paul’s head, bracketing him fully upon the Throne. Trapping him there.

“I would make them kneel. Every world, every system, every sector of space. Across the breadth of the Known Universe, I would have them kneel before you. And those that refuse will die. Each and every one of them.”

“They will cast your name in damnation if you do this. Feyd-Rautha would be synonymous with jihad.”

“I know.”

“And you would do it anyway.”

“How many more gifts must I give before you understand I will give you all that I am. Paul Atreides, wash your hands clean of what I will do. Absolve yourself of my actions. Bring peace in your name while I bring war unending.”

“It will not matter. You have made a cult of death in my name. Feyd-Rautha will be the first prophet I anoint. It will still be the name Atreides they curse.”

“Then I shall eclipse you and wipe away the very memory of your cruelty. No history book will remember your malice. No one at all will remember anything but Paul the Merciful. I will be your monster and you will be my Madonna.”

Together, they would defile the Golden Lion Throne and break the Imperium. They would break it all. Every power structure that people thought held the Known Universe together, somehow stronger than the strong force and more pervasive than gravity despite it only existing in ideas and words and deeds. It lasted only ten thousand years. Yes, perhaps longer than the Mantle of Heaven carried by those who first spoke the secret tongue that Yueh taught Paul. But not by very much.

As those distant futures faded. she was left with the Feyd she knew and adored. This beautiful killer who was moulded without love and yet learnt words for love in a bloody language. Her love who stole her heart under the stained glass of Kaitan. This man she wished to be wed to in truth and name and deed.

So she leaned down and stole his lips between hers. It is a battle, this kiss, ruthless bites more than gentle explorations. To consume is the only desire she held.

Maybe she had been born to love him and these ruinous desires had been implanted by Bene Gesserit conditioning, but Paul knew the power of choices, and she made so many that led her to this point. Each choice was a root that grew deeper and deeper, feeding a tree that bloomed lilac and scarlet. Even in those strange futures where she went by he, they were connected.

What greater truth was needed?

She worked her way down his lips and chin and neck, grateful that his robe was parted down the center. She bit down where his collarbone jutted out against his pale skin, bit one of the many bruises that marked him.

Quickly, she stripped out of her blouse and threw it aside. Large hands cupped her flanks, kneading her flesh. She smiled, shucking her pants off elegantly. No more struggling like the first time they were together.

She enjoyed it, being nude where Feyd was clothed. To be physically vulnerable but utterly in control. She enjoyed allowing him free reign of her flesh, to poke and prod and hold as he pleased. The strength of his hold around her back hurt. She loved it.

“He tried to kill me,” Paul said against his neck, biting with fervent desire. “To kill us.”

“He did.”

“I want the Baron dead. He must die if I am to know peace.”

“One day, I shall gift you his death,” Feyd said, and Paul knew it as I love you. As sure as the teeth around her neck wound and the tongue lapping at her blood said I will kill you.

“What of life? What will your life gift be?”

“Are you bride enough to bear our child?”

“Don’t be a fool. You speak impossibility, husband mine.”

“And yet, I ask, wife.”

With Paul’s blood on his mouth and feverish desire clouding his eyes, he asked the impossible. It left her shivering. It wasn’t possible. Not at all. But she imagined it like a fool who never learnt better. An heir borne of their union, a child both Atreides and Harkonnen, grown of her body. A daughter, perhaps. A son, possibly. A child, regardless.

Heat spread across her body starting at her chest, racing up her spine, and moving down her nerves. It was like joy, like happiness, but more, and only at a thought. She blinked away tears before they could form and slowly took control of her breathing.

Feyd merely watched her as his words nearly destroyed her. He was cruel like that. She pulled back and shuffled back so that she could kneel between his legs. Pushed them aside and hiked up his robe so that it pooled at his waist and revealed his hardness to her.

“What strange thoughts have entered your head now, Atreides?”

She did not answer and merely spread his legs wide, lifting his knees. Like this, it was so easy to lick a stripe across his entrance. Feyd jerked violently, likely reopening an injury, but Paul did not care. She sought to taste his flesh and laved the vulnerability he so readily offered. It was not a thing she ever thought to do but she desired it and made it real. This was her husband and she wished him to feel pleasure.

And so she ate his entrance, licking vivaciously, tasting all that he had to offer. Explored him relentlessly, not content with one area. Swallowing his balls, biting his skin to draw out startled yelps. She enjoyed how she could elicit such sounds merely by licking his shaft and swallowing the head of him. When she felt he was near his completion, she pulled back and quickly worked a dollop of oil on her co*ck.

Paul shuddered as she breached his flesh. So easily did she enter, so smoothly did heat engulf her length. She saw how he gripped the bed sheets, fingers curled so tight his knuckles went grey. He shook, the muscles in his abdomen so tense. And still, he accepted her.

This was a humiliation, a reversal of roles most profane. So many layers of imperial shame bound them. Men they were, men who made vows of marriage across different stars, and yet a bride penetrated a groom.

Yet, this warmth could never be wrong. This joy shared between them would never be a sin in Paul’s mind, so strongly did she discard all beliefs taught in the Orange Catholic Bible. She would build a monument for Feyd, to him, inside him. Make holy the temple of his flushed body, consecrate it with each bite, and bless it with her seed. He would be an idol of death and she the bride to death.

It would be a blasphemy most adored.

“Faster,” Feyd demanded. “Damn you Atreides, move—”

She stole his lips in a kiss, silenced him. A temple should accept worship with silence befitting its holy edifice.

How slow she moved, delighting in the aftershocks of their bodies becoming one, cells chanting, millennia of genetic breeding rejoicing. Theirs would be an adagio, slow and odious. She wished Feyd to understand how totally their bodies were made for each other, that he drew Paul in with each stolen gasp, and became pliant so easily beneath her ministrations. And more than that, she would revel in the heat of it all, the tightness clamping down around her co*ck, so hard she nearly wept from the pleasure.

Was this what Feyd felt when they f*cked? Was her body so responsive, so pliant, so inviting? The cruel hands of fate nearly denied her this warmth. A half step in a different universe and she would not have Feyd held around her so tightly as she thrust into his depths. She would not be able to kiss him with all her teeth and learn new ways to adore him as he gasped out sweet nothings and filthy curses. How cruel to know so many would call this an abomination. Not merely the Imperium or the Bene Gesserit, but her ancestors for ten millennia. All except for one who tried to bridge the gap and was betrayed. Paul would make something beautiful out of the shattered faith and broken dreams of her forefather.

From the glory of their union, she would make a messiah of Feyd. A god in the image of man, a man shaped as a god, unmade by such fervent devotion. Pale and cracked, marked red by the blood of Paul, scars sculpted by the hands of Paul.

From dust they were formed and to dust they would return, their flesh lives seconds on God’s galactic clock, and she would spend her precious seconds making a new god from his flesh, one that would give them minutes, and hours, and then gentle eternity.

Feyd spilt beneath them, shouting himself hoarse. He spilt hot between their abdomens where his length was trapped. Paul adored the expressions he made, the delirium as he looked at her and saw only green witchfire in her eyes. His gaze was obsession and lust and, perhaps, love. She hoped it was. Paul loved him when she was but a girl and she would love him till her dying breath.

She kissed him again for she enjoyed the taste of him. Kissed him and imparted every hope and dream she held for their glorious future. Kissed him as she f*cked him slow and soft. Kissed him for every kiss under the yellow sun and the black sun that they had not experienced, every kiss in the ocean and the fighting pits and every world they had yet seen.

The zenith of her org*sm blindsided Paul, striking through her surer than the blade that cut her down. She came with a force that had her holding her breath, frozen still, unable to comprehend the depth of her pleasure. She came and did not stop coming until she felt lightheaded.

When she again breathed, she collapsed on top of him. Hid her face in his neck as Feyd carded his fingers through her hair. It was strange to finish and still be warm, not left cold by the emptiness of a bed occupied by her alone. She kissed his neck.

They were a mess, the two of them. Stained in red and white, their bodies a canvas for violence and desire. Here together. Theirs a union ordained by the universe despite all odds.

“Why do you weep?” he asked her.

She had not realised why she tasted salt upon her tongue. Did not notice as her tears fell down her face and pooled where her lips met his neck. She tried pulling away.

Feyd did not allow her to leave completely, drawing her deeper into his body. He tugged her head back and forced her to face him. “Speak truth Atreides.”

“I cannot give you what you ask. I cannot be the bride you wish. What child could I bear? The universe was not kind to me. Not to any of us. I am nothing but a barren womb, a genetic failure. No one will carry our genetic legacy.”

My mother wished to make a god of me. The Sisterhood meant to make a god of our child. What god cannot make a child of their body? Forgive me my failings, Feyd. Forgive me for not being enough.

“I love thee,” she admitted, damning herself, damning them all. “I loved thee with each letter you wrote. I knew I would be yours when you made those vows on Caladan, yet by nature I am a boy, not a girl. That is why I weep, for I cannot give you what you deserve.”

Feyd tasted her tears and drew his hands around her cheeks. His tenderness shocked her. It was only as he laid an enemy to rest that he showed even a hint of tenderness.

“My Lady Paul, my war bride. I will gift you life as well one day,” Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen swore to his intended and the universe shifted at his words.

Gold obscured her vision, the sands of time parting before her as her consciousness was flung to a new location. Dark stone and a throne, golden sunlight bathing the room. Crowds of people in strange suits that Paul knew not. But some, he recognised. Irulan beside her father. Lady Jessica veiled in stranger clothes.

And standing before an armoured Paul was Feyd. His once husband and a child whose appearance struck Paul like a blow, grief, anguish, and shock travelling back through time as he beheld the alabaster pale boy.

“Life is my second gift,” said Feyd, eyes dark, expression unreadable.

“Leto,” Paul-to-be whispered in the silent hall, unable to believe the impossibility before him.

A son who mirrored his features, colour bleached by a sun black and unrelenting. With eyes rimmed in lilac paint and the lilac markings of Harka.

His firstborn child, named in honour of Paul’s father, the Just Duke. Leto the Second, Paul’s trueborn son. The child of his blood and genes, the legacy he thought impossible in his younger years.

Their son, he corrected, for the boy had Paul’s features and Feyd’s colouring. A union most profane, an impossibility that stood before him. He felt, then, a powerful echo from his cells that remembered the past more strongly. That recalled a time when he went by she and would be called bride.

“You ask who am I to stand before you? I am Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, Baron of Giedi Prime, he who first shed blood in your name! You carry in your hand the blade I gifted you and wear in glory the shawl I placed over your shoulders! Do you dare deny it?!” His hand rested on the hilt of his blade. “If you do, then I will challenge you.”

The truth of it eluded her grip as time slipped away, golden grains falling through her hand. She could not know how Leto came into existence, not until the moment came closer. It mattered not.

One day, she might be a mother.

One day, she would have a son to hold and love and cherish. That was the promise Feyd-Rautha made. That was the future she saw.

“Look at me,” Feyd demanded, breaking that vision. She was helpless and could only stare at her husband under two suns. “I will gift you life. You will be mother to our heir. This I vow to you, my bride. Believe in me. Have faith in your husband.”

Feyd offered that blinding dream known as faith, the mythical impossibility upon whose foundation House Atreides was built. For ten thousand years, her ancestors built upon that dream brick by bloody brick, casting their belief forward unto the future until Paul was cloaked in the mantle of responsibility baked into her genes: that she was Atreides and there was no faith she would not answer.

In that moment, she believed.

“I do. Always.” This, she promised, before her death-groom. This, she would honour. Whatever it cost, she would build that future. “When I am Empress, you shall be my Emperor-Consort, and our son will have the Imperium as his playground.”

These were the words that damned her and damned the Known Universe. Love, a force greater than the inertia of the Known Universe, damned billions and billions to a cruel fate. Love that she chose and would choose each and every day.

Let them write of this moment. Let them record their secret histories. Let them know that she made this choice willingly.

How could Paul do anything else but love the one who she had been made for?

Communiques between Empress Atreides and Warmaster Harkonnen

As archived by the Office of Imperial History

Recorded in the Year 10196

By Princess Irulan Corrino

Ruling Siridar of Corrinth

To her Imperial Majesty Paul Muad’dib Atreides,

First Padishah Empress of her name,

Defender of the Known Universe,

duch*ess of Arrakis,

Stewardess of Caladan,

Baroness of Giedi Prime,

Voice of the Outer World,

Wife, the suppression of the Sagittarius Arm progresses as expected. Losses are within your permissible parameters. Given another three months, I fully expect the defences of all worlds in this sector to fall. Those who have yielded without fight have again been granted access to the space trade. Those who resist the longest will be stretched thin rationing supplies and equipment. This siege is on our terms. They will kneel or they will starve.

Many worlds fall in line when presented the choice of kneeling before Paul the Merciful or facing the Monster Feyd—often, they violently depose their leaders for the honour of kneeling before your banner. They love you, even here in the far reaches of the universe, you are loved.

I hate it.

They think they know you, but they would recoil if they knew your vicious heart and saw the blood staining your teeth. Every drop of blood is in your name and still, they wipe away your bloodstained image and see only the smiling duch*ess.

I hate that you are so loved by so many unworthy of your attention. I hate it with every fiber of my being. But I will settle for knowing that only I hold your true heart in my hands. And if anyone else did, I would pick their bones out one by one and feed them to you until you choked on it. That concubine of yours would suit.

Your Fremen Jamis proves himself a nuisance. He does not approve of our union and makes it known at every turn. More accurately, he disapproves of my existence as a Harkonnen. Should he challenge me, I will cut him down. Order your pet to heel or he shall be lost to you. On days where he obeys, he proves himself a proficient general—far better than your Stilgar who lacks any understanding of restraint. Senseless slaughter is unworthy of your altar. The deaths I leave behind are glorious works of art. I record them and send them ahead of each world I invade, a mosaic of inventive death that only grows and grows.

Sietch Tabar has acclimated well to controlling the Highliner leading the main army. They lack the necessary modifications to truly fold space and time, but some are willing to undergo the change. I suspect their exposure to a planet of the spice melange has predisposed them to the evolutionary markers necessary to develop that ability.

After all, do I not hold the same power? I can see the dangers of the present through instinct alone. One Guild Navigator tried to betray us by routing us through a black hole. I saw the road they meant to take and diverted our path. Some days, I feel it so keenly, the fabric of space and time. One day, I will reach out and traverse the galaxy with my mind. Nothing will be safe from my blade.

And perhaps I could be convinced to visit more.

Tell me of our son. Our Leto. My prince and heir.

I did not think I would care for a child. I held hopes my eventual spawn would be worthy and murder me in combat. I would have settled for poison or a knife in my sleep. But in Leto I feel… not pride and not love as you know it, but this sense that I have moulded a future monster in my image, and that it is a good and holy thing. His reign has the potential to be bloodier than ours. I wonder if he will be made in your image or if he will take after his father. Will nature win over nurture?

I shall have gifts ready for Leto after this campaign. The House Vanadis still utilises chemically propelled weaponry and I have found a rifle that he would grow into well. I hope unrest remains when he is proficient in its usage so that I might teach him to kill from range. Or, should the unthinkable happen and peace hold true, I shall leave him on Lankiveil and bid him survive against winter’s chill and barioth claws. We will make a hunter of him yet. He held a great aptitude to poison while I raised him but his bladework requires greater attention. I will be displeased if he whittled your resolve down in escaping his training sessions.

I have found a suitable gift for you as well, my Empress. They fashion volcanic glass into jewellery on Lumum’Ba Teritius. I have carved a collar of lethal glass for you. You will wear it alongside the bones of my mother. It may very well kill you. I know you will enjoy the challenge of survival even as you hypocritically tell me to avoid needless risks.

I wish you would not complain over my recklessness. You know it is a waste of ink and parchment. Without you here, nothing stirs my blood to alertness.

I wish to f*ck you on the Lion Throne and across every new horizon. I see your climax in the settlements I destroy and hear your moans as people pray for mercy. I desire you so terribly. Driven to madness by your absence. No violence, no death, no destruction could satisfy me as simply as the taste of lemon upon your lips.

In the holy vestments of your station, I would utter profane thanks between your legs and defile the sacred temple of your body.

This, I would do in your name, my Empress Paul.

Your loyal husband,

War Marshall of the Imperium,

Emperor-Consort Feyd Rautha

To War Marshall of the Imperium Feyd-Rautha

My beloved Härkä,

Princess Irulan would like to remind you that she is far more than a concubine and that should you fail to accurately record your political victories, she will castrate you. Doubt her ability to follow through on her threats at your own risk. I would certainly not tempt it.

To matter more important.

How have I angered you so to earn all the titles in my address? Was this not what you wished, dearest husband, a war unending in my name? Did you believe you could have me and your war at the same time? That I would sit on your lap as you ordered continents burnt from atmosphere? Have you grown weary of offering deathly tribute in my name if I am not there?

One might accuse Feyd-Rautha of suing for peace. Were that so, I would name you coward. I granted you all that you desired, now follow through with our bargain. The cost of our union, the price of the Imperium between us, is yours to pay in blood.

It must be done, Feyd. For a future I can live with, you must bear this cost. I betrayed my House, my morals, and my honour. I did so for you and I live with that pain each day. But this war of ours is the only way to bring peace to my heart. Only by your victory may I be Empress and only by the legacy of this bloodshed will my son retain the throne. His will be a more peaceful rule, one suited to his gentle heart, this I assure you.

How easily you make me weep. How easily you make me mourn. Your words alone kill me, Feyd-Rautha. Your absence wounds me.

Our son is a comfort to me. He grows in leaps and bounds. His hair has thankfully grown in again after that chemical treatment you put him through wore off, though I read in his annoyance that he hates having hair. He prefers to style himself after you. A waste. It is red as the sunset and his eyes are like oceans of Caladan before a thunderstorm. He would make a beautiful boy, but he wastes it on appearing harsh and dignified.

In another life, one where you did not choose me over all else, Leto would have died. In my grief, I would name my next son after him, after my father, and leave him a legacy too great to bear. Sometimes, I hated my father for he was too great a man to match. I resented him because I wished to honour him but he desired from me would have killed my soul. I resented him because I could not love him less even as I disappointed him in those final years.

In our Leto, I see that same expression reflected when he thinks of you. Visit again soon and let him know that his existence is more than enough. I do not wish him to grow bitter that he cannot live up to the legacy of his father the Marshal. I spend many hours each weak cultivating his interest in music—he cannot stand bagpipes, but he loves the drums, and his fingers pluck guitar chords to make sounds like crystals sparkling in sunlight—and Irulan oversees his budding interest in historical scholarship. My father made the mistake of training only the duch*ess in me and leaving nothing else. Our son will have more.

If he does not, all that we have done will have been worth nothing.

Chani has spoken to me again. It was a short conversation to be truthful. The matter of Leto’s custody is as always contentious. It strains to breaking point any attempts at cordiality. She does not recognise him. When she sees him, pale from the black sun, marked by the tattoos for Härkä, she sees her ancient enemy, and hates me for allowing this atrocity to occur. I have betrayed her. Betrayed her trust and dishonoured her. I will carry the weight of that sin till my dying moments.

But she has told me she will take him into the dessert and teach him our ways.

He will call you father and know me as mother, but Chani’s relationship will be something new, and I hope it will be filled with kindness.

Ah, I have become maudlin in your absence. Far too many tears stain these pages already. I feel your thumb brushing those stains and grow fonder. You were worth dishonour and betrayal. I must tell myself that. For the father I betrayed, the House I disgraced, and for the blood spilled in my name, you must be worthy. Three billion confirmed deaths in the last two months alone, countless more starving under siege, those children who will never reach adulthood for my ambition. I weigh them against having you at my side.

It is an easy decision.

Your jealousy is unbecoming of my husband. To believe me unfaithful while you tame the Imperium in my name. How foolish.

I love thee, Emperor-Consort.

I love thee, husband. In all the ways that matter and all the ways that do not. I love thee a million times over and until the end of all things. When the universe has gone cold and dark, I will love thee still. When nothing remains, when it is all dead and forgotten, ours will be the spark that brings life anew. Under newly born stars we will meet again on the killing fields of foreign worlds and learn to love again.

To say it a thousand times over would only bring me the greatest joy. To grow tired of saying it is impossible. Return to me soon, beloved, so that you might taste my love and know the truth of my esteem.

I love you, Feyd.

Your adoring wife,

Her Imperial Majesty,

Empress Paul Atreides