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Chapter Text

 

I am terrified by this dark thing
that sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
so murderous in its strangle of branches?

'Elm' - Sylvia Plath (1960)

: Excerpt from The Void Chronicles by Karal Aniika Zhaivz, 10101 AG :

In the year 9691 AG, the Ampoliros, a Class 9 starsearcher of magnificent build and unbeatable speed, set off on a three-year voyage through the Niushe system in search of intelligent life. Nine months and four days into the journey, Captain Fregonokon logged the presence of an abandoned cargo vessel obstructing their route. Six of her fourteen crew members volunteered to board the unnamed vessel – which turned out to be a ghost ship. The storage bay was found to be emptied of rations, yet its valuable cargo appeared untouched and intact: crates of Kaitainian ivory, Ixian steel, whale hides from Lankiveil. These goods were presumably accounted for when brought abroad the Ampoliros, though the log entry detailing their specifics, as with much else aboard this ship of legend, have been lost to the void between the stars.

Two days after this encounter, Fregonokon's crew were reportedly struck by a strange fever that caused them to descend into madness. The data salvaged from the transmitted logs show a descent into delirious ravings of being attacked by an unseen enemy. Two such frenetic entries speak of crew members turning on each other, attacking with uncalculated, bestial savagery, in what amounted to a slaughterhouse frenzy. The origin of this dementia has never been determined. Since the Ampoliros’ disappearance into the great empty, no evidence of the nameless malaise has surfaced in any traceable form. It is said that the great vessel wanders still among the stars, manned by explorers who were possessed by the ghosts of a phantom vessel, and became undying ghosts themselves.

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The light of the pearlescent moon presiding over Caladan’s verdant cliffscapes caught the merest whisper of shadow masked by the velvet-soft night: a dark veiled figure moving soundlessly to materialise, seemingly out of nowhere, at the entrance to the castle of House Atreides. A single command from beneath the veil made the sentries stand down in sudden subservience as if in welcome of a queen’s entourage instead of a lone elderly woman in black.

The woman’s bearing alone announced her as no ordinary crone. She walked as one who bore the weight of destiny centuries in the making.

Half an hour later, Paul Atreides was shaken from a dream coloured by black blood and bone-white stardust. He woke to find his mother standing over him in the darkest hour of pre-dawn. Her face, even in shadow, was pale and tight as a newly stretched drumskin.

“Get dressed and come with me,” she said sharply.

He rubbed the grit of sleep from his eyes. “Why…?”

It barely crossed his mind to refuse her despite the rudeness of the hour. The Lady Jessica was not one to be possessed by temper or fits of sentiment. And she did not give such orders lightly.

“Because your life depends on it.”

“How so?” He pulled on a tunic over his night shirt and shoved his legs into the first pair of pants his fumbling hands could find. In less unusual circumstances, he was a far more fastidious boy. But his mother’s tone pierced him with an urgency that overrode all vanities.

“The Reverend Mother has summoned us. It’s a summon we cannot refuse.” 

He knew without explanation whom she spoke of: the Proctor Superior of the Bene Gesserit, the sisterhood of formidable weirding-women whose network of truthsayers and advisors were embedded within the Imperium’s greatest seats of powers.

“And what does she want with us?”

“With you.” Jessica sighed: a long, narrow, reluctant exhalation. “Since you were born, I’ve been working to shield you from the role you were meant for. I wanted you to be whole…to have a whole life. To inherit the wealth of the land as your father wished.”

“I don’t understand.” She was already walking ahead, and he stumbled after her, disoriented from this senseless half-formed revelation.

“The Bene Gesserit intended for me to have a girl child. Instead I had you. Had you been born female, you’d have been taken years ago, and made to –” 

She shook her head. “It’s not of importance. What is important above all – above anything you’ve done in your life – is that you pass this test.” She gripped his shoulders, her face stone-hard, her eyes full of pain.

“Mother, please. Stop speaking in riddles.” His heart raced in confusion and dread. “Am I going to die?”

“Only if you fail.” She drew a deep breath. “I’ve trained you for this, Paul. You won’t fail. I’m sure of it.”

“Are you?”

She ignored him, and he stood with his feet planted until she was forced to pause and face him. “What am I to face? What does the Reverend Mother have in store? And why now, of all times?”

To his exasperation, she answered only his last question. “That is the way the test is conducted. Its initiate is taken unprepared. If I had readied you in advance, she would know. She would read it.” Jessica’s mouth tightened further. “She is prepared to kill you for the slightest infraction. Obey her every instruction, pass her test, and you will live. And be left in peace.”

A lesser lad would have been overwhelmed into inaction. But Jessica spoke true; he had been trained for this moment, albeit without realising it, thinking his mother no more than a zealous but loving guardian arming him with the best education the heir to the duchy could command. Only now did a creeping dread come upon him: a suspicion that he had been shaped and pruned and sharpened for more than the role of Duke Leto Atreides’ son.

They stood now at the threshold of a room he had never in all his years set foot in. The plain circular door was suddenly a looming maw, and he instinctively stayed close to the warm light of the glowglobe while his feet grew heavier with each step into the bare interior at the centre of which sat a shadowy figure.

“You must do as she says. And remember all I taught you. The training of your body and mind: all of it. Remember.” Those were his mother’s only parting words before the door closed and left him walled off from her protection.

He faced the high priestess and willed himself not to cower. He had seen her before, after all, albeit only once. Gaius Helen Mohiam looked utterly unchanged from when he had encountered her as a tender boy of eight. He remembered the oddly withering look he had been grazed with, as if his very existence slighted her.

There was no ire or disdain from her now. She merely sat there, calm as a stone, staring at him with with such stillness and silence that he felt compelled to speak and accede defeat.

Then her voice pierced the still air, though her lips had barely parted.

“Paul Atreides.” 

At the shape of his name on her tongue, something reverberated through him, hooking onto the back of his mind. Then he was being pulled forward by the very force of her will.

“Kneel.”

His ankles gave way beneath him; he fell to her knees before her.

This is my house, he thought with rising outrage. The house of my mother and father. “How dare you –”

“How dare I use the Voice, indeed?” Her low voice was gentle, mocking. “Already your mother is proven wrong. She tells me you are smart, humble, resilient. But I see you have the usual arrogance of a young man with the world in his palm.”

“What do you want from me?”

The answer appeared in the form of a small iron box, coated thickly with the patina of age, all the more threatening for its ancient strength.

“Put your hand in the box.”

“What lies inside?”

“A test of endurance. The kind gifted only to childbearing women.” As his eyes widened, she continued: “Your body is a remarkable one, I am told, due to the unique nature of your birth. A gift your mother pressed upon you in the womb. You may come to thank her for it – or curse her.” 

The Reverend Mother smiled then: an oddly tender, mournful smile, a glimpse of compassion amidst the shadow and ice. “A difficult path lies ahead, child. If you do not have the strength for it, you must be culled.”

Her hand flew out like the darting blur of a wasp. And indeed a wasp-sting, or what felt like one, tickled the soft skin of his neck.

“Put your hand in the box,” came the calm command. “Remove it before I bid you, and you’ll find a basilia-laced needle in your vein.”

He broke out in a sweat. Basilia: an assassin's poison. He parted his lips to call for his mother – she would not let this happen to him; she would not stand for this. Mother Mohiam read his intent without a word.

“You may call for Lady Jessica. She’ll no sooner disobey me than slit your throat. She knows your life hangs on this moment.”

Remember all I taught you. His mother’s parting words before she left him to the Reverend Mother’s mercies. He calmed his breathing and regulated the flow of breath and blood the way he had been trained to, in the ways of weirding-women taught to no other boy or man in the land. Then he surrendered his left hand to the unknown depth of the cold iron mouth.

At first there was nothing. Then a slow creep of pain, arriving in small, sharp twinges, nothing more than insect bites crawling up his nerves. They slid up his arm and shot right to his ribcage, his abdomen, his pelvic muscles. He kept his every inhalation perfectly calm and even. The pain spiked, ebbed, spiked again, but never got the better of him.

Perhaps ‘never’ was too premature a thought.

The insistent stabbing in his side grew sharper, and sharper. The sensations that had been abstract, amorphous as all bearable pain was, took on a more defined shape and weight until he could no longer spread it thin and dilute its impact. It sprouted serrated teeth that tore through his belly and pushed a guttural groan from between his teeth. He fought to stay upright, to embrace the torment and let it pass through and over him. He would not give in. To give in was to die. 

The poisoned needle stayed in place. And so did his hand. The iron maw sent a fresh wave of fire up his arm, which coursed to his lower body to fill him with an agony beyond any he had ever imagined. The relentless assault steadily intensified before coalescing into a new torment: a stirring and stretching in his belly. A living thing, sentient.  

He gasped and looked down – but no, there was nothing, a mere hallucination of the senses. He wondered if the basilia had not already penetrated his flesh. Then the serrated blades dug ever deeper, scoring gashes into his innards. He cried out and bent over, all his concentration channelled into keeping his left hand in place. Something had indeed taken root inside him. Something with a will of its own, clawing and tearing its way out and eating him from within. It refused to be caged within his body. The thing was gnawing at his guts; it would devour him alive and push its way out in a gush of carnage.

“Help me,” he begged through gritted teeth, his stubborn resolve crumbling. “It’s going to kill me. It’s going to…”

“If you cannot survive it, then you cannot leave this room alive.”

“Please,” he gasped. Tears streamed down his face. His body was trembling; he was a mass of uncontrollable tremors. He could not stay on his knees much longer. He was going to fall, and then his hand would leave the cursed box, and then –

The creature dug its claws in and ripped a tear in his belly. He felt the tear become a ragged red hole as it forced its way out, and began to scream, and found he could not stop.

ENOUGH!

Jessica’s voice spread through the air with such force that it shattered a lamp in the room. No, not her physical voice; rather, a thought shaped like a bullet, piercing the air in a psychic gunshot. Mother Mohiam’s head flew back from the force of it. She withdrew the small box, and Paul collapsed to the floor. His screams had moved his mother to defy the leader she so feared. She had come for him at last.

He knew why she could not come sooner. And yet her lateness still felt like a betrayal.

“He is strong,” said the Reverend Mother as her acolyte burst into the chamber. “He may yet live. But through one birth, no more.”

“He will not be a womb for beasts,” Jessica hissed, all fear and decorum gone. “My child will not become a breeding machine!”

“If he does, he would be well taken care of. There are worse fates an aberrant child can meet.”

A womb for beasts? Paul stared up at his mother, too exhausted to be outraged, his only sentiment a haze of shock softened by numbness. “Is that what I was to be? Some sort of…broodmare?”

“I’ll explain as much as I can. But later.” She helped him up. “Stand up now. Prove your strength.”

But there was barely any strength left in him. His body was intact; there were no bloody smears on the stone floor, not so much as a paper cut. Yet he felt undeniably weakened as he was led back to his room. Some part of him had been irreversibly changed, though he could not say what it was.

His limbs turned boneless and his eyelids heavy as soon as he hit the bed. He barely felt his mother undress him as if he were a little boy once more. Still, the mind that had been schooled and honed since before he could walk stayed sharp enough to grasp at the question branded into his consciousness.

“She said…my body was…remarkable…unique. Something happened…in the womb.” His words were slurred from his tortured body's dire need for sleep. But he knew her skilled sense would hear them. “What did you do to me?”

“I saved you.”

“You changed me.” The truth of it rose like a second inner voice, a half-buried instinct. “You made me a…” He had no word for what he was, though he would find it in time. 

“If I had let things take their course, do you think you’d be lying here, in a comfortable bed, in a house and land that has given you everything you could want?” Her fingers gripped the bed’s edge, her voice tight with worry, with anger, her eyes flickering with a litany of horrors waiting to spill off her tongue.

Then she sighed and softened, and kissed his forehead. “Forget what I said,” she said as she pulled the quilt over him. “I was angry, but not with you. Rest now.”

He closed his eyes and let himself tumble into oblivion, unwary of the strange fever-dreams that lay in wait in the dark. He would wake from these visions of white fanged faces and monstrous worm-like writhing beings to find his pillow damp from sickly sweat. He lay for a day and a half in the grip of his ailment, riddled with fierce aches that even their Suk Doctor had no name for. But Doctor Yueh’s deft hands and measured doses, along with the natural workings of his strong young body, restored him back to health by the dawn of the next morning. And all was as well again as it could be.

Paul had no way of knowing that the seed of a corrupting plague, once thought to be lost to the far reaches of space, had been burrowing ever closer to home over the years. Or that one of its black insidious roots had found its way into the heart of House Atreides.

Chapter Text

In the festering core of a sprawling stronghold that still clung to remnants of magnificence sat a great white leech of a man. The reptilian hiss of the hovering spheres that turned his massive, sprawling weight into a monstrously graceful slither preceded him, punctuated by the sound of the laboured breaths telling of his fatigue. He had not fed in a while. He’d been saving himself for this feast, this fleshly banquet that made him delight in the bloated form he had once loathed. His largeness was a measurement of the countless bodies that had served him. And all whom he presided over would remember it for as long as they lived in his shadow.

The Baron of Giedi Prime was once an ordinary man: fair of face and stature, to be sure, but plagued by the weaknesses of his forebears. He remembered only fragments of his ordinary youth, before the curse that befell his house spread its fever through his veins and transformed him into something stronger. Something made to endure. The price to pay for this endurance was the premature end of what came after him: the barrenness of the Harkonnen family tree that had once thrived from hoarding the lion’s share of Giedi Prime’s scarce bounty. For that which made them so strong also made them unable to spawn.

But that barrenness was coming to an end. A rare creature both lovely and resilient, meticulously bred from carefully chosen bloodlines, was being groomed as a gift to House Harkonnen. A gift to bear them the first of a new breed of man greater and more perfected than himself – while being all his to command.

Vladimir Harkonnen sat himself at the head of the long table and stared down its length at the head butler. “Bring me Salusa’s finest.”

Salusa Secundus, the vassal homeworld that trained its strongest for war to fortify the Harkonnen militia, was also a breeding ground for cattle. Even the youngest child soon learned that the surest way to escape the Amassing – in which citizens were taken to the Citadel and never seen again – was to wrest their way into the ranks of the elite Sardaukar troops. Only by turning themselves into perfect human weapons could they stay immune. Sardaukar were given the privilege to live and prosper, for as long as the hardships of battle would allow, in a sphere above that of the common populace.

As for the rest, they lived in the knowledge that their days were ever numbered. A handful had been reaped just this morning for Baron Harkonnen’s pleasure, carefully culled and inspected before being delivered to the fortress. There would be no filthy peasantry for the lord of the land. Each one of the twenty men and women were at the prime of life, fair of health and as becoming as their hard existence would allow. 

They were laid out before him on the massive slab of a table. Lissome and groomed to the last, a few even layered lightly with plumpness: an uncommon, delightful treat, for the majority of the cattle tended towards the stringy side. Not that such succulence was essential to the vital substance in their bodies the Baron and his kin relied upon to live. But it added a certain toothsomeness, a tender little bite lacing every swallow of hot, gushing life.

The door swung open to admit the one he had called upon while the spread was being assembled. The promising figure of his nephew and heir outlined in a sliver of white light. “You summoned me, my lord.”

Vladimir looked up from the first course: a robust man drugged to the gills with a heady concoction of semuta and spice-melange – a veritable feast of the senses for his kind. He gestured for his nephew to take a seat, but not before first appraising how fine he’d grown. 

“Indeed. I bring you good tidings, as well as a feast.”

Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen was always a pleasure to look at: the very specimen of powerfully built youth at the first apex of manhood, who moved with a fatal feline grace that dealt a killing stroke faster than one could draw breath. This masculine beauty contrasted oddly with the full, shapely, almost womanly lips and softly sloped brow that lent his face a most seductive manner. And of course Vladimir had turned him at such an age that preserved him at the height of his allure.

He had been plucked out of the litter for a reason. Even as a small, nervous, inconsequential runt from an inconsequential family, he had shown promise. And now he was blooming, fecund with it. It was imperative that his beauty and potential not go to waste.

“I have a present for you. One you were promised years ago.”

The nephew he had stolen as a child to make of him an heir cocked his head keenly. “You’ve kept me waiting long enough, uncle.”

“Only because we were cheated of our claim. But the insult will not go unpunished, nor a promise go unfulfilled.” Vladimir lifted his drugged victim’s wrist to his face to sniff at the thick crimson life that ran steadily if sluggishly in that temptingly raised vein. “Your gift is a well-guarded one, like all gifts truly worth having. But you will find the way has been partially cleared.”

The shadowed eyes watched keenly as the Baron’s taloned ring pierced that throbbing vein to absorb a taste of its bounty, an appetiser to the feast that lay ahead. “And when do I lay claim to it?”

“Fifteen days from now. Ready yourself to strike. You must be stealthy, undistracted. Remember your purpose. You remember what you were chosen for.”

“Always.”

Feyd took his place by his uncle’s side, eyeing hungrily the portion allotted him. A pale wet tongue slid from between his lips and flushed pink at the promise of ripe flesh. He waited until the Baron sank in before doing the same. As they fed, their colourless skin grew flushed with pallor and warmth, icy fingers and bluish nails changing hue with the sensual rush. The inlaid ivory of the table began to glisten with a red rapacious spill. One by one the banquet of bodies was devoured, leaving behind a sacrificial heap of flesh drained to the last drop, even the comeliest among them reduced to sunken eyes and pallid gaping fish-mouths.

Drunk on satiation, Vladimir sank back into his large chair and waved for the servitors to cart the bodies away. The gaping stupidity of the dead was ever an unsightly thing. They had repulsed him from the start, the addictive grip of drawing life to feed his own turning to disgust at the sight of the mortality he himself had evaded. After nearly four hundred years, it had become merely a tiresome reminder of the inevitability all living things must face. All save himself and the lineage he would build.

Feyd rose from the remains of his own repast, sensual and animalistic in his bareness – he had stripped himself to a simple leather wrap for this blood-smeared glut, leaving his sculpted torso and thighs unclad. He looked over his shoulder at his uncle as he left. He knew he was being watched. Those pale eyes flickered with something akin to a pantomime of shame, of coyness, of an ever-blossoming carnal knowledge coaxed from dormancy by the Baron’s patient hands. Then he walked off and disappeared through the doors, leaving behind a taste in his lord’s mouth quite different from common bloodlust, and altogether sweeter.

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At the first light of daybreak painting the sky in a pale grey-blue wash, the brief ceremony that was nonetheless wrapped in much pomp and regalia announced that the siridar fiefdom of Arrakis – the arid planet so prized for the spice-melange mined from its golden sands – was now in the hold of House Atreides. No mention was made of its previous fiefholder House Harkonnen, who remained mysteriously, almost suspiciously acquiescent on this imposed surrender of their greatest well of wealth.

The white-clad officials of the Spacing Guild handed over the deeds to Duke Leto on behalf of the Padhishah Emperor Shaddam IV with Lady Jessica and her son as witness to the exchange, the ducal seal etched in the hardening gleam of wax. It seemed an enormously generous boon upon their house; almost too generous. Paul knew his mother shared his misgivings. And so did his father, whose high-minded ideals did not blunt his political shrewdness. He deduced from the snatches of conversation he overheard that Leto was troubled by this gift and wished to divine the reason behind it, going so far as to seek an audience with the emperor himself.

“Was there any reason given for the transfer?” he asked over the ruminous quiet at the dinner table.

“Only unsatisfyingly vague ones,” Leto replied. “According to official sources, House Harkonnen has lapsed into severe negligence and lack of accounting; that the once-great family has ‘fallen into ruinous corruption, bloated with disease.’ Whatever that may mean.”

“And will they be a threat?”

“There is no reason to believe so.” 

Something in the pitch of his father’s quiet assurance was somehow off-key. Paul struggled to pin down a reason for his vague conviction of being lied to. He could not help noticing that ever since the Reverend Mother’s test – the ordeal with the needle he’d later learned was called the gom jabbar – his perception had been heightened to a degree he found frankly uncomfortable. It was an ability that would have served him well in any number of situations. But there was something to be said for the cocooning freedom of ordinary human ignorance he had heretofore taken for granted until that blanket was stripped from him.

This sharpening of his senses led him to catch the light-quick glances between his parents at the mention of the Harkonnens. Then in a flash, the covert exchange was over, and Leto returned to picking at the slices of meat in the stew he had allowed to go cold over the course of his contemplation. 

“There is reason enough to prepare for a challenge, should it come to our door.” 

Jessica laid a hand on his arm. “If you really believe so, I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

A few more cautious words slid over the table, each one tightening Paul’s nerves a little more. “Is there anything I should know?” he asked at last, unable to help the grievance at being somehow excluded. “Anything I should be ready for?”

His father’s smile was wan but warm. “Not unless you’re of age to go to war. Which, unless I’ve been sorely negligent, is at least two years away.”

“So we do anticipate war?”

“In such a position as we are now, one must be always prepared, even in these times of peace. Suffice to say that I do not expect we’ll be stabbed in our sleep. Whatever safeguards must be set in place are nothing out of the ordinary –”

“Leto, he’s clever enough not to need false assurance,” his mother interjected.

“Are you accusing me of being false?” His tone was sharp, but there was a twinkle in his eye. Paul felt a sudden, painful surge of fondness – as if he was afraid of losing his father. Which, perhaps, was no surprise given the threat of retaliation upon them. Leto was not the kind to order his men to march into battle without marching along with them.

“I’m saying that lying about danger may only leave him vulnerable to it.”

Leto sighed, and spooned a last mouthful into his mouth before giving up on the stew. “I’ll take the rest for supper in my room,” he informed the nearby servitor, who nodded smartly in acknowledgement. He turned to his son with a look that made Paul think of his mother’s face as she’d sat by his bed after the ordeal of the gom jabbar: a look burning with love and worry. 

“Paul. Could we speak for a bit after dinner? In the study?”

Without meaning to, he found himself looking to Jessica, who squeezed his hand in the affirmation she had earlier failed to provide. This time her assurance was real. And for a time, he would allow himself to believe it was enough.

Leto was gazing at a sculpture carved from pale marbled jade when Paul arrived in the study: a well-lit room with a circular floor-to-ceiling window that framed a picturesque view of Mount Syubi rising from the distant mists. Paul had seen that carving countless times, and never gave it a second thought until now.

“This was made in honour of your grandfather,” said Leto. “A warrior of the old age, the old ways. A fighter of bulls and oxen.” Indeed, the figurine – fascinatingly primitive in form yet refined in its sharp, precise lines – showed a man facing a fearsomely built bovine beast, the horns just missing him by a few hairs.

“Are you thinking of what he would have done?”

“I’m thinking of what we would do. Or should . There is great merit in facing down your fears; in the taming of beasts when the lives of others are at stake.” His father’s fingers nudged the sculpted warrior into the shadow. “But there is also merit in turning from them.”

Paul stared questioningly, forcing patience upon his tongue. His father’s thinly veiled caution told him what he already knew: that the shadow of the Harkonnens was indeed upon their doorstep.

“An Atreides is duty-bound as well as honour-bound,” Leto continued. “My duty, and your mother’s, is to protect you. With our lives if necessary. And yours – as our child and my heir – is to survive.”

“You speak as if you’re leaving for good.”

Leto’s voice was tender. “I’d never leave you.”

The dread building in Paul’s throat briefly robbed him of speech as he crossed the room slowly to be near his father. His unspoken need was answered with a tight embrace.

“Don’t leave us,” he said urgently. “Don’t go to the emperor, to Kaitain. Let us go to Arrakis as one.” He pressed his face against the strong shoulder. “Please.”

“Didn’t you hear what I just said? I am bound by duty to do what is best for us.” He clasped his son’s neck affectionately. From this close distance, Paul noticed for the first time the thickening silver streaks in the black hair and neatly trimmed beard, the deepened creases that made the man look at once more fallible and more immense, an expanse of understanding etched into his face.

“Father,” he began, then hesitated. The final question was caught on the back of his tongue.

“What is it?” Leto smiled when he fumbled and went quiet. “Well? Don’t keep your old man guessing all night.”

I think there’s something wrong with me, he wanted to say. “If I…if I’m not – if I turn out not to be the…the son you wanted…” He couldn’t go on. But in the end, he didn’t need to.

Leto clasped his hands, then his face. “You already are.”

“Even if I’m…” Unnatural?

“Paul, we can’t always help what we are. You’re no more a perfect son than I’m a perfect father. All I know is that I love you with every fibre of my being. I never knew it was possible to love someone like that until you arrived. Until I first held you.”

Paul felt his insides overflow and his eyes burn. He did not know what to say as he let himself be pulled into another, longer hug, and so merely stared over his father’s shoulder at the small jade figurine. The rearing bull looked harmless and almost serene in the soft shadow and warm lamplight.

Leto the Just. That was what they called his father, from the lords of the Landsraad to the common man and woman. It was what he would be known as in the books when he passed into history. And Paul could not have been prouder, whatever he turned out to be, to call himself Leto Atreides’ child.

Chapter Text

The Ampoliros II was a sleek, swift beauty, its tubular form inlaid with silver motifs that formed an abstraction of wings from the eagle of the Atreides crest. It was a masterwork of precise engineering and craft, its controls steering the heighliner’s every movement with delicate ease. There had been objections to its naming; the first Ampoliros had been a legend among ships, to be sure, but also a cursed one. Jessica had taken one look at the letters etched into the newly commissioned vessel and urged Leto to change it. But the Duke was not a superstitious man. And after all, the disappearing ship had launched some five hundred years ago, before the rise of advancements in post-Guild shipbuilding and space-folding.

“If one must be swayed by old myths, then let this ship be known as the cursebreaker,” was his reply. He kissed her lips and hand in parting. “I’ll make a detour to Kaitain as planned, and see you in Arrakeen in two months. And you, Paul.” He held his son tight and pressed his lips to the boy’s cheek. “Remember your lessons.”

Paul nodded, though all he could think of was the bull waiting in the shadow.

Leto’s next embrace went to Duncan Idaho, a king among swordmasters from the proud warrior caste of House Ginaz. “I wish I could take you with me.” Warmaster Gurney Halleck had elected to accompany his duke, with Idaho staying behind in his stead. “Take care of my family.”

“With my last breath, my lord.” Duncan slid close to Paul, a hand on his back as Leto turned and walked toward the magnificent heighliner that caught the sun’s gleam on its curved outline. 

Paul was glad for Duncan’s assuring largeness beside his own willowy frame. At the cusp of sixteen, he had yet to grow into the broad-shouldered build that seemed the birthright of all Atreidean lads who had begun sprouting the first hairs on their chins and chest, which grew within a year into a dense dark fuzz. Paul had yet to show those signs of manhood anywhere on his smooth-limbed frame save the downiness of his nether regions. Yet his health was without fault. On occasion he was teased for his lack of bulk; but by and large was praised for the grace of his movements in a sparring ring, his exquisite features that were a perfect amalgamation of both his handsome parents, the abundant, lustrous babyish curls that sprung forth like flowers from wet earth and framed his fair face in a manner more seductive for the fact that he was barely conscious of its effect. For all his grooming, he had the unwitting beauty of a child, woven into the body and spirit of a budding man. One who was more scholar than warrior, to be sure, but whose strength and intellect was seldom ever in doubt.

Such an enquiring mind had its own drawbacks. He spent a sleepless night ruminating on his father’s quest, on all he had absorbed regarding the hostile yet breathtaking landscape of Arrakis, then reading everything he could find – which did not amount to much – of the original missing Ampoliros. A great beauty built not as a slim small-crewed heighliner, but a massive starsearcher meant to last it inhabitants for years; an explorer of the enigmas guarded by the deep reaches of space. 

He fell asleep at last to the soothing hum of a filmbook’s voiceover as its projection ran on, splashing stardust and luminous moons onto the walls. He was lost to slumber when the last quarter of the film told of the mysterious illness that filled those it infected with a murderous thirst – and that turned the few surviving crew members into monstrous beings, of whom little was known save their dependence on feasting upon other humans. These unseen monsters passed soon enough into myth: a vague warning to those whose hunger for knowing every last secret between the stars would lead to peril as the price for hubris and ambition.

But parts of that narrative must have wormed its way into Paul’s subconscious. For he dreamt of bodies transmuted into ghastly tentacled things with predator’s eyes; of pale faces dripping with thick venous blood; of the same bloodspill turned to black ink beneath the pallid light of a dark star beneath which such creatures could thrive. The last thing he felt was a splay of cold fingers creeping spider-like along his back and a mouth next to his ear, speaking his name.

He awoke with a start – the nightmare receded, leaving only an ache in his neck from sleeping awkwardly amidst his books and tablets. But the monstrous white light haunting his dream was no more, and the illumination seeping through the nearest window was only the ordinary warmth of late morning.

He rose stiffly and stretched his limbs, and went to the hall where he knew breakfast would be waiting. Such were the everyday comforts a young lordling could take for granted. He could not have been prepared for the brutality that would come to stain the unshakeable corridors of the castle he called home, and make such privilege a thing of the past. But perhaps a part of him knew – that dormant seed of instinct-based prescience inherited from his Bene Gesserit mother, and sharpened a little further by the test that had torn him nearly in half with pain.

He must have known that death was woven into the tapestry of the Atreides saga. For when the Ampoliros II returned fourteen days after it took off, an ominous silhouette descending from the clouds above, his rising dread felt like less of a shock and more like a memory of something that had yet to happen…until it finally did.

| | | | | | | | |

For once, his mother sought to protect him from the truth.

“Don’t come any closer,” she said sharply as the bodies were being carried from the ship. Of the eighteen people on board, only three had lived. Gurney Halleck was among them – scarred and harrowed and shaking like a much older, frailer man. Duke Leto Atreides was not.

Paul wondered what horrors she was trying to shield him from. He wanted to see. He wanted to absorb the fullness of it all despite knowing it would shatter him. He hung on to his thin thread of hope up to the very moment when the last of the deceased left the cursed vessel. The faces of the men carrying the half-shrouded figure were ashen, aged in their mournful shock.

“No,” Paul whimpered, rearing forward.

“Stay back!” Jessica ordered. She had been in the ship. She had seen something that she did not want him to see. Except that not knowing was driving him to madness. 

“He’s my father!” Paul retaliated.

“And I’m your mother, and you will obey me!”

Her words emerged in a symphony of fine vibrations shaped to a needle-point, piercing the back of his mind. His feet froze in place; he tried to fight her Voice nonetheless, defiant to the last, and stumbled to his knees.

“Don’t take him away from me,” he pleaded. The men bearing away their duke turned their faces resolutely from the tragic boy crying out for his father. “Don’t…please. Please.” He dug the heels of his hands into his eyeballs, wanting to blind himself, to blind the insistent Seeing-sense that had warned him of this, leaving him helpless to prevent what must come to be.

No. We could have stopped this. Leto’s death was no natural thing. This was a murder; a slaughterfest.

“They’re not taking him anywhere, lad.” Duncan’s voice was unusually gentle as he knelt beside Paul and put an arm around him. “There will be a sending-off, all the proper rites. You will have your goodbyes.”

He had never seen Duncan Idaho cry before that day.

When at last he saw his father, he felt his welling tears dry up at the sight of this travesty filling the coffin. Leto’s face peeking through the stiff collar of the ceremonial uniform was an oddly swollen, barely recognisable thing. As if someone had stuffed him like a roast bird and sewn him up. He must have been so badly wounded that the embalmers could only do so much. And the hands – what had they done to his father's hands? Withered and bloodless, like bones dipped in wax.

“It’s not him,” he murmured. “None of this is him.” Perhaps he’s not really dead.

“It’s him.” Gurney was standing beside him. “I saw him fall myself. I’m sorry, my boy.”

“What did you see?” Paul grasped at Gurney’s arm when the man began to leave. “What happened on that ship?”

“We were ambushed. Attacked and slaughtered by…inhuman things.” The warmaster who was the very bastion of impenetrable stoicism would barely look him in the eye. “There were three of them. Three of…whatever those creatures were. Female, or vaguely so; hard to tell. They looked more or less identical. Hairless and fish-pale and mute save for when they made those awful hissing, clicking sounds.”

“But where did they come from? Are there planets or moons where such beings live?” His mind was reeling, almost eager to search for answers as a distraction to the horror of his father’s body.

“Where do you think they came from? Who would have the greatest motive to weaken House Atreides?”

Paul stared back incredulously. “Harkonnen? But they’re…they are beastly, to be sure, but not literal –” 

“You forget, boy, I used to be a slave on Giedi Prime. I've seen the bloated leech they call their Baron for myself. It’s not incomprehensible that such a monstrous being would breed even worse monsters.”

“But –”

“They didn’t just kill. They drained him dry, your father, along with the rest. Some were left intact – bloodless and pale, with their veins showing but…decent. Some were torn limb from limb. A real bloodbath. And a few, like Leto, well…”

Paul felt the ground shift from his encroaching nausea. He looked elsewhere only to see the walls turn as horridly waxen as his father’s hands through the blur of his sudden sickness. He regretted his prying; but there was no turning from this knowledge now. Gurney went on in a voice as dead as the bodies lined in neat rows following the duke’s grand coffin.

“He was a husk, Paul. Grey skin like paper, wrapped around sinew and bone. His eyes were still open. Open and staring forever into nothing. His lips pulled back from his teeth like –”

“Enough.”

Paul had parted his own lips to say it, but the command came from Duncan. The swordmaster caught him as he swayed. Duncan had always taken care of him, had raised him like a second father.

He closed his eyes and pressed his face into the broad muscle-hard chest until the worst of the dizziness passed. How strong his mother must have been, to stare at the horror that was her husband and remain composed. She would have overseen the cleaning and preparation of his body, too. She would have seen that horribly desiccated figure filled out into a semblance of the man whose portrait adorned the antechamber of one of their receiving rooms. His father had always disliked that painting, making many jibes about how pompous and uncomfortable he looked – “like I’ve been struggling with bowel movements,” was his usual remark.

For some reason, it was this odd recollection that made Paul break at last into a full torrent of weeping. Everything became a blur following the painful outbreak of sobs that threatened to shatter his narrow ribcage. He remembered only that at some point, Duncan lifted him off the ground and carried him away from the unforgiving scene, and he let himself be borne off so like a little child. He remembered each one of his sobs echoing too loudly in a hall that was far too quiet for the mourning of such a man as Duke Leto Atreides. He remembered that it was raining softly, a fine mist fogging the windows and shrouding the land in a soft grey veil that seemed to mark the end of an age.

“What will become of us?” he whispered as he was laid somewhere soft, a pillow sliding beneath his head.

“I don’t know,” Duncan replied sadly, kissing his hand. He would realise belatedly that the gesture was a reverent one: a kiss on the hand that would now wear his father’s ring. “I know only that you are Duke of Caladan now. And I believe you’ll be a fine one.”

| | | | | | | | |

In the bowels of the abandoned ship named after a cursed starsearcher, the heir to the Harkonnen empire emerged from the darkness he had slithered into under the camouflaging chaos wrought by his darlings’ concerted attack.

How beautiful they had been, how utterly magnificent, a feral swarm seemingly ejected right from the black womb of the void. All three had been chosen as children from the more promising crop of the slave pits to be his devoted lovers and defenders. They would have died from poverty or crushing labour, or from gruelling use as pleasure slaves of the disposable kind. Instead they had been raised above squalor and suffering to be ensconced in the protection of House Harkonnen. And then, as an added privilege, they had been bequeathed with the blood-gift that would bind them to him for all time.

Feyd-Rautha had been tempted to join them in the bloodbath that filled their cold black eyes with a rush of sensual avarice. But he’d held himself back, knowing that his existence had been shaped for this. Unlike his brother, who had been brought over and turned to become a warhorse and an even greater thug than he was as an ordinary man, he was meant for something more lasting. A legacy with him as its progenitor.

The predators who attacked the Ampoliros II had retreated back to their small pod after, which was coated in Tleilaxu-engineered stealth that deflected detection from the Atreides’ navigator. They had left Feyd behind and returned to the tiny orb of a vessel which was now landing some distance away. Feyd saw its reappearance now, descending discreetly like a dark moon into the mist. Shortly after, he felt the distant vibrations of their movement in the thickets as they made their way to him. The spice that so many of his victims were infused with prior to feeding had resulted in the magnification of his senses. The three women were bonded closely enough to him that he could sense them if he focused and reached out at will, as if with invisible feelers.

He inhaled the air that tasted so different from that of his homeworld; the smells emitted by a myriad of living things, rotting things, the scent of earth and vegetation trapped in the dampness of the nightfall that he had waited patiently for. His kind could not withstand any light save that of the black star that shone upon their homeworld. A strange weakness, to be killed by something so commonplace as sunlight. This world could be theirs if only they could walk freely within it. And so could a multitude of worlds.

He had been told that the spawn he was to bring forth with this Atreides child would be a hybrid unlike any being who came before. Resistant to the burning of the sun, immortal and enduring without need of constant blood-feeding. A child with the heightened senses of a born predator and the prescient intellect of a born ruler.

About two kilometres from the Atreides stronghold, they met the first line of resistance, which they cut down and devoured with ease. The wounds they sustained healed within minutes. Feyd was barely bothered by the pain; if anything, it was a stimulant, filling him with the hot rush of being alive.

“More coming,” said Lera, she and Uko having reached him first. She was the only one who spoke; the other two were mute. All of them were equally deadly.

“You’ll make short work of them, won’t you, darling?”

She kissed him, drawing a taste of blood to make both their nerves tingle. “With pleasure.” 

Magdalina appeared behind them. She had a thirsty look in her eyes. Even before turning, all three had been conditioned to develop a taste for human flesh. 

The shadow of the Sardaukar arrived shortly after Feyd and his deadly trinity, the black ship gliding silently ahead to unleash a volley of fire and chaos upon the battlements. A grand explosive spectacle that ultimately served as a distraction. It was all too easy for Feyd to slither and slice his way through the turbulence to reach his goal. The tentacle-like appendages that appeared with a flexing of his abdominal muscles – two on each side, emerging from hidden slits in his torso – allowed him to traverse the walls like a great pale spider.

He fixed his eyes on the beautiful child who had been bred as his prize. The one who was ostensibly being led to safety by his trusted Suk doctor, so innocent of the fact that he was being drawn to his doom by a kind-faced betrayer.

Only too late did realisation serve the Atreides boy as he looked about like a skittish doe lured into the hunter’s snare. “Where is my mother? She should be with us…”

“I’m sorry,” said Doctor Yueh, his voice rent with the weight of regret. He looked at Feyd’s emergence from the dark with loathing for his true masters as well as himself. But he’d been given a terrible ultimatum, and had made his terrible choice.

Paul Atreides turned to see the face of his intended as Feyd parted his lips and the end of his tongue split like a blossoming flower into four fanged edges. He relished the flash of horror in those startlingly crystalline green eyes as the fangs sank into the milk-smooth neck and drew that first heady rush of blood –

Ecstasy flooded Feyd’s veins in an ice-hot rush. Ahh, but this must be the paradise of the old religions, the nectar of the gods. Paul’s blood was like nothing he’d ever fed on since his turning. It set his nerves on fire – a sweet, soft, singing fire like a million pinpricks of revelatory light in colours such as his own barren world had never before afforded him. He held Paul tight to him and relished the brief struggle before that slender, succulent body surrendered to his thrall.

“You’re mine, Paul Atreides,” he whispered as he lapped up the remaining trail of blood. As you always were.

Paul’s soft lips spilled a strangled, gasping sound that could have been one of terror, or of desire. Then his eyes fell shut and he swooned in Feyd’s arms as the trap that Baron Harkonnen had been laying for a hundred years closed fast around him.

Chapter Text

When the dust settled on the swathes of glistening blood carpeting the floors like grotesque banners of Harkonnen triumph, Lady Jessica was left standing amidst the ruin with nothing to her name but stone walls and a handful of survivors.

“What more can they take from me?” she whispered into the silence. The answer, of course, was nothing. 

She would have given whatever was left to undo what her own ambition had wrought. She would have sold her dignity on an auction block if it would save her boy, a son who was to have been the daughter denied both the Harkonnens and the Bene Gesserit. Except she had known as soon as Paul exited her body that her manipulations of his foetal form had been too late. He had within him, though he did not know it, the ability to carry a life to term.

“She will bring forth the child to end the wars between worlds,” the Council had pronounced of the girl that Jessica was to bear. “The Kwisatz Haderach: the shortening of the way, the one who will traverse the narrow golden path to power built on peace.”

Peace and power. She should have seen the contradiction of it. Those who wished to amass power or to be housed within its aura would never sacrifice more than an iota of it for something so unselfish as a peacemaking emperor. But she had been blind, swollen with self-importance. Oh, how she had glowed with pride for being among the carefully chosen, those promising young women. How queenly had been her bearing when she stepped forward from among this handful to volunteer herself as the Mother of Destiny: mother to a golden girl-child who herself was promised a glorious future.

That future had been a lie.

Jessica was herself a unique breed, bearer of a hereditary secret she had kept to herself. Such secrecy would end up shaping much of her life. Secrets and lies: the price to pay for the touch of supernatural strength in her blood that made her both an asset and a threat. 

The truth was this: she was a child of Vladimir Harkonnen, child of a nameless woman impregnated with the seed of a nameless man – his seed mingled with a strain from the Baron’s own loins. It was a failed experiment that led to Jessica killing her own mother while still in utero. The doulas had been forced to cut her out a month early after the woman fell dead from a haemorrhage with Jessica writhing inside, clawing and sucking, a murderer before she was born.

And so she emerged into the world part monster; or as her Proctor Superior would say, “a queen among hetairae, a divine concubine-mother.” It had never been necessary for the Duke to wed her. She need only be his lover and carry his child to term. And by doing so occupy the place of queen on the chessboard, guiding her daughter – the most important pawn in the scheme of humankind’s history – to her final intended place.

Her daughter would be matched with a mate to equal her talents and beauty. A mate who, it would turn out, hailed from a house of monsters.

“I’ve heard stories of what happens in that fortress of horrors,” she had declared, a month and a half after the stirring thing within her bloomed from a mere bud of tissue into something with the beginnings of limbs and eyes. “Females turned into mindless machines, used only to reproduce. Victims to the despicable engineers of Tleilax. Is this how our Kwisatz Haderach will be made?”

Her accusation was rebuffed with rehearsed eloquence. “The Harkonnens ended their ties with the Bene Tleilaxu fifty years ago.”

A lie, she wanted to say, and we all know it. A manufactured gesture to avoid expulsion from the Landsraad. But she kept her own counsel under the aura of deference that came naturally even when it turned from genuine submission into an act of defending her unborn. She had thought long and hard before coming to her next decision. Leto desired a boy – though he never actually said so, and would have loved and guarded a baby girl just the same. If she gave him the male heir that custom demanded, she would be even more safely ensconced in the sanctuary of House Atreides’ protection. And yet all this calculation had, for a time, fled the world when her baby boy arrived. A perfect beautiful boy who grew only more beautiful with each passing year. But like a cursed princess from an arcane folk tale, the touch of destiny found its way back home sooner or later.

How grotesquely appropriate that the child of a girl who came from a den of beasts should in the end return to the very same den.

But he would not be trapped there forever. Not if Jessica could help it.

She summoned Gurney and Duncan to her side. “Muster what forces and arms we have left,” she told them. “We’re moving our voyage forward. We must leave as soon as can be humanly managed.”

Duncan frowned. “Leave to where, my lady?”

“To Arrakis.”

| | | | | | | | |

When Doctor Yueh uttered his mournful apology, Paul had been visited by an unexpected echo of his mother surrendering him to Gaius Helen Mohiam’s poisoned needle and iron box. That awful feeling of betrayal, the world as he knew it disappearing from beneath his feet.

Then he had turned to see that monstrous visage sprung right from the depths of his nightmares. Its appearance had driven him into mindless shock – a vicious rip into his already fraying state of mind when he returned from the wearying day-long ceremonial parade of his father’s stately funeral procession to seek the rest he desperately needed. He had been shoved awake at some ungodly hour to the sound of explosive flame and crumbling mortar. Everything that happened next was a blur of being shepherded frantically from one pair of hands to another, his mother’s urgent voice in his ear, her hand around his. And then that grip had left him, and he was being led down a quiet corridor by the trusted healer who had served his family for as long as he could remember.

The image of a tongue that opened up like nightmarish lily-petals felt burned into his sclera. The tiny wicked hooks had sunk into his flesh…

…and the shock of red pain became a burst of white heat, which turned to liquid gold coursing through his veins and delivering him to a place beyond this mortal sphere. Such was the inexplicable sensation that had locked him in its senseless, terrible, wonderful spell before the stealing of his blood left him weak and tumbling into oblivion. The last sound that followed him there was a rasping, haunting whisper.

You’re mine, Paul Atreides.

He came to in the steel-cold embrace of a large pod-shaped seat that cradled him like the massive hand of a merciless god. A creeping chill coaxed a tingle from his numb hands and legs. He had been wearing only his thin cotton bedclothes when he was first forced to flee. The loose pants had been stripped from him, leaving only the long nightshirt to cover what it could, his bare legs all too naked in such a compromised position. 

Slowly his blurred vision came back into focus. The black curves of the low ceiling above had a vaguely mechanical quality, a brutal yet captivating symmetry. He guessed that he was in some sort of space vessel, though the layout was not one he was familiar with.

There was a flicker at the periphery of his vision: the blinking of fathomless black eyes set in a pallid unfeeling face. Pupils that made him think of the shiny carapace of skittering, gnawing insects. Was this the thing that had ambushed him after Yueh led him into its arms?

The creature lowered itself to brush against his chest, and he felt the faint but definite swell of a breast. One that, along with the eerie hum flowing from the colourless lips in a high melodic pitch, suggested a being of female persuasion. A tongue reached out to tickle his ear. He immediately recoiled at the recollection of the small sharp teeth within that length of prehensile flesh. But merely moving his head made him overwhelmingly dizzy. He would have thrown up if only he had the strength.

“Uko. Leave him.” A low, velvety hiss of a command. “He’s mine.”

“I’m not yours,” Paul murmured.

“As a matter of fact, you are. You were bred to be my mate, as I was chosen to be yours.”

The face that emerged from the dark to loom over him was a long pale oval, perfectly smooth and hairless, defined by soft dark swoops of shadow that lent the deep-set eyes an alluring slant and the lips a striking fullness. A hand slid into view to stroke his cheek and trace the arches and dips of his nose, his cheekbones, his mouth. Not a misshapen monster’s hand; only an ordinary one, with well-shaped fingers that felt just a tad too smooth, as if the minute grooves of fingerprints and lines had been sanded away to leave only firm featureless flesh.

“You’re a Harkonnen?”

The full lips curved upward in an affirming smile. “I am the one your mother made you for. To birth a powerful new being. And perhaps a new race of children to follow.”

His mother’s confessions – the truths that had shaken him to the core, that made him afraid of the strange half-breed thing he might be – washed over him and made him breathless with fear. 

“I will not be your broodmare,” he choked out.

The pale hairless young man, if such a creature could be called a man, cocked his head in a curious enquiring manner. “But it is your intended purpose. What else is your life worth? What prevents me from draining you to a husk, like my darling Magdalina drained your poor father, if you refuse to mate with me?”

Tears stung his eyelids from the image of his father at the mercy of these monsters, the light leaving his eyes as the blood left his face. One of the female creatures – he could see now there were three of them – pressed her tongue to his cheek to catch a trickling teardrop.

“So pretty,” she marvelled. He could not help noticing how striking she was; as lovely as she was terrifying. “Your eyes. Pretty when they fill with water.”

“You can have his tears, love. But not his blood. Tonight, his blood is mine.”

The man lowered himself as if kneeling before Paul. The lush lips were brushing his inner thigh, suckling at the tender skin. Paul felt those little teeth emerge from the folds of his tongue and hook into his flesh. There was the flare of the wounding sting – and then it melted into a shocking bliss that inflamed his loins and spread its heat through his belly. 

His back arched in involuntary need. Each stinging little bite trailing up his thigh sent an electric shiver up his spine and melted his mind into a vessel devoid of thought. He was a mass of quivering nerves; he was a formless pool of desire. He hated himself for this naked lust that his enemy had such command of. When a hand slid beneath the nightshirt to stroke his stiffened cock, he whimpered and struggled, disgusted with himself as much as his captor. He was so weak that he could barely lift his head and shoulders without straining. And his conqueror relished in taking every advantage of his drained state.

“You’ve more than just blood to offer. Haven’t you? You’ve been keeping it hidden long enough.”

The fingers went from traversing his cock to what lay beneath. And Paul cried out when he realised the soft weight of that fleshy sac – the part every boy took for granted as soon as they became familiar with the shape of their bodies – that bit of him was gone.

He reached down to the tender place beneath his erection. No. Please, no. He had not been imagining it, nor those too-smooth fingers been playing tricks. That other distinctly male part of his anatomy had disappeared, absorbed by the body that seemed no longer his but that of an aberration. An aberrant child . That was what Mohiam had named him.

“What have you done to me??”

“It was not my doing.” The intruding hand slithered back to his nether regions, and he grasped the wrist to halt its movements. But his grip had little force at present, easily loosened with a twist. Then the fingers were stroking, manipulating him into unwanted arousal. And beneath his stiff male sex there appeared an opening he had never even known to exist; one that bloomed, perhaps, only at the touch of its intended. As if saving itself for his betrothed, his monstrous mate.

A ragged cry burst from his throat at the horror of it, of the fingers sliding in and immediately triggering a hot moisture that soon grew into a slippery wetness. Oh, it was a twisted, mutated thing, an unnatural thing. Perhaps he might have grown to accept this part of himself, to cherish it even; but not like this. It had been forced upon him – and kept from him all his life like a secret shame.

The Bene Gesserit intended for me to have a girl child. Instead I had you. 

And here he was, not a girl, nor fully a boy, but something in between.

“You disgust me,” he sobbed between gritted teeth. “I will die before I bear your children.”

“We’ll see about that.” The tongue was sucking at his chest now, draining him even more, and drawing a fresh shudder of revulsion mingled with undeniable need. “As for disgust…hmm, you’ll find it can turn soon enough into pleasure. If only you let it.”

Horror and revulsion clawed at his insides. He wanted to scream and thrash and destroy his own body that had once been a source of pride and now felt only like a cage: malformed, unrecognisable, twisted to serve the purposes of those who would turn him into a thing for fucking and breeding. Then his conquistador’s fingers were inside him once more, milking more unbidden pleasure from that secret shameful slit. The seductively soft lips were ardently caressing his neck. To unknowing eyes, those lips, tender as a lover’s, served to artfully shield the sight of the vile tongue that fed on him.

The orgasmic bliss was mounting, mounting. Shooting from his lower regions to his every nerve. “No. Hnnnh…don’t...” He was pleading mindlessly, but for what he could not tell.

“That’s it. Not so bad at all, is it?” The fingers pistoned in and out of his warm wet slit. “Such a lovely, dripping mess. You’re coming to enjoy it already.”

Tears leaked from his tightly shut eyes at the realisation that this would be his first time: this brutal invasion of his changed body was the moment that ended his virginity. That precious initiation he had been anticipating torn away by an act of rape.

And yet he was throbbing with want. His loins, his entire body, was a singular vibration of perverted pleasure. His orgasm was so strong when it came that it knocked the breath clean from his chest. Just before he lost consciousness, he felt a hand pressed upon his belly and heard the velvety hiss in his ear.

“Our children will be beautiful.”

Chapter Text

The three things Feyd-Rautha had learned about his uncle, and how to please him, was this:

Firstly, that one of his means of holding power was to withhold praise. To exact every inch and every drop of sweat and blood a man could give before so much as a breath of approval. And the praise, when at last it came, was all the sweeter. He would let a subordinate read the minute signs of his body language for proof of his pleasure; and read it one would, if one had been conditioned to know well the consequences of the Baron’s displeasure.

Secondly, that while he dressed his own engorged form in plain if costly garb, he delighted in being surrounded by decadence, and with servants who even at their most practically attired retained an immaculate appearance. To an outsider unacquainted with the ways of the land, the black arches and balustrades offset by gleams of bone-white stone were unforgivingly austere. But to those raised in the light of a sun that drained away all colour, black was the epitome of beauty: rich, dark, sensuous. It was the colour of the fitting mesh top that formed a tantalising latticework over Feyd’s smoothly muscled torso, and the narrow belted kilt that sat almost insouciantly low on his hips; the colour of the jet stones embedded in the zirconium-steel choker and bracelets he adorned himself with for this felicitous occasion. His teeth, too, had been carefully blackened, each parting of his lips a dark maw that Vladimir was known to find seductive.

Thirdly, that such seduction was the surest way to stay in the Baron’s favour. It was a delicate game that he played. Overt flirtation would be repulsed and even punished – and all the citadel’s inhabitants soon learnt of his penchant for most inventively torturous punishments. But neither did the manner of a timid untried youth suit him. Rather, he toed the wire-thin line, as he was so skilled at doing, and put to use what he had been taught.

His own appearance was complemented by the presentation of House Harkonnen’s priceless new trophy, adorned to Feyd’s instructions and laid out in a barely conscious state on the great table where they had lately feasted on Salusa Secundus’ most succulent offerings. Two offerings in one evening: his lord could not have asked for better.

“I trust he is to your liking,” said Feyd.

“I would prefer it if he was a little riper. A little plumper.” Trust the Baron to show dissatisfaction at something that wasn’t even Feyd’s doing. “But he will do well enough.”

Both savoured for a long moment the sight of their spoils of war. Paul had been drugged to keep him compliant, then washed and groomed, and dressed in nothing but bands of clinging gauzy white fabric that would have made him acutely uncomfortable were he awake for how they showed off more than they covered. The boy struck him as the type to keep himself sheathed in a halo of modesty that masked a secret sluttish side – oh, how he’d squirmed and moaned like a virgin whore when Feyd's fingers had breached him, blossoming and wet with the briefest touch. A mimicry of flushed arousal had been achieved with a light dusting of cerise on his lips and cheeks and nipples, alleviating somewhat his translucent pallor from being so recently fed on. Around his wrists and forearms were simple silver circlets inlaid with onyx.

Of course, no amount of paint or ornamentation could erase the fact that Feyd’s prized mate looked the very opposite of a sturdy breeder. Paul’s loveliness was a narrow-chested, willow-limbed kind, with delicately peaked bones framing his shoulders and hips, pressing through his milky skin with each faint breath. He looked like he would snap with the first vigorous fuck.

But Feyd was far from discouraged. Such helplessness had an intoxicating appeal when infused with the boy’s futile rejection of his advances. And he knew that beneath the fragile exterior was a resilience and adeptness only a Bene Gesserit changeling with a strain of Harkonnen blood could boast.

“You’ve not spent yourself clean, I hope,” said his uncle. “He is not fit for breeding just yet. But as soon as he is…”

“You shouldn’t fear I’ll run dry anytime soon, dear uncle. I have plenty to give.” 

The dulcet note in his voice had crept in unthinkingly. And Vladimir did not miss it. He had only to extend his hand and slide it beneath the leather kilt to find Feyd already hard in anticipation of this thorough inspection, the methodical process of ensnaring his nephew into his hold a little more with each touch. The Baron cherished him best when he was found wanting and ready. A robust, well-trained, obedient boy.

He remembered well the early confusion while being initiated into the pleasures he came to associate with an exclusive sphere meant only for a chosen few. Certainly he had not, by any stretch, found the Baron attractive. And yet those hands – those swollen yet somehow dainty fingers versed in the sensual arts – knew all the right ways to touch him, to awaken and heighten those senses that someone in the first bloom of youth was just beginning to attain.

Disgust could turn to pleasure under the right circumstances. Feyd had learned this lesson particularly quickly, being a naturally adept learner. And these were far from the hardest lessons he had been subjected to in his early arduous life as a runty little son of a whale skinner.

He closed his eyes and let Vladimir’s wandering hands take what they desired. “Such a fine, beautiful boy,” came the rasping whisper against his cheek. “And your children will be even finer.”

My, he’s in a rare generous mood, thought Feyd, and his sex grew rigid with pride. He started to touch himself – but his uncle’s hand shot out to grip his arm.

“Don’t be a whorish fool.” The rasp of a voice was sharp with warning, but also, if he read it correctly, a hint of fondness. Vladimir would have railed him rotten by now were he an ordinary man with ordinary inclinations. “The next time you spill, it will be inside the waiting womb of your intended.”

Feyd bowed his head acquiescently, thinking with wayward delight of how he had already wasted his seed once. After fingering Paul into what was likely the boy’s first proper orgasm, he had brought himself to climax and stained his bride’s face with ejaculate as the latter fell unconscious, then instructed Lera to lick it off the way she’d lapped at Paul’s tears. 

The Baron should know better than to expect modest restraint from him. From one who had been shaped to partake in the various illicit joys barred from lesser beings.

Vladimir pulled him closer while pressing his pallid lips to Feyd’s wrist to break the skin with utmost delicacy. Feyd returned the gesture, kneeling by his uncle’s seat, awash in the gratifying warmth forged by this exchange of immortal blood. His senses were heightened when he next rose with the Baron’s blood on his lips. The walls seemed to breathe, to sing with secrets of their own. And the scent of his sweet little broodmare was ever more tantalising.

He bent close to Paul to inhale the sighs emerging from the lips shaped like petals plucked from Caladan’s wet verdant depths. The fragrance of Paul’s blood was heady, mingled with the semuta-laced anaesthetic that had at last fully overpowered his weakened body. The dark lashes that curtained those mesmerising green eyes flickered every so often as if perturbed by dreams. A soft whimper or two escaped through the pearl-like teeth.

“Are you dreaming of me?” he whispered mockingly, hungrily. “If only I could see into that pretty head of yours.” What sweet, damp tangle of fear-laced thoughts might he plunge into? What sort of complex circuitry lay beneath the face that was almost too lovely to hold any cunning intellect, but also lovely enough to deceive with a mask of innocence?

Feyd could hardly wait to find out. Paul would not be a passive, half-conscious thing forever. Sooner or later he would awaken, and surrender to the destiny he so feared. And sweeter still than surrender was the struggle that came before. For what joy was there in the spoils of war without the blood and tears, and searing, life-giving pain?

He bent to taste the invitingly parted lips, savouring the taste that was so different from a blood drinker’s flesh and from the humans he’d sampled both before and after turning. He imagined the small perfect teeth trying to bite back. If he was lucky, Paul Atreides would be as feisty as he was pretty.

Feyd felt his lord’s eyes upon him, watching avidly as he made a performance of the kiss, appeased by the securing of his legacy. The time was coming for the Harkonnen empire to reclaim its former glory; and then to rise even higher. The long-awaited golden child would soon be within their grasp. And with his birth, the Imperium and all its unassailable might would fall into the Baron’s patient hand.

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Paul’s head was heavy when the semuta-laced dreams came to an end and returned him to the ruins of his existence. He lay on his side and stared numbly at his half-curled palm until sensation returned fully to his limbs, wishing that the numbness would remain. It would be nice to feel nothing. It would be a kindness, really, for him to be rendered brain-dead before the use of his body commenced.

But he sincerely doubted his claimant would be so kind.

The barren, windowless room he was entombed in had no ornamentation save a narrow mirror on the opposite wall. Slowly he sat up on the hard slab of a bed and saw in the looking glass the mockery of what passed for garments cleaving to his body. He would rather be naked than so insulted. He tried to tear away the white bands of material, and failed; the fabric was strong for all that it was so thin. His strength was still returning. But his head was clear, though that might well turn out to be the greatest curse of all.

That restored clarity was what allowed him to glimpse the quiet, apologetic flicker of movement at the door. He drew a hiss of loathing when he saw the hangdog face with the Suk diamond inked on its forehead.

“I’m not here to beg your forgiveness,” said Wellington Yueh. “What I did was despicable. If you knew why I did it…” He shook his head and made a gesture of futility.

“Why are you here, then?” Paul barely recognised the spit of venom that was his own voice.

“To measure your vitals, as I’ve been instructed. From your movements and speech alone, you’re recovering at a remarkable speed. I suppose you are Lady Jessica’s son.”

“A half-son,” he said bitterly, before he could stop himself. “A mutated, half-formed…” The shock of what lay between his legs sank in anew, and it took all of his training to stop from passing out again.

“What do you mean by that?”

Yueh’s inquiry seemed sincere enough. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“The – the oddness of… The unusual nature of my…anatomy.” Warmth crept into his cheeks. It was absurd to be mincingly modest after all that had befallen him, but some habits died hard.

The doctor’s ignorance offered some small relief. At least the secret had stayed with his mother. And perhaps his father – though Paul would never be able to ask him. Once more that throbbing hurt rose to the fore like blood in a reopened wound. He’d had space and time to grieve, but all those days felt like mere breaths. He carried his father like a weight in his heart.

“Perhaps you’d care to elucidate.”

“Or perhaps not.” His stomach clenched into knots – why was he even talking to the man? “I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m not obliged to tell you anything.” His words had become a snarl, and every fine hair on his flesh rose as one when Yueh tried to examine him.

“Don’t you dare touch me!”

The doctor obliged. When he next spoke, it was in a whisper quiet with pain.

“They have my wife, Paul. They have Wana.” His sigh was one of torment so worn and rethreaded that it bordered on fatigue. “I don’t know if she’s even alive. I don’t know if there’s anything...left of her if she is.”

Paul had parted his rage-twisted lips to say something – but nothing emerged. He thought of being in Yueh’s position, of what he would do if someone he loved as much as life itself was being pushed to death’s door…or worse. Knowing Baron Harkonnen, it was definitely worse.

He pulled his knees to his chest and locked them there with arms that felt too thin and too naked. “Don’t touch me,” he repeated, with less vitriol. He could not bear to be touched just now. He was trembling, on the verge of breaking yet too rigid to break – his entire being hard and dense with terror and a sort of angered disbelief at everything that had happened. The hardness had his heart in its grip, cutting off air, making his eyes and lungs burn.

Yueh did not come any closer, but hovered like a reluctant shadow. He pulled a blanket over Paul’s shoulders before sitting on the far edge of the bed. They remained in this stasis while Paul concentrated on dragging breath into his constricted lungs, until the assault of hopeless panic slowly subsided.

“What’s his name?” he asked when he could speak again.. “The one whom I’m mated to?”

“Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. The Baron’s nephew. Well, his favoured nephew; Feyd has an older brother. An equally unpleasant fellow, albeit more predictable.”

“And they are both…What do you call them, these monstrous beings?”

“Yes. We’re at the mercy of a family of monsters.” Yueh smiled humourlessly. “As for what they’re called…historically, they go by many names in many tongues. Upir, strigoi, lamia…the Old Terran words stretch back into millennia, into the unknown. As do the stories that resurface every century or so.” Some of the weight lifted from his brow, absorbed as he was in sharing what he’d learnt. Perhaps hoping Paul would be just needy enough of knowledge to forget what he’d done.

“The disease is poorly studied, hence the wild variations in lore. The citizens here – those who know of their unnatural appetites – call them drauga. Roughly translates to ‘walking dead’. Draugr is an old word for a corpse imbued with new life by consuming flesh or blood.”

“And if they are denied blood? Will they die?”

“They grow weaker. I’ve not had a chance to find out how long they can go without.”

“How long have you served them?” 

The sorrow returned. “They took Wana from me just under two years ago.”

Two years of torment. And the man had barely shown a sign of it save perhaps for a stooped, aged gait and the deepened lines of his face, which Paul in his youthful ignorance had taken for the signs of a man no longer in the spring of life. He remembered his mother asking if the doctor was being worked too hard. He wondered also if anyone had ever been quietly, skilfully assassinated by medicines all too easily administered by a trusted hand. How much information had he been feeding the Harkonnens in this span of time? It did not bear thinking about. But he knew now who must have aided in the disablement of the invisible shields and detectors at the grounds’ edges that had allowed for the infiltration and annihilation of his home – 

Home. The word dug a chasm inside him. Was there even anything left of his childhood abode? He felt crushed by the prospect of having no past to return to, and no future save that of carrying Feyd-Rautha’s abominable spawn.

“You really don’t know, then? Of what makes me a…a viable breeder?” To describe himself as such made him vaguely sick. But the time to skirt around the hard truth was past.

“I’ve guessed for some time that there are things atypical, but not unheard of, about your body. Your reproductive organs.”

“Is it possible to change them – to alter something? A way to make me…infertile?”

Yueh was about to answer, but silenced himself when he saw Paul’s eyes widen in alert at the sound of footsteps, then narrow in fear. The door slid open to admit a gracefully muscled figure whose glacial grey pupils gleamed like cat’s eyes in the shadow.

“Join me for dinner, won’t you?” said Feyd-Rautha, cuffs and a chained collar dangling from his hand.

Doctor Yueh was ordered out from the room, disappearing as quickly and discreetly as he’d arrived. Paul felt the world shrink and suffocate him at the draugr’s presence. He barely had time to gather his senses before Feyd was looming over him, fastening the collar around his neck in one swift motion.

Then the terror all but fled when the smooth hand against his bare skin made him quiver with want. Something in his body seemed almost programmed to respond to Feyd-Rautha’s touch.

“Ah, that’s fast. You’re almost good as new already.” Feyd sounded as aroused as Paul felt, his whisper silky soft against Paul’s neck. “Almost full to the brim. Extraordinary.”

The fanged tongue was upon him, and once more he was forced into a heady surrender. This time he was not drained to the point of weakness; but he was weakened nonetheless, his head fogged with lust. The manacles were barely needed in the end. He surrendered his wrists without even being aware of doing so, gasping at the sensuous slide of leather against his skin. Then he was being thrown over Feyd’s well-honed shoulder and carried to the next ordeal that awaited him in this house of the living dead.

Chapter Text

Feyd was a few paces away from the smaller dining chamber he frequented in his uncle’s absence when the command came from behind his shoulder. Words issued in unsteady, ragged-thin syllables, but a command nonetheless.

“Put me down.”

He smiled. “Ask politely, and I may consider it.”

A hard exhalation escaped before the little prince stopped himself. Was that a huff? He found himself immensely amused.

“Come now. A little duke would’ve been taught to speak prettily and persuasively. Why not put your talents to use?”

Paul said nothing more, evidently preferring to suffer the indignity of being so hauled about rather than submit. His loins, pressed against Feyd’s shoulder, began to harden as soon as a hand stroked the back of his thigh. Paul could barely bite back the mewl that escaped the petal-soft lips.

Then Feyd felt the slender-fingered hands creep under his shirt hem, brushing his skin beneath. The feeling was both ticklish and thrilling. He chuckled. “What are you doing, little –”

He spilled a sharp bark as Paul’s nails scratched viciously into his skin like tiger-claws.

The sensation was more surprising than painful – but surprise was Paul’s intention, he realised, as his startled jerk caused his grip to loosen. His captive hit the floor and sprang to his feet in a charmingly brave escape attempt. Feyd allowed him to pursue his laughably slim chance. He did not even bother keeping Paul within sight, his blood-drinker’s hearing picking up the frantic footsteps all the way past the nearest exit. The boy ran with a lightness that put him in mind of sprinting gazelle. It made him feel like a direwolf chasing down his prey: thrumming with contained power, ready to pounce, the strength in his every sinew stretching and contracting at a leisurely pace.

He heard Paul’s small, startled exclamation with the unintended collision, a smack of flesh meeting flesh. The tableau he came across showed his hulking older brother looking avidly upon the fallen sylph at his feet.

“The Atreides bride. We meet at last,” said Glossu Rabban with a smile that would have looked magnanimous to those not well acquainted with him.

“Back from Arrakis so soon?” Feyd greeted.

“The desert rats are dwindling,” came the reply, in reference to the Fremen uprising that had once nearly destroyed the spice mines. “Soon they’ll be no sport at all. What a pity you won’t be there to enjoy the last of the hunt.” Rabban looked down at the figure trapped between them. “Not till you fill him with a child. If he can even hold one.”

The look in Rabban’s eyes went from subtle appraisal to poorly veiled thirst. Enough time amidst the dunes would do that to a man, Feyd found. There was always a fresh surge of appetites following a return from a land where the heat was so draining on their kind, even with sunshield armour and assiduous protective measures. Such measures were unfailingly refigured as a show of force. Impenetrable black, swathes of steel, stone-hard facades. Feyd had often wondered what would befall them the day the enemy learned of the very weakness, the very weapon, that Arrakis had in such unending plenty.

“Delicate little thing, aren’t you?” Rabban remarked, a meaty hand helping Paul from the ground in an apparent gesture of goodwill. “As pretty as the flora of your homeworld.” He tightened his grip when Paul tried to pull away, and pressed his face into the lush curls to sniff the scent of them.

Then his intrusion was cut short with a roar of rage. Feyd found himself gaping, then grinning. Paul had spat at him. Dear gods, the boy was certifiably insane. Feyd’s veins began to thrum anew for him.

“You’ll need to drink soon, or you’ll run out of spit,” he said cheerfully as he reclaimed his bride. “And feed, too. I can smell your hunger. You’re minutes from fainting on your feet. Then Rabban will truly have some fun with you, and I just might be tempted to let him so I can watch.”

“I’ll have more than fun with you,” Rabban growled. His hand swung forth – there was a thick, hard thwack like a gunshot. Paul’s mop of curls went flying as his head whipped to the side from the vicious backhand that sent him tumbling back to the floor.

He would have done much more if Feyd’s well-placed words had not stopped him. “Damage him further, and our dear uncle will hear of it.”

Rabban grunted derisively. “You’ve done a poor job of taming your breeder. Why is he running about the place unleashed?”

“For his health, of course. And he is leashed.” Feyd pulled Paul to his feet by the cord joined to his collar, forcing him to move or be strangled. “Come now, dearest. Or would you rather keep my charming brother company?”

Paul lowered his eyes, pale and fearful once more. Feyd might have reacted more poorly towards the hit were it not for the fact that his mate looked much too lovely when subdued after a fight. The redness of his brother’s assault was already darkening into a bruise. There was a small cut on his lower lip, like a fetchingly painted mark adorning his exquisite pout.

Two servants placed before Paul platters of sliced fish and meat. No vegetables for a slave, not even a prized one; the maintenance of plant life was a costly endeavour here. “Eat,” Feyd ordered louchely, “or you’ll be force-fed. I’ve had it done before, and let me tell you, it was a most enjoyable time.”

Paul, loathing the thought of giving his master any more enjoyment than strictly necessary, stabbed daintily at the dishes before him in between darting glances that assessed Feyd’s own consumption. He must be clever enough to know that the food was neither poisoned nor drugged; the former because he was needed alive and well, the latter because Feyd had command enough of his body with the barest touch, the lightest nip of his milky skin. Nonetheless, the boy had been trained in being discerning with his trust. What a pity that it had failed to save him from a well-placed betrayal.

In the end, Paul gave up his defiance to empty the plates and drain the glass that was filled several times through the meal. He had not been fed since arriving on Giedi Prime; he must have been ravenous. Only a witch-child could have held himself together so admirably while starving.

It would be a thrill indeed to break him in.

The last few bites he pushed into his mouth were slow, almost morose. Finally, he spoke in a whisper made audible by the echo-loving silence.

“When are you going to fuck me?”

Feyd laughed. The boy was ever full of surprises. “And I thought you shuddered at the very thought of bearing my spawn.”

“You’re going to do it anyway. All I can do is wait.”

And wait, and wait. Feyd knew such uncertain anticipation was often a greater torment than the dreaded thing itself. He would have made Atreides wait a little longer for his enjoyment. But he himself had been patient for long enough.

He smiled benignly and turned to the servants at the door. They had their instructions, awaiting only his command. Paul went white and stiff-limbed when he saw what they’d been summoned for, torn between struggling and accepting his fate with dignity when his wrists were bound behind him. Another restraint kept his upper arms pinned fast to his sides. This in turn was joined to the collar around his neck so that each defiant jerk of his head choked him just a little.

Dignity became somewhat harder to maintain when the gag was produced. One that cunningly filled his mouth with an obscenely phallic protrusion secured in place with magnetic straps. Feyd ran his thumb across the smooth dark leather discreetly hiding the fact of that cock-like invasion. He sighed and ached from picturing those prim lips split apart by his own sex.

“You’ll taste the real thing soon enough,” he teased. “But the first honours must go to your ripe, waiting cunt.”

And ripe it was indeed. As soon as he slid his hand below and started rubbing, Paul’s knees buckled, and both his cock and the opening below it began to leak. His face burned in shame, infusing the bruise of Rabban’s backhand with a flattering mauve tinge. He practically begged with a stifled moan for Feyd to relieve him when the fingers left the sodden stretch of fabric between his thighs.

“Bring him to my room. And secure him well. The little duke is a firebrand.”

Feyd waited until the dining hall was well clear of a single soul before leaning heavily on the table and groaning with his own burgeoning want. The curve of his deeply swollen erection pressed painfully against the edge. Never had he gone so long without relieving sexual impulse. Then again, never had anyone stirred him and driven him as desire-mad as Paul Atreides did. He drew several long breaths to steady himself before opening his eyes to a world that glowed like the moon at its brightest. Fate shone with grace upon him: the once-abused child who’d had greatness foisted upon him, and who was about to prove that he wore its mantle well.

| | | | | | | | |

The minders assigned to Feyd-Rautha’s most prized pet took his warning to heart. Paul found the bindings excessive – criss-crossing and encircling him all the way from chest to ankle, a blindfold incapacitating his sight as well as movement, as if it made any difference. The constant slide of the phallic gag against his tongue was making him sick with its oily, metallic taste. Or perhaps he was sick with the prospect of his inescapable fate.

And yet his wet warm sex – humiliatingly, soppingly wet – spoke otherwise. The evidence of helpless arousal glistening on his inner thighs was all too obvious. A small comfort was the stoicism of the staff and slaves tending him. Their unblinking calm suggested that none of what was transpiring was in any way shocking. He had a feeling any verbal expression of mortification on his part would be met with bemusement or a shrug.

But that in itself was a source of despair. If they did not see the horror of what was being done to him, then they could not be moved to help him.

His earlier escape attempt had been both rash and calculated. He’d needed to know how Feyd-Rautha would react to such an act; needed to gauge what he was like when not in the mood of a cat toying with its incapacitated prey. To know how far his patience could stretch and how much moderate measures of insolence amused him. He wanted to get a greater glimpse of the layout of this place, how long its corridors stretched and where the doors were.

That was what he told himself, belatedly. He denied the possibility that he might simply be going mad. There was an enormity to his situation, a constant gnawing of desperation, that even his well-honed mind could not begin to swallow.

He heard the sound of the door,of Feyd-Rautha’s confident, predatory footsteps entering the room that was the opposite of the barren little cell he’d been held in. It struck him that the ceiling in this room – as with what little he had seen of the citadel – was much too high, imbuing a sense of massiveness he found discomfiting. Ceilings that made those unaccustomed to its scale feel dwarfed and helpless, on the verge of being devoured in a single black swallow.

Then all stray thoughts of such trivial things as architecture fled his head when the cool, too-smooth hands brushed his skin to unfasten the bonds around his legs. Being robbed of sight forced him to anticipate the man’s next move; added a certain taut sensuousness to every slide of skin. The gauzy fabric below his hips was ripped cleanly away. His thighs were parted, calves pushed up against his thighs, exposing him for Feyd-Rautha’s viewing pleasure. Yet no fingers came to tease his hard cock or leaking slit. It made him breathless – with want or fear, he could not tell.

“Lovely, isn’t he?” came the odd question. “What do you think of his rare make, darling?”

“I think he is lucky.” Paul spilled a muffled moan of horror at the presence of others in the room, at being put on display in such a manner. “Twice the pleasure. Isn’t it?”

The owner of the familiar female voice brushed up against him, and he recognised her as one of Feyd-Rautha’s pets. It was a relief compared to the prospect of strangers. She’d have seen every inch of him already; seen him captured and laid bare and degraded to no end.

A soft skittering from the corner told him the other two draugr-women were present as well. Their familiar presence was almost a comfort…until it became clear they were here as more than witnesses. A tongue licked the fluids he was leaking copiously, a mouth sucking at them in the fashion of someone savouring an exotic dish. He could tell immediately that it was not the tongue and mouth of his intended. His body simply knew, feeling only disgust, devoid of desire at another intruder’s touch. He wondered who this was – he recalled only the name of Magdalina, the one who had devoured his father. Her hands, or one of her sisters’ hands, was holding his legs apart. Another was cradling his head and kissing his cheek.

“Such a sweet child,” cooed the one who could speak. “So pretty. We will take care of you.”

They must be enjoying his futile struggle to distance himself from the rape. His arousal diminished by Magdalina and her comrades, he felt himself grow cold and hateful and crawling with panic once more. The gag was starting to suffocate him. His world had become one of blindness and discomfort and the horror of his own womb awaiting infiltration. A whimper was building up in his throat: a terribly pathetic whining he was trying to hold back to no avail. It became a moan, and then a ragged, drawn-out cry, and then he was screaming and he could not stop –

Then Feyd-Rautha was upon him, holding him protectively like a faithful lover. The blindfold was removed. His panic ebbed a little, enough for the muffled screams to break down into sobs spilled against the chest he was being cradled against. He looked up into the face of his doom. The face of desire. The face of the one who would treasure and preserve him.

“Shhh,” came the soothing whisper. “No one will hurt you while I’m here.”

In the periphery of his vision, Paul saw the pale forms of the ghastly trinity fade away into shadow, along with everything else. His world had become that of Feyd-Rautha’s hands and lips and seductive whisper. That haze of arousal cocooned him once more, and the heat flooded back into his loins.

“Spread them for me now,” Feyd urged softly, prodding his thighs apart. “Good boy. Oh, you’re so wet and slick and lovely. So hard for me. Only for me.” A sigh almost human in its desirous warmth rained upon his neck. He had disrobed while his darlings toyed with Paul, and his nakedness pressed alluringly against Paul’s own barely clothed form. The small fangs sunk in, but only for a quick taste, the briefest rush of blood that sent a shudder down Paul’s spine.

Feyd kissed him through the leather of the gag, and he responded with a soft half-strangled moan: the sort of sound that needed no translation. A sound of mindless, undiluted need.

A hard length of flesh pressed against his cunt. He looked down to see for the first time that dreaded, seed-heavy sex he now hungered ever so perversely for. Through his lust-addled senses, he saw that it was fairly ordinary in form and proportion, or so he assumed – he’d been too much of a virgin to know for certain. But as soon as the head of it pushed past his wet, eager folds, it became the most divine sensation he had ever known.

Feyd held him tight and clenched a fistful of his sweat-dampened hair. “I’m going to breed you now,” came the velvet whisper, along with another teasing, unbearable nudge of that cock, inching in a little more. “Fill you up till you can hold no more. Till you’re leaking with my seed, heavy with my child. Perhaps you’ll be more docile then, hmm? My sweet, submissive little boy-bride.”

He shook his head in frantic denial, or tried to. Instead his head fell back limply in abandon, as if inviting Feyd to feast on the expanse of bared neck. The gag was pulled from his mouth at last, allowing him to breathe unobstructed, and to let his cry – so sharp it sounded like a scream of pain – echo off the walls as the rigid cock plunged fully into him.

Through the overwhelming assault of bewildering pleasure, he was vaguely aware of the horrifying protrusions emerging from Feyd’s abdomen. Two long, large, fleshy appendages on each side, one of them slithering across his belly and chest. He squirmed in horror, albeit sluggishly, as if in a dream. A nightmare made of sex and blood and monstrous beauty. Feyd’s slick hard girth felt like the height of ecstasy buried within him. He closed his eyes and tried to forget the strange pale tentacles. Let himself drown instead in the ruthless caressing hands and the rhythmic thrust that was making his own arousal a painful, unbearable, wonderful thing. 

Feyd’s hand encircled his cock and milked a stream of release, hot and overflowing. He’d never even known he could spill so much until his cruel lover drew out the untapped potential from within his untried body. Then the cock sheathed inside him sent its own stream flowing deep inside, seeking to take root in the receptacle that he’d been reduced to.

His needful moans segued into a whimper of denial. Too late he pulled away, curling up and waiting for the wail of despair raging in his chest to surface. But he was exhausted, spent, shivering in the throes of a post-orgasmic shock. Too late to fight; too late for useless regret. And there was a relief, after all, in the acceptance settling slowly into his limbs.

Someone was spreading him out and attending him with a damp cloth. Sliding a cool clean sheet under him, cleaning him up with such care as to draw a sob from him. In his broken defeat, he heard his own small, cracked voice calling the name of the one he was bonded to.

“Feyd.”

“I’m here, my love.”

Feyd lay beside him and pulled him close so his back was nestled against the other’s chest. The fanged tongue pierced his neck, and indulged at last its thirst for his life-giving blood. He shivered with the pleasure it gave him; cherished the growing warmth in the body pressed against his. The too-large chamber shrank into a place of giving, of cradling solace. He let his consciousness drain away in a sensuous slide and welcomed the black oblivion that followed the safety of his keeper’s embrace.

Chapter Text

In the month following that first bedding, time passed in a haze of fleshly pleasures, punctuated intermittently by nightmares that receded back into the shadow of the subconscious as soon as Paul woke. He no longer dreaded Feyd’s claiming of his body while simultaneously lusting for it, but gave in to that mindless, animal instinct and allowed it to consume him. It was simply easier that way.

There were days when he barely got off his back. There were nights when he stirred briefly awake to find Uko, who was fast becoming his favourite of Feyd’s concubines, nestled against him. Sometimes her sisters would be there on his other side. He liked it best when it was just the two of them. But he had no say in such things, and so kept his inclinations to himself.

Feyd never slept in the same bed with him. He would unfailingly disappear as soon as Paul next opened his eyes after drifting off in a fog of post-climatic bliss. Once, after the man withdrew to leave as soon as he had fucked both his holes, Paul was left so strongly and inexplicably bereft that he had started sobbing while gripping the sheets with white-knuckled hands. Feyd’s pets had not been present at the time to offer the comfort of their bodies and Lera’s sparse but soothing speech. 

The second time this happened, the sound of his weeping drew Feyd back to study his tear-streaked face in fascination. “What are you crying about?”

“I-I don’t know,” he stammered, feeling utterly pathetic. “Don’t leave me,” he added in a whisper.

Feyd cradled his head and kissed him, and he melted into the kiss with an eagerness that would later make him loathe himself, at least until the next kiss, and the next.

“You were so desperate to run from me before,” Feyd murmured. “Where would you have gone, hmm? Back to the ruins of your house? Off to some corner of Harko to lose yourself as a nameless worker, dying wasted and ugly from disease?” A thumb toyed with his nipple, his lower lip. “You chose well in the end. Staying here with me, under my protection.”

And for a good while, Paul would successfully convince himself of the same; and that he had indeed been given a choice.

Feyd did not come to him every day, perhaps to ensure he did not overspend himself. But on occasion he would sheathe himself in places other than Paul’s cunt. One afternoon Paul awoke from a doze to find his face in Feyd’s lap, a hard slick intrusion already filling his mouth.

“Mmmhh...?” came his half-awake sound of surprise before his lips shifted almost of their own accord, shaping themselves around the rigid girth.

“I promised you a taste of it before, didn’t I? I like to make good on promises.” Feyd’s hand clasped the back of his neck tenderly. “You ever taken a cock in your mouth before?”

“Nnnhh.” He blushed.

“A good a time as any to learn.” The cockhead pushed further to where his throat began, making him retch and shudder. Then his head and neck were guided into a more comfortable angle to minimise his gagging. Not that it lessened the ecstasy of that taste and feel against his tongue – he suddenly could not get enough of it, sucking clumsily like a newborn animal nourished by the first rush of milk from a teat. When he retched a second time, Feyd pulled out just enough for him to catch a couple of breaths.

“Easy now,” came the soothing, seductive whisper that served to deepen his longing a little more. “My little virgin cock-slut. You look so pretty with me in your mouth.”

Paul was almost pleased by the derogatory praise until he caught his own reflection in the mirror. It was, in his opinion at least, far from a pretty picture. His face was unevenly flushed with great pink blotches, further emphasised by the wetness leaking from eyes that swelled too easily with the first welling of tears. The hair falling on his cheeks were already sticky and matted with Feyd’s pre-come. And then there were the rivulets of spit trickling down his chin despite his best efforts. He’d begun salivating at the invasive penetration of his mouth even before he fully woke up, so hungry was he for the taste of Feyd’s skin, for the touch and very essence of his sex.

He looked away, unable to face the barely recognisable image of himself. The Paul Atreides of old was no more. He no longer knew what this new one was. But that was not for him to decide.

The thrusts were picking up speed, their rhythm matching the throbbing drumbeat of his own sex – both of them. Though of late they had become one, the stirring of his cock foretelling the wetness of his cunt. He began unconsciously to rub his slobbering hardness against Feyd’s calf until a bruising smack on his behind reprimanded him for it. A reminder that he existed to serve first and foremost.

“Insolent little boy-witch.” Feyd’s rasp was deliciously commanding even when tight with his own burgeoning arousal. “What do we say?”

The cock was removed so he could make his apology in full.

“I’m sorry, my lord,” he gasped.

“That’s right.” Then his throat was being besieged once more, relentlessly, cruelly even, making him choke and cry and his vision go white from lack of air. The pistoning did not cease till the hot gush of spend he’d been anticipating flooded in and made him struggle not to spill more than he could drink.

“Take it all in, there’s a good boy.” And he did, as much as he could swallow. What indescribable bliss this was – this lewd nectar that soaked his senses as well as his tongue with the colour of gold and flecks of endless prismatic splendour when he closed his eyes.

Seconds later, he was sobbing pitifully when Feyd refused to relieve him. His hands were pinned above his head, and Uko summoned from where she had been waiting so silently that Paul never even heard her.

“Make him suffer, Uko.” Paul whined and wept, and Feyd smiled like a merciful god. “Just a little.”

“Uko,” Paul stammered breathlessly, “please –”

Feyd’s hand slid firmly over his mouth. “Shush, pet. Your tongue has fulfilled its use.”

Uko looked up at him with the closest thing to kindness he would receive beneath the Harkonnens’ roof: a soft knowing look, full of understanding. She proceeded to go to work with her tongue and child-soft lips and her experienced fingers. He wondered briefly if Feyd touched her like this. He had wondered before what sort of things they did together before he’d been pulled into the folds of their unholy quartet.

She did not let him suffer too much. His release was a great rolling wave washing over his torment, softening his vision that was overly sharpened by the rush that Feyd’s seed always flooded his body with.

Later, as he lay with his head against Uko’s chest, he thought of the mindless subservience that had rolled so naturally off his tongue in his moment of need. My lord. He had said it unprompted, uninstructed. Somewhere along the way, it must have been trained into him, though he could not recall when and how. Later, he would rise with the bile of self-loathing in his mouth, and the remnants of a nightmare that clawed at his insides. A dream of a monster-child who stubbornly whispered its own existence into being until he willed it to be still. Willed it to be dead, again and again and again.

| | | | | | | | |

A drinker’s dependency on fresh bodies, Feyd had learned, tended to wane with age. The Baron only truly needed a full feeding once every three to four years. But he kept himself glutted with regular feasts nonetheless, drawn from Salusa Secundus’ flesh factories and from their own vast cities. After four centuries of life, Feyd suspected it was one of the few pleasures left to him.

Feyd himself was a much younger creature. Turned just under ten years ago, his thirst came with every new moon. He could stretch himself thin for a little longer than that, and indeed had tested his limits a few times while honing his natural and preternatural abilities to their peak. He liked knowing the borders of his endurance; took pride in being intimate with his body’s finer workings, and what brought it pleasure and pain – or both, intermingled in the most exquisite of ecstasies.

There were moments where the man he so admired filled him with a contradictory fear harboured by the part of him that did not cherish Vladimir’s approval of his own uncorrupted body. The part that feared becoming his uncle. And so he kept himself flawlessly sharpened to banish a future shadow of himself as a grotesquely engorged ancient with predatory hands.

Such a strange tangle of feelings to have about one’s beloved uncle. Maker and lover, lord and sire. Vladimir Harkonnen was all this and more. He was a thing from a younger Feyd’s nightmares, a slither in the night that made him sweat into the sheets before he finally left these fears behind on the night he was turned.

A lone figure at the corner of his eye caught his attention. He rose from his modest but satisfying meal and smiled when he saw the elfin face turn in revulsion from the freshly drained corpses. To prevent him from growing weak with lethargy, Feyd had decided to allow him limited movement about certain areas of the citadel. The sentries had been made well aware of the consequences should the Atreides slave disappear on their watch. Those who had been in Harkonnen employ for more than a month needed no second warning.

“How do you like your new home so far?”

“It’s not much of a home.”

“My deepest apologies. What does the little duke find lacking? I’ll be sure to pass your complaints along.”

His sarcasm was greeted with further despondence. Paul glanced once more at the bodies that lay limply entangled like bloodless twins in death, and said: “I was wondering if you find me repulsive.”

Of all the strange utterances to come from the changeling child, Feyd had not expected this. “What brought you to that conclusion?”

“You’re unfailingly eager to leave as soon as we…as soon as you’re done fucking me.”

“Didn’t realise my obligations included being your bed-warmer.”

“Obligations?” The word escaped in a hiss, which caught Feyd entirely off-guard, though his body language barely gave away a twitch. “Do I mean so little to you, after you went to such great lengths to snatch me from my home –”

“Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” Feyd snarled. “You know exactly why you’re here. You know your place, as I do mine.” He crossed the distance between them in three quick strides and slammed Paul against the nearest pillar, pressing a palm against the flat belly, the heaving bird-boned ribcage. “Speaking of which, you’re taking an awfully long time to bear the fruit of my labours.”

Paul’s mouth trembled, growing pink with the flush infusing his face. “It was not my doing. I expected to be gravid by now.” A month and a half had passed. Feyd knew too well from past attempts at Vladimir’s behest – grotesque failures he took little joy in recalling – that his seed was more than robust enough; it had only failed to find a sufficiently robust vessel. None had yet survived past the fourth month.

And what if he doesn’t…? came the flash of a thought before Feyd dismissed it.

“Yueh has examined you?”

“Twice in the past week.” Paul frowned. “I assumed that was the reason for your coldness. Your quick absence as soon as your duty was done.” He seemed to have forgotten that they had done a bit more than duty required; his lips had been wrapped around Feyd’s cock to milk it of valuable spend not three days ago. “But then I recalled, that’s been your way from the start…”

His last few words slipped into a hazy, breathless mumble. He’d been restraining himself admirably when Feyd’s breath and hands fell upon him, but now he was subtly arching his hips while averting his eyes to avoid the full glare of his desire mirrored back at him. Feyd grabbed his chin and forced Paul to meet his gaze.

“Please,” Paul breathed – reduced in the span of seconds to pleading. “I just need…”

“Need what?”

They both knew the answer, of course. Feyd’s hips pressed against his to trap him against the pillar.

“Not here. Feyd. Please…” His protests ignored, he shielded his face as if he was a blushing virgin at the altar when his thin short shift was pushed up to his waist.

“But why wait, when you’re clearly so ready for me?” 

True enough, the cunt below the hem was already leaking before the lightest touch. On impulse, he slid down to lower his head to that most delightful fount and drank from it. Paul’s cry was such a sharp, splintered, delicious thing when Feyd’s tongue penetrated him – a cry that screamed No and More in perfectly equal amounts – that Feyd could have almost climaxed from the sound alone.

When he got back to his feet, Paul was pressing a hand to his ripe pink mouth, eyes wide in mortification as he shrank from the stare of the one watching them.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Rabban said, stoked for the rest of the feast he’d clearly invited himself to.

Paul glared back briefly before his self-preserving instinct kicked in. He had not forgotten his less than congenial encounter with Feyd’s older brother. And Rabban, Feyd knew, was dying to remind the breeder-slave of his place.

“You don’t get to fuck him.” His sibling was known to break what he played with, and Feyd was bent on keeping his prize whole. “But you can watch.”

Paul shook his head with futile refusal and welling eyes. Lera had been right: he looked so pretty when he cried. Feyd licked a trickling tear from a vividly flushed cheek. “Tastes almost as good as your cunt,” he whispered.

“You’re a low, disgusting, despicable creature,” came the brittle curse. “You and your brother both. I hope your house falls to rot from your greed.”

“Such a poet. I wish you’d be so eloquent every time we fuck.”

In response, Paul pressed his lips into a hard white line and stared ahead with a stony gaze as if Feyd’s thrusting was only a grinding, tiresome ordeal to be patiently borne. Yet his breaths still came fast and hard through his daintily flared nostrils and gritted pearly teeth. And Feyd drew no less satisfaction from debauching his unresponsive body. There was a perverse joy, besides, in carrying out this intimate act in full view of the sibling he had played and fought and gone on adventures with once upon a halcyon time, before the end of their former house shook them apart. It put him in mind of Vladimir Harkonnen’s fish-like eyes trailing over the body he had cultivated for such a display. It felt, in other words, vaguely wrong.

His lower half began to thrum with the approach of Paul’s orgasm. Their bodies were so attuned that he could almost tell exactly how close the latter was. He withdrew his swollen, dripping sex seconds before the climax – forcing a stuttering groan from between the tenaciously tight lips. A lovely idea had taken hold of him; a small act of generosity.

“You may have a bit of him, brother.” He grasped Paul’s wrist and held it out like a present. “Just a taste.”

Rabban’s grin was almost child-like in its glee. He took the slender wrist and sank his tongue-teeth in as Feyd sank his own into Paul’s neck and rutted away, chasing his climax to its glorious end. Unable to withstand this dual assault, Paul faltered in their grip, the fight leaving him as his eyelids fluttered and he slumped in Feyd’s hold. Feyd drew back and licked his lips, and savoured how ravishing his mate looked in his bloodless swoon.

“Enough,” he snarled at Rabban. “I said a taste, no more.”

“Don’t be selfish, you imp. I’m tired of wearing myself down on the frontline and getting only your scraps in return.” 

Feyd rolled his eyes, a savage insult on the tip of his tongue. He should not, perhaps, have been complacent in his superiority – learning his lesson only when Rabban snatched his mate clean from his hands and tore a gash in Paul’s neck in his eagerness. His witless, bumbling, common eagerness.

Paul cried out, revived by the pain, and turned to Feyd in wide-eyed distress. “Help me –”

Outrage coalesced into hot fury. Feyd grabbed one of the meaty hands and twisted; there was a small snap, and a huge spittle-laced bellow. Rabban staggered back while cradling his two broken fingers – then slammed an elbow into Feyd’s face.

“You’ll pay for this dearly!”

“Don’t be such a pissy little child,” Feyd muttered through the mess of his bloody mouth and broken nose. Drinkers healed at a prodigious rate not known to lesser beings. “By tomorrow, the only thing still bent out of shape will be your dignity.”

Ignoring the cloud of pain in his head, he lifted Paul off the floor and into his arms. Blood was streaming steadily from the torn vein into a red river down the white of the shift. He would need a healer’s attention very shortly. “And don’t touch my things without permission.”

An hour later, he slouched in a broad chair watching Paul sleep after his wound had been mended and his stained clothing changed. The boy slept in his, Feyd's, chamber – an unheard-of privilege – for he was absurdly paranoid now about his mate being compromised again.

But then, his wariness was justified. Paul was indispensable in securing the future of House Harkonnen, and to Feyd-Rautha’s place in that grand future. As for that dangerously mind-clouding, undeniable imprint-bond that was starting to affect him nearly as deeply as it did his breeder…well, he would simply have to continue keeping his distance. The distance that Paul had been so intent on questioning him about.

Paul’s lashes flickered; his fingers twitched. Feyd realised he had not actually been asleep. He was mumbling something in his drained torpor.

“Don’t let him have me,” came the weak whisper.

“You shouldn’t have provoked him when you first met. But some lessons are learnt the hard way.”

Paul murmured an answer: something with a faint note of protest. Truly, his tenaciousness bordered on insanity. His next sentence was marginally clearer.

“Don’t leave me.”

“You’ve no place making demands,” Feyd replied, albeit without much sting. There was little joy in attacking such a weakened target unless it was for blood.

“Please…my lord.”

The broken desperation in Paul’s voice was so exquisite that he leaned forward to catch the taste of it, to let it be tangled in the tapestry of his senses. The kiss that blossomed between their grasping mouths was unusually deep and unhurried and full of lingering sweetness. Feyd knew he was sabotaging his own endeavours to build a wall between temptation and self-determination. He would not become a slave to desire. 

And yet…was it not his right and his privilege to take pleasure in the hard-won spoils of conquest?

He stripped himself bare, slid into bed, and pulled Paul against him. The press of skin against skin – strangely and intensely sensual despite the absence of sex – made him groan with the bliss of it. A groan matched by the softer but no less animal sound spilling from Paul’s lips. Then the sound coalesced into a more melodic timbre; one that formed the shape of his name and repeated it as if his name was the most sacred of words. A prayer made of flesh and blood and secret sighs, spilled in the sanctuary of the bond forged between two creatures who had been born, bred and made for each other.

Chapter Text

Two more months passed. The promised yield of a once-barren tree, long-awaited and eagerly anticipated with the acquisition of its bearer, had yet to manifest in the barest of buds, the first inkling of roots. For all that the Harkonnens’ prize breeder was in the bloom of his springtime years, his belly remained a flat, fruitless land.

Vladimir stared down at the three sombre figures gathered at present before him: the strong and beautiful nephew whose seed was going to waste, the Suk doctor still mourning his ransomed wife while serving faultlessly the one who had taken her, and the last surviving heir to the fallen Atreides duchy. 

This date was to have been one for celebration. Everyone gathered was dressed to some degree of formality; the changeling boy, too, was adorned in a manner that now felt to the Baron like an insult. He was clad in a waterfall of pale ice-blue silk with a soft cowl framing his delicate features and modestly veiling his alluringly lush curls; though the bare back and arms made clear that his body, spoken for as it was, lay beyond the realm of such fripperies as modesty. Against his fair brow lay a silver circlet: what was to have been a crown marking his elevated value upon a successful pregnancy. His long fingers were ornamented with a multitude of rings produced for what his keepers had deemed an occasion of importance. Vladimir entertained the thought of shoving those rings down their throats until they choked.

“I presume you know why you’ve been summoned.”

Judging from their almost resigned expressions, they had guessed correctly, despite the suddenness of the summon and absence of a prelude. Each had been honed in their own way to be the intellectual superior of their peers. Though if things did not change very soon, they would find their wits could only delay retribution so far.

“The heir on which the future of this empire rests has yet to materialise. I can only conclude that the fault lies with one – or more – of you.”

He looked first to Wellington Yueh. “Your reports indicate that you have examined Paul Atreides at weekly intervals since he and Feyd-Rautha were bonded.”

“I have, my Lord Baron. With no less than three witnesses including two medics each time, each chosen by your good self, my lord.”

The Baron did not miss the way Paul’s mouth and demurely clasped hands tightened, nor the rising heat in the cheeks so prettily framed by a few stray curls. With the advancing of age, his senses had followed. He could read in the boy’s heartbeat the smell of humiliation and fear as if it glowed like telling runes upon his skin.

“Nonetheless, your prior relationship with the boy leaves an…element of compromise.” Vladimir lifted the silver pipe of his hookah to his lips and inhaled a lungful of spice-infused vapour. “It was an oversight on my part, I admit. Henceforth, you will have no further contact with Paul Atreides. Should the two of you be seen in each other’s company with none other present, there will be consequences.”

Both pairs of downcast eyes flicked upward with glimmers of alarm that revealed to the Baron a wealth of information. Yueh knew too well the implication that his precious Wana’s life was at stake. The tautness infusing his face, followed by the flicker of subservient fear Vladimir had seen enough of to be familiar with, told him the good doctor would need little persuasion to comply. The boy-breeder’s reaction was a little more interesting – but not at all surprising. Yueh would be one of the very few persons he would consider a friend and ally; one he was clearly dismayed to lose. He might well have persuaded the doctor to smuggle him some means of contraception. Or perhaps, worse still, drawn him into an covert, clandestine exchange of illicit information. Paul would have been willing to forgive Yueh’s betrayal in exchange for anything he could learn that might allow him some small advantage to turn things in his favour. The odds might be unassailably stacked against him. But one would be unwise to underestimate the child of a shrewd, well-respected duke and a powerful weirding mother.

Paul looked to Doctor Yueh, and was met with a firmly averted gaze that led him instead to seek succour from his mate. But Feyd was far too versed in the glass-edged dance of his uncle’s court to show any inkling of sympathy. “Before you ask, my lord,” he said in that velvety rasp seemingly modelled on Vladimir’s own, “I have not been remiss in my duties.”

Vladimir said nothing, letting silence linger in the air: the stone-like dearth of sound that was so often the ultimate miner of truth. That was when his truthsayer stepped forth from the shadow to end their doubts.

“Your nephew speaks true. As do the doctor and his witnesses.”

A small, serrated gasp cut through the air. Paul’s entire frame went rigid at the sight of Gaius Helen Mohiam, shrouded as always in understated, queenly shadow-black. He looked as if he would rather suffer the probing hands and eyes of the court inspectors a hundred more times than be near the Reverend Mother.

“I had my doubts at first,” she said to the Baron, albeit clearly enough for all to hear. “But even with his addled senses, his gift is palpable…”

“Don’t be abstruse, Proctor Superior. I called on you for answers, not riddles.”

“Paul was bred to have the natural tendencies of a promising Bene Gesserit, along with certain skills his mother would have taught him. Prana bindu, accelerated healing, manipulating the flow of breath and blood and bile.” Her gaze rested shrewdly upon the tense figure draped in pale virginal blue. “I cannot say if he has mastery of all these talents. But I suspect he is infertile – only because he has willed it so.”

Paul broke his demure silence with wide-eyed denial. “My lord, this is not so! I did not will it – I was never even aware I could –”

“You were not aware,” said Mother Mohiam. “But you have the ability nonetheless, just as your mother chose for her womb-bearing child the guise of a boy.”

“I am a boy,” he whispered, albeit without full conviction. “I was born a boy.”

“You are a unique being bred and shaped to be the peak of what any male or female human can be. Had you been fully a girl, you would have achieved that peak. I have little doubt that you are able to conceive a child, and to bear one to full term.” She turned to the Baron and continued in a volume audible only to him. “But be wary of overtaxing his body. I’ve tested him, and he may not be strong enough for more than one child.”

“One is all I need,” he replied in the same low tone. “And what I need at present is an effective way to break the boy’s mind so his body may yield. But it must be done in a way that does not compromise his fortitude. A mad, weakened thing is unlikely to produce a healthy heir.” He smiled, exhaling a cinnamon-scented cloud. “I don’t suppose you are quite depraved enough to give up the secrets of a weakening a witch.”

Mother Mohiam only stared at him with a gaze like ancient glaciers.

“Then I must resort to that method which you and your sisters will not approve of.”

“You will do what you deem fit, Baron. I have given my counsel.”

She exited the chamber without his leave, as only one in her position could. As she swept past Paul Atreides, he gritted his teeth in what looked very much like an inaudible hiss of pain or loathing, or both.

Then, most unexpectedly, he reached out to grip her by the shoulder. But she foresaw his movement before it reached its conclusion. He whispered something urgently as she sidestepped his attempt to accost her.

“I’m afraid she has passed from my sight,” was all the Baron heard from the murmur passing through the shadowy veil.

Paul’s breaths were hitched; his eyes sharpened, teared up, his poise very nearly crumbling as he stared after her before pulling at his cowl to shield his face. All of this happened in a blink. The Baron could guess very well whom their brief exchange was referring to. Paul must have asked after his beloved mother, and been told that she was dead.

His distress was unfortunate. All the more reason not to wait any longer to act, lest the foolish boy waste away from misery, as a sentiment-prone Caladanian was wont to do.

He leaned back in the massive seat that framed him like a throne and made of his bulk a magnificent thing. “You are dismissed,” he told the three summoned subjects and the rest of the court.

Then he called upon another two personages. Like soundless reptilian phantoms they slithered forth: small, almost child-like creatures with narrow faces devoid of emotion save an avid glimmer in eyes that resembled pale glass orbs within which fine lines of smoky light shifted constantly, disconcertingly. Bioengineer twins from Tleilax, hailing from the cult of geneticists who had become the sworn enemies of the Bene Gesserit for advancing that which the weirding-women had pioneered far beyond the limits of what they – and indeed much of the Imperium – considered humane.

Vladimir had once been inclined to agree, if only because he was wary if not loathful of such dangerous bioweapons as the Bene Tleilax were capable of creating. But in the end, it was better to have a threat on one's side than against. Humans must concern themselves with what was humane or not, as was their prerogative. And he, a different being evolved beyond humanity itself, must likewise attend his own concerns.

He spoke briefly to the twins; they merely blinked in acknowledgment. They knew what they had been brought here to do. All they had been waiting for was his permission to act, and bring the promised child to fruition at last.

| | | | | | | | |

Paul was trembling, his breaths spilling unevenly in shuddering waves into the hands he pressed to his mouth. She’s alive. A thrill of euphoric relief mingled with echoes of pain and dread, memories of ancient iron encasing his hand, a searing red pain gnawing at his innards.

It was all he could do in that unforgiving hall with its too-high ceiling to hold back the sudden wash of fear at the Reverend Mother’s appearance. He would always associate that cruel test as an onslaught that marked the end of an age of innocence and peace. That iron box had found the source of the greatest pain his body could yield – the agony of a fertile female birthing a monstrosity – and milked it without mercy. It had found his secret womb, the one kept secret even from him, its owner. He would never forget that horrific revelation brought forth by Feyd-Rautha’s fingers on his blooming secret sex.

“My child will not become a breeding machine." His mother’s attempt to protect him, to rectify too late the deeds set in motion before he was more than a concept, an intent.

A fresh surge of dread made him feel faint. The silken cowl was suddenly stifling. He pushed it back, his curls dampening at the roots with fear-sweat, then pulled off the band of silver crowning his brow and clutched it for something to ground him. He let his fist clench until the nails dug into his palm enough to hurt.

When Gaius Helen Mohiam’s all-seeing eyes found him, he had been plunged, for the span of a breath, right into the thick of that agony that left him weak and plagued by fever-dreams for days. Yet her presence was the price to pay for the news he had extracted from her in a moment of desperation. News that, combined with the forceful memory of the gom jabbar ordeal and the shock of that fateful night’s revelation, made him dizzy with a confusing storm of emotions.

“If you’re about to have a fainting fit, I’d advise doing it in a safer place.”

He looked up to see Feyd staring down at him. He’d been half-crouched and leaning against a wall without even realising it.

“My mother is alive,” Paul whispered. “I believed she was gone – there was no way of knowing…” He stumbled to his feet and wiped the wetness from his face. He had not allowed himself to ache for her, to even think of her. It had been enough to lose his father and everything he could call his own so soon after. And now he was shaking from the grief that had come to exact its revenge for his denial.

Yet at the end of those grief-stricken tremors was a great, almost unbearable relief. He could barely hold back the sobs he spilled against Feyd’s chest while clinging to his vest. After a while, a hand slid  up his back to bury itself in his hair, cradling the curve of his neck.

“Then she’ll come to claim you eventually. Or die trying.”

He realised belatedly that Feyd was the wrong person to confide in. But then, who else did he have? With a single word the Baron had severed him from Doctor Yueh, his betrayer turned confidante and the closest thing he had to a friend. And Feyd’s steadying hand on his neck was a welcome sensation. The touch that was his bastion of safety, that never failed to warm his skin and rouse the surge of pheromones that bound them to each other. Was it so bad, after all, to be with someone who would not easily give him up? 

Feyd-Rautha would never offer such a thing as love. But protection, perhaps even devotion…those were not such foreign concepts, even to a Harkonnen… 

No. He drew back so that Feyd’s touch would not cloud his mind. Don’t forget what he’s using you for.

“I thought the old witch said she’d passed from sight,” Feyd recalled.

“She merely meant that the psychic link some weirding-women share had been broken. Mohiam was my mother’s mentor, hence their bond. But she meant the words to be misleading. So the Baron would not catch what lay beneath.”

“Then how do you know the real truth?”

“She signed it to me, with her face. An obscure form of language used only in the innermost Bene Gesserit circles.”

“And of course Lady Jessica taught it to her precious son. Shaping you to her will, as is her way.”

“Much as your uncle shaped you.”

“She made you in her image, in every aspect save her sex.”

“Are you suggesting selfishness? Ego?” Paul flared up, all misgivings towards his mother’s deception briefly gone. “She did it to keep me safe. From you.”

“Much as it may deflate your ego to hear this, my sweet little bride, I did not choose to make you my life’s purpose. I’ve had almost as little say in this whole thing as you. Yes, I anticipated my prize. Because it was my one avenue to escape insignificance. To being remembered, my name and likeness engraved into the family tree. One that only the great become a part of.”

“And the continued blossoming of that tree rests on me.”

“Correct. Your mother’s concerns were small. My uncle has the legacy of an entire line to consider. He will see House Harkonnen restored to its prime, whatever the cost.” He sidled behind Paul and slid a hand against his stomach. “If you keep standing in his way, you will regret it.”

“I can’t control it,” Paul whispered, leaning into him. “I don’t know how.”

“Have the Reverend Mother teach you. If she cannot, then she forfeits her usefulness to us.”

Feyd’s hand slid downward to grip the place between his legs and draw forth a groan of need. “Duty be damned. I’d like to fill you up nonetheless,” Feyd murmured against his arched neck. “Breed you with a child of our making. A beautiful creature, with your seducing witch’s mouth and green eyes and –”

He never finished his sentence. The last word ended in a hiss; then the hardness of his body against Paul turned oddly soft, swaying and loosening, before falling to the floor with a heavy thud.

Paul looked down at his unconscious form in shock. Seeing Feyd-Rautha – his captor, his lover and lord – rendered so helpless felt utterly wrong. He turned to call for help and met with a pair of large glassy eyes, set in a waxen face with a vaguely amphibian quality.

He barely had time for bewilderment – for any sort of fight – before something fine and sharp pierced a vein in his neck. Assassins, he thought at first. It brought to mind the needle of the gom jabbar. But the citadel was too well guarded for that. Unless there had been a betrayal of the sort that had infiltrated House Atreides in the form of Doctor Yueh. But there must be a reason. Someone who wanted the end of the Harkonnens. Surely not from an Atreides ally, or he would not be a target…

All this flashed through his mind in the second or two before the substance in the syringe flooded his nerves and sent him toppling to the floor beside Feyd. His consciousness fled even before he hit the ground. He was aware only of falling into a blackness that seemed to last forever; falling into a deep and certain dread that once again, forces beyond his control were closing their power-hungry grip around him.

Chapter Text

He is coming. He has found a way.

Paul hovered in the endless womb of that amorphous liminal place between the stars, haunted by voices from across time. “Who?” he asked: a single fragile word formed by a throat rendered mute from the paralysis of dreaming.

The Child Between Worlds, whose mind bridges space and time, whose body holds the endurance of a thousand lifetimes. Your child.

“I will not…”

The choice is not yours. He has found his place within you. You will be his mother, revered as the bringer of peace, the herald of the ones the desert-dwellers call the Mahdi. He who walks the Golden Path. 

And Paul saw it all – or flashes of it: his son’s birth, a raw, bloody thing emerging from his body; a perfectly healthy, normal newborn save for the disconcerting eyes that held a terrible knowing, ancient wisdom inherited from a hundred generations before. He saw a preternaturally adept little boy learning to walk and speak at the age of six months old. Learning five languages by the age of two, how to speak them fluently by four. He saw a young man fair of face and lithe of limb, with a mane of curls so much like his own, but lighter, with a beautiful coppery tinge. He saw armies and legions and empires bowing before this man. He saw a solitary figure amidst the shifting spice-gold sands of Arrakis. A figure both triumphant and lonely; forever passing through the world without ever finding a place to be still, to exist within the cradle of a finite lifetime.

Then the figure shed its clothes. And he saw with growing horror the thing his son was becoming…

A cry was torn from his lungs – or rather, a weak, dampened groan as he jerked back to consciousness. I have to save him.

But there was nothing and nobody to save, for the child did not yet exist. He was cold from the premonition that was sharper than any half–formed vision he’d had before.

Then I will save him from being born.

Paul blinked his eyes open to find himself naked and lying on what felt like a narrow plasteel bed. His fine raiment had been stripped away, his wrists and chest stilled with restraints. His calves were strapped into steel stirrups to spread out his legs and leave his nether regions completely exposed. A flood of panic pulled him painfully to full wakefulness with a sudden racing of the heart, a pounding of blood that made his ribs and eyeballs hurt.

Someone was speaking to him; no, over him, addressing the second person in the room. He strained to grasp the conversation spoken in a tongue that did not belong to any of the twelve languages he’d been schooled in. Only when he parted his lips did he become aware of the gag obscuring them: a stretch of thick material, flexible yet unyielding, that held a leather bit between his teeth to still his tongue. Panic made him dizzy and blind until he forced himself to be still, to regulate his breaths, to do all those things that kept a body alert and calm and ready.

But it was an ordeal to force calm upon himself when he was so clearly helpless – so utterly whittled down to a specimen pinned down and spread out and put on display. There was no audience present; but he felt so humiliatingly bared that there might as well be.

His stifled, frantic whimpers were acknowledged by the figure nearest to him. “The silencing is not an insult, only a necessity.” The voice was eerie in its lack of intonation; a voice that did not sound like speech so much as a series of otherworldly notes from an electronic instrument. “My colleague is bothered by noises of a certain pitch, such as that of verbal distress. Our work requires a degree of concentration.”

The person speaking to him was almost shockingly small. No taller and broader than a reedy twelve-year-old of indeterminate sex, and exceedingly narrow of face and limb, as if its body refused to absorb more resources than absolutely necessary to keep a body alive and moving. Yet it did not move with any sign of frailty, only a sort of shrewd agility.

As soon as the large glassy eyes swept over him, he twitched his hand and his fingers in universal sign, hoping the creature would understand.

Why am I being restrained?

The small lipless mouth moved in an eerie mimicry of human speech, though the words that emerged were perfectly clear. “Because we anticipate resistance of the sort that will endanger yourself.”

It was hardly a conclusive answer, only an alarming one. What are you doing to me?

No answer was forthcoming this time. He felt an icy smear across his belly. A flash of steel-shine briefly blinded him. When his vision adjusted, he saw that it came from the twin devices being pushed into position above: probe-like instruments that ended in tapering needle sharpness, pointing diagonally downward at his naked torso. At the same time, he felt something push against his female sex – and slide forth relentlessly past its opening, making him cry out and clench in reflex, resisting the intrusion.

“Fighting only brings more pain.” The creature looked more freakishly child-shaped than ever through the blur of his dread-induced tears; a soft-voiced tormentor with soft smooth fingers clasping his arm. There was a needle sliding up his vein, a spreading of cold fire in his arm and shoulder. Then the cavernous room turned hazy as his senses were once more stolen from him. 

No! Stay awake. They can’t – you can’t let them…

He struggled in his restraints, not to be free of them, but simply to keep blood coursing through his veins and his head clear with adrenaline. But already his body was betraying him. His limbs turned to lead and his mind became fogged despite his best endeavours honed over years of practice, with his mother’s voice in his head guiding and admonishing him by turns. Jessica had a mastery of regulating and passing toxins form her body that her son did not. He wondered if she could have fought this powerful narcotic that was dragging him down into a mire he hadn’t the strength to fight.

He felt the painless pierce of cold steel in the flesh of his belly, the hard slim protuberance plundering his depths in a grotesque mechanical rape. Then his eyelids fell shut to draw the curtain on this abominable scene. And he knew nothing more for a long time after.

| | | | | | | | |

Feyd awoke in his own bed, his head heavy and ringing faintly with some vaguely metallic sound that slowly faded as his senses returned in full. There was a frightening deadness in his limbs when he twitched back to life and knew the awful sensation of having his bones and sinews locked in stone. 

He gritted his teeth, instincts afire despite his uncooperative body, and looked about for the nearest threat: someone who had been plotting his defeat, perhaps. His own brother came to mind at first. Their already tumultuous relationship – tested on occasion with bouts of vicious competition their uncle did nothing to discourage – had been embittered after the tussle over Paul Atreides. He recalled something fine and sharp piercing him like an insect, and the world becoming a void, a vision of a white-ringed dark star expanding to blind him with its brilliance so that all turned to whiteness, to a great vast weightless empty.

He remembered Paul’s aborted cry of alarm, the widening green eyes that his drugged vision turned into huge twin crystalline moons before the nothingness came to consume him.

It seemed a terribly stupid and senseless way to die.

Still, it appeared he walked among the living – if one could call his stilted baby-steps walking. It took a whole half of an hour before he could trust his feet to bear his weight and move at the same time. That was after he managed to drag himself into an upright position in a cumbersome series of movements that made him thankful to be alone in his room for how he resembled a drooling dullard. If Paul could only see him now…

And where was the boy? Was he, too, lying unconscious in his room? Feyd cursed himself for failing to glimpse the stealthy predator – or predators; there was more than one, he had registered this too late – creeping up on them. Their movements had been so inhumanly untraceable, devoid of warmth and breath and those minute tics someone with Feyd’s senses would have otherwise detected from a distance, that he had been embarrassingly bested in his very own home.

Pride held him back from leaving his chamber till he could walk without a limp to confirm that Paul’s small bedroom was empty. He did not bother with the guards as he stalked the hallways in search of answers; their behaviour indicated that nothing was out of the ordinary. It would seem his uncle and brother and much of the citadel’s inhabitants were carrying on largely undisturbed. 

So, the attack was planned. Sanctioned by the Baron.

As he headed straight for his concubines’ quarters, Lera’s appearance caught his attention. Her face broke into a rare smile from relief. “You are unharmed.”

“Clearly.”

“You’re looking for your Paul?” Taking his silence as affirmation, she added: “They took him to the no-room.”

She was referring to the unseen construct that was part of a hive of chambers once built as underground bunkers. They were so named for the stealth cloaking that made them immune to detection by prescience as well as range weapons and explosives. To all but a few who had access to them by means of genetic detection, they effectively did not exist.

Not for the first time, he appreciated how careless in conversation even the cleverest of courtiers and servants were around his darlings. They thought his women to be slavish and empty-headed in their devotion. And he was happy to let the illusion stand.

“How long has he been missing?”

Lera cocked her head in thought. “About two weeks.”

The words took a few seconds to sink in as he stared speechlessly until she began to slowly shrink beneath his gaze. He had been unconscious for a full fortnight. A span of time in which a war could be waged or a kingdom come to ruin. And yet everything was as it should be, at least on the surface.

“What has my uncle been planning?” he hissed.

Lera shook her head in a plea of ignorance. Uko and Magdalina appeared behind her, and she ushered them away, seeing that he was in no mood for their affections. Indeed, only one person could have cured the raging, crawling itch beneath his skin that was like nothing he had felt before. It had been creeping up on him ever since he rose weak-kneed from bed: a need he could no longer ignore thanks to the cursed bond that had formed without him even being fully conscious of it.

He was burning like a madman for Paul Atreides.

By the time he reached the threshold of a hidden passageway, Feyd could almost smell the scent of him, so painfully sharpened were his hunter’s senses from the hunger that was stronger even than bloodthirst. He slid his fingers into the small receptacle that functioned as a keyhole and walked into the gap that opened up at his touch.

It took some time to find the chamber in which Paul was held. Feyd was half-certain at first that his uncle had mated him to someone else; to Rabban, perhaps, who doubtless would have accepted the role with glee. Or perhaps Paul had been pushed aside in favour of a fresh female candidate produced by the Bene Gesserit: nubile and strong and schooled in the sensual arts. The thought should have been appealing. But his body was utterly disinterested in the thought of anyone who was not the lovely Atreides witch-boy.

He was getting closer now. It wasn’t too long before his heightened bond-instinct led him to his quarry, where he found himself stilled by shock.

He was almost convinced at first that the lifeless, naked body was only a clone: some fascinatingly monstrous specimen only the Tleilaxu could have conjured. But no – every one of his tingling hairs and the rush of heat in his belly informed him that it was indeed his stolen bride, kept alive by a multitude of tubes protruding from his body; for feeding, for water and salts, extracting waste, and perhaps others for more sinister purposes. The largest of these serpentine intrusions emerged from Paul’s mouth, fastened in place to deliver air down his throat to lungs stilled into near-death. They had trapped him in an induced coma. And the reason became obvious to Feyd when his preternatural sensitivity to life – warm, human, blood-rich life – detected the stir of it within the comatose figure.

Feyd placed a palm against Paul’s belly and was met with the faintest yet undeniable pulse. There you are. There was a budding thrill at this blooming of life, mingled with a vague distaste at the back of his tongue.

He did not have to question its lineage. He simply knew, could feel the part of him embedded within this vaguely humanoid bud of growing tissue, like a strange mirror of his own heartbeat, his own flesh. Then the bile of anger reared its sour-hot head. He turned to the small figure at the periphery of his vision.

“This is what you attacked me for,” he hissed. “To milk me while I was unconscious so you could make…whatever that is.” He jerked his head at the unmoving figure and the thing nestled within him.

“The beginnings of a faultlessly healthy boy-child,” the Tleilaxu intoned. “Accelerated in growth to surpass its most vulnerable stage of life.”

“Upon my uncle’s order, was it?”

“His order to us was to bring this child to fruition, by the most effective means.”

“I’ve heard of such means that your kin deem effective.” Feyd’s restless ire was was mingled with an odd calm at recalling the grotesque experiments that had always fascinated him. “Turning living bodies into inanimate vessels. Birthing tanks.”

“That is correct. Such a process would allow him to birth more offspring beyond this one.”

“Process. It has already begun?”

“There are a series of complex procedures involved. But I would say that, yes, we have begun.” The engineer looked up curiously at him with a face like a withered frog. “You are upset. It would be to your benefit –”

“It would benefit me to have Paul Atreides back in my bed.” The itching heat was back with a vengeance, and growing worse. “Now.”

“The Baron has decreed –”

“ Damn the Baron!” Feyd barked, and would have strangled the engineer had the machine to which Paul was hooked not begun flaring up with light signals that indicated something out of the usual. The Tleilaxu’s twin appeared and hurried to Paul’s side. 

“Your touch has awakened him,” he said to Feyd.

He was right; Paul was suddenly very much alive, chest heaving weakly as a fluttering panic struggled to break free from the tube-fed cage his body had become. His lashes twitched frantically; his throat spilled hoarse garbled sounds around its intubation. Ordinarily, Feyd might have found such torment amusing, or at least absorbing. But the state of things had moved beyond the ordinary. He was gripped by a strange fear that if Paul perished or plunged into madness, he would take Feyd with him.

“Cut him out,” he ordered.

He thought of Paul’s nails in his back. Paul struggling in Rabban’s grip before spitting at him. Paul’s lips pouting and twisting, gasping in pleasure, the cream-smooth cheeks flushing in anger or arousal, framed by the thick lush curls that almost moved with a life of their own. Paul humming dreamily to himself while lost in the folds of a flowering plant that made him sick for his homeland, rousing in Feyd an unquenchable longing…

“We have our orders, my lord –”

…an unquenchable, maddening urge to bury himself in that softness and ravish it slowly, sensuously, to drink it in like blood. A morass of rare, luscious loveliness unlike anything he had known in his hard life that, for all its power and privilege, had never allowed him more than the briefest moments of indulgent joy. A life that kept him endlessly ravenous, endlessly wanting.

“I will not repeat myself.”

The Tleilaxu parted his lipless mouth to object a third time. This was a mistake. Feyd withdrew the knife that never left his side and slashed a deep curve into the thin flesh. The engineer croaked and collapsed with his guts spilling onto the floor.

Feyd turned his gaze and his blade to the remaining twin, who needed no further instruction. He set about stabilising Paul’s vitals before detaching the life-support tubes. “This abrupt change may not bode well for the child,” he stammered.

“Then grow another. You have what you need.” For of course the engineers would have reaped from Paul’s body as they had his own – invading and plundering, treating their bodies like diamond mines. Very well, then; they could have what they wanted, as could his uncle. As long as they left him in peace.

Such a strange, weak thing to long for: peace. As if he had ever lived his life in pursuit of it; of a sentiment he associated with a placid existence full of nothingness, insignificance. And yet as he walked away with the half-conscious Paul in his arms, the latter's slowly strengthening heartbeat thudding against his until their rhythms began to match like twins of each other, it did not seem – for that one brief moment – like such a terrible idea.

Chapter Text

In a shadow-softened refuge at the heart of an unforgiving desert, an ancient crone who held within her the memories of a thousand forebears cried out in joy. For she had Seen at last a long-awaited visitation that before this had arrived only in shifting glimpses. Now, at last, the hazy mirage bloomed like a vivid flower amidst the barren dunes: pale sand giving way to the lush green of the paradise to come. And in the midst of that verdance walked a graceful figure haloed by the sun, in the gossamer silks of a saint, with a belly that curved with blossoming life.

Beside her, the woman from Caladan bent to kiss her hand, hanging on to every word of her revelation. “Have you seen it?” she asked. “His Coming made certain?”

“A man with a child-bearing body,” the crone replied. “He will carry the Mahdi across the desert and lay him at your feet.”

“And he will live? The bearer, I mean. You saw that he is well?”

Reverend Mother Ramallo spoke no more, retreating back into silence. Her silences stretched ever further as the days went by. She was nearing the end of her long years. Soon the latticework of lines carved into her face, a tapestry of pain and love and prayer and dreams, would lose their hardness in exchange for the peace of death.

Soon, the woman at her side would have to take her place.

Jessica gripped the gnarled hand almost too hard to to pass for devotion. But the Reverend Mother – even in the liminal void she inhabited with the fearlessness of one gone mad from decades of ancestral memory – must have read her true desires. Some part of her vast prescient instinct would have sensed a mother’s undying fervour to retrieve the child so cruelly torn from her. The loss she had endured had not broken her; but rather twisted and reforged her into something else. Someone who would wage a devastating war to save her son.

She had come to Arrakis as a holy woman, with selfish intent in her heart: to turn the southern tribes’ devotion to the prophecy of a Child from the Outer Worlds into her own weapon against the Harkonnens. She had thrown herself at their feet as a refugee, tragedy tumbling from her lips and trembling hands – a home reduced to bloodied ruin, a husband killed in such a way as to render him unrecognisable, her son abducted by Arrakis’ oppressors to leave her, the widow of a ravaged duchy, with nothing to her name.

The humility with which she offered herself into their keeping paid off. Such an absence of airs were to the Fremen a clearer indication of greatness than any aura of grandeur. That, and the telling sign that she had birthed a male child capable of childbearing: a claim legitimised by Mother Ramallo, whose word as the Ear of God and a River of Other Memory made her word as good as law.

Not for nothing had the Bene Gesserit seeded changes within native belief systems to ensure that any sister of their fold would find safety and prestige wherever their influence took root. A weirding-woman would find herself easily integrated into the ranks of the sayyadina, as Jessica had proven by being consecrated less than a month after her arrival. Even before that, the mystique surrounding her arrival had brought believers flocking to her side, telling Jessica that her son would bring them their Mahdi. She had not known until then that he was with child. The news shook her to the core.

“Was it a baby made from longing…from desire?” A question she had very nearly asked Mother Ramallo, time and time again, and never did. She did not – could not – think of her Paul being gotten with child by the means of which so many children of war and plunder were begotten.

It was too much for any mother to bear. 

“They have the bearer of our Saviour in their keeping,” she had said to the acolytes and the masses who came to worship during the salat. “The era of silence beneath the soles of our colonisers is over.” She chose to omit the fact that House Atreides would have taken the place of those colonisers. She was one of them now. And she would use this to her advantage. For what else did she have?

“We must find a way to Giedi Prime. Have our fedaykin storm the Citadel –”

“No,” Mother Ramallo interjected in a rasping, resonant treble. “To do so is to court destruction and annihilation. We must wait.”

Jessica had tamed the burning in her throat, head bowed in a show of deference. “How long do we wait, Jaddah?”

“He will come into our midst,” came the reply. “Here, in this very place he will lie, and stain the ground with the blood of life.” And she smiled a serene, implacable smile.

The mention of blood was little comfort to Jessica. But no soldier, priestess or acolyte would move without the blessing of the Reverend Mother. Arrakis was at its harshest in the south, and its denizens found solace in the shade cast by the shroud of superstition, in the immovable knowledge that One would come to shorten the way to Paradise. The kwisatz haderach.

Once, Jessica had allowed her life to be shaped for this singular purpose. A bright-eyed girl who had accepted with pride the task of conceiving the future mother whose womb was the path to a Golden Age.

She could barely recognise that greedily ambitious girl now. Here she knelt now, ensconced in the robes of a revered sayyadina that hid the desperation of a woman determined to regain the dearest part of what she’d lost.

And so she kept her plans to herself, with no small amount of effort, using every mind-shielding method she knew to make secrecy her second nature. One could not easily keep secrets in the presence of the Reverend Mother: she who had drunk the sacred Water drawn from the body of a Shai-hulud, the great worms who were an embodiment of the divine wrath and wonder of an unforgiving land.

Jessica stared at the huge bas-relief mural on the slanted wall above them, where loomed an uncoiling sandworm with its black long-toothed maw ringed in precious gold, a prayer on the edge of a cynical tongue. Bless the Maker and His water. May His passage cleanse the world. 

Tears welled in her eyes: that waste of water she had been training her body to stem. The training failed her only when she allowed her thoughts to dwell too long on all the possible torments that might befall her baby boy. She caught the tears and licked them from her fingers, tasting the bitterness of her own salt.

Keep him safe and well, she prayed at last to nameless gods. How easy it was to lose oneself in piety here in this place where nothing grew as strongly as faith. Where from suffering and sacrifice sprang sweetest of songs. The first haunting notes of the late evening salat drifted through the dry air, caressing her face and upturned hands like a promise made by blind men and madwomen. But it was all she had to hold on to now: a promise and a prophecy written in sand and blood.

| | | | | | | | |

Paul returned to life with the words of a tyrant on his tongue. Syllables both harsh and lilting, shaped in the inflections of an ancient dialect he had learnt enough to be passable in, but not near enough to speak the words that tumbled from him in half-sleep. 

“I set out to lead humanity along the Golden Path. Look at them now, sowing the seeds of turmoil and violence even while they claim to crave peace.”

He understood them, nonetheless, though they passed through him in a voice that was not his own.

“I will give them aeons of enforced tranquillity. I promised them Paradise. I promised them a lesson that their bones would remember –”

The vision of the creature with his eyes and Feyd-Rautha’s lips faded into a handful of sand. Then Paul clawed his way back to wakefulness.

“Help me,” he gasped. Help him…stop him.

He was cold with nausea. A weak shiver ran through him despite the thick blanket covering his nakedness. He reached out for something or someone to anchor him back in reality. A small, smooth, cool body: soft outside and steel-hard beneath, comforting in its familiarity.

“Uko,” he breathed gratefully. His voice was hoarse, cracked, barely audible. His throat was so throbbing and sore that every swallow hurt his eyeballs.

Uko signed to him: You need water. She retrieved a ceramic vessel and held it to his lips when his unsteady fingers failed to grasp it. His throat hurt as he willed it to open up and let the water in. But with the cool trickle came sweet relief. He let her fill the cup again, and emptied it again. Then, spent from the effort, he fell back and let her kiss his forehead and cradle his head against her chest.

“Good. You’re awake.”

Feyd-Rautha emerged seemingly from nowhere, with that uncanny stealth of a draugr. His appearance roused in Paul a strange mix of longing and loathing.

“This…” He lay a hand on his belly where something had taken root and sunk its claws in unbidden. ​​”This is yours. Your doing.”

“I had nothing to do with its conception.”

It was the truth. And the truth did nothing to stem the horror of what had been forced upon him: a beautiful monstrosity who would be bred as a Harkonnen weapon. “If you hadn’t kidnapped me and made me your –”

“I did what I had to.” Feyd slid onto the bed and pressed himself against Paul, who shuddered blissfully at his touch despite his bitterness. “I would gladly have taken a willing bride.”

“Not as gladly as you took me. Harkonnens pride themselves on claiming what they deem to be rightfully theirs with force. Earning fear when they cannot earn respect.”

Feyd clasped his face almost lovingly. “Don’t forget you are part Harkonnen, cousin.”

Paul turned from his touch, though he burned to do otherwise. “You’re not my cousin. Not anymore. You and your kin are leeches – you do nothing but devour…”

He closed his eyes, almost ashamed of the pleasure he derived from being devoured, being fed on until his senses were alight with unbidden ecstasy. Feyd responded by biting him lightly on the inside of his arm.

“I did not ask to be turned. But neither did I fight it.”

“So you did want it.”

Something odd quivered for a second beneath that ruthless countenance; a half-formed flinch that flickered in the shadow of the smooth hairless brow. Then the pale eyes narrowed as he gripped Paul’s arm bruisingly hard. “Unlike you, little duke, I was born to hardship. I was given a chance at greatness. If this is the path to a better existence than living off scraps, so be it.”

“And I am that path. I should end my life, and rob you of your…”

The voice briefly aided by the water’s moisture thinned out once more into a hoarse rasp. Exhaustion returned with a vengeance, the surge of anger no longer enough to sustain him. He had no choice but to lie back and let his body recuperate from whatever the Tleilaxu engineers had done.

“They shoved a tube down your throat to help you breathe while you were in a coma,” said Feyd as Uko coaxed more water past his dry lips. “You were all but dead for two weeks. You’re lucky I saved you from becoming a brainless breeding machine.”

“You have my gratitude,” Paul replied, though the withering note was drowned by the fact that his words were all but inaudible.

“I’d save your strength if I were you. In the meantime, you can think of more inventive insults to bequeath me with when you’re at full health.”

Feyd’s left shoulder angled away as if to leave, while his right stayed locked in place. Paul, likewise, found his body arching ever so slightly in his direction, despite his head being resolutely turned as if to say: You disgust me.

Then  he felt Feyd’s hand sliding across his belly. A taut, flat expanse that would not remain so for long, if the foetus’ accelerated growth continued. “Yueh was here earlier. He advised against cutting it out, or inducing some unfortunate incident.” Paul had, in fact, entertained just such a notion. “It is linked too inextricably to your body. Unless you have a deathwish…”

“And what if I do?” Paul whispered. He was suddenly awash in misery. He had fought the trap of his purpose once before, and lost. Even so, his body had continued to wage war against it; and now it, too, had been defeated. He curled up on his side and wept softly into Uko’s shoulder. After a moment, Feyd cradled him from behind, enveloping him in a cocoon of safety – or the closest to such a thing as he could find.

“It’s not such a bad thing, you know,” Feyd whispered with his face and fingers half-buried in Paul’s hair. His body was warm, almost lovingly so, fresh from feeding on some unfortunate. “One child – a healthy child who lives – and you’re released from your burden. Released from me.”

But will you let me go? Words he did not want an answer to, anymore than he wanted the answer to an even more urgent question.

Would you want him to?

Feyd lifted his head from the mass of curls long enough to dismiss Uko. She kissed the side of Paul’s mouth and slipped away quietly, leaving one side of the large bed cold – for she had not fed in a while, and left behind no imprint of bodily warmth. Then Feyd’s arm tightened around him, a calf hooking his own. And the cold melted away in the fortress of his embrace.

“You were muttering in your sleep,” Feyd murmured, intrigued. “Something about a golden path. A lesson their bones will remember: those were the words, I believe.”

“That was my…our son,” Paul replied. “I saw him in a dream once. Snatches of the future. I heard him speak, as a grown man. A madman.” He began shivering again. “He will be unstoppable, Feyd. He will be lovely, and monstrous, and clever. Too clever.” And I’m afraid of him already.

“That future is only one of many possible paths. You fear too much.” Feyd rained searing kisses upon his arm, moving upward to his shoulder, his jaw. Paul shifted around to seek out his mouth, and Feyd met his longing with a long kiss surprising in its tenderness. A tongue slid past his lips to silence him, the small deadly fangs sheathed, offering only a hot intimate slide of flesh that sent a pleasant thrum through Paul’s nerves and made him forget the soreness of his throat and the weakness of his limbs. 

“You promise to take care of me,” Paul whispered. “Of us.”

“I do.”

Feyd’s thumb moved against his stomach in slow sensuous circles. Paul clasped his hand to keep it there, a slow warmth nestling between them as their bodies cleaved together. In the dim halo of the small frosted glowglobe above, he could close his eyes and dream that they had been joined in a peaceful union. A dream in which their child arrived in this world free of the tides of fate: an unburdened child who knew nothing save that he had been conceived in love.

Chapter Text

The capital had not seen a Naumachia – the epic staging of a naval battle – since the reign of Gunseng II, the Baron’s sire and predecessor. In their empire’s receding years, which had not so long ago teetered on the brink of quiet ruin, such decadent diversions had been all but forgotten. But the oldest of Giedi Prime’s citizens recalled vividly still the tales told by their elders: the thunder of gunfire, the clash of spear and sabre, the spectacle of storming waves and billowing sails in a clash of titans descended from myth.

Vladimir Harkonnen remembered well those glorious fights to the death from his boyhood days. Those scenes lived on in memory like perfectly preserved dioramas full of florid detail. But mere memory would not serve the rebuilding of the barony’s repute. With House Atreides annihilated and the spice flow secured, the time had come for the Landsraad to once more bow to Harkonnen might – most of all those who had delighted in their fall. Baron Gunseng’s words rang true then as it did now: power over spice is power over all. 

This resurgence of wealth was only one of the reasons for the flurry of restorations that transformed the decaying citadel into a pinnacle of intimidating grandeur, towering buttresses and swooping vaults rebuilt in jet-black and marbled white accented with azurite recalling the deep blue of the family crest. A most auspicious day was dawning with the rise of the dark sun’s pallid glow: the crowning of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen as na’Baron on his birthday, and the ushering of an heir to make of his inheritance an infallible legacy.

The greatest Houses in the known worlds were here today to witness a celebration that rivalled even the legendary spectacles hosted by the Emperor. It was a moment to be immortalised in the annals of history. A moment marking the arrival of an extraordinary child – the first of his kind, as foretold by the writ and song of bards and prophets and high priestesses alike.

The bearer of this child arrived in the arena on the arm of his lord na’Baron to trumpeting fanfare and a chorus of awe. Both were haloed by a cluster of glowglobes that hovered above the two regal figures to cast them in colour against the black and white of their surroundings. It was imperative that Feyd-Rautha make an entrance; and indeed he was fully dressed for this display of battle prowess. His burnished scaled armour in a deep Harkonnen blue was embellished on the chestplate with an intricately carved silver ox, thin slashes of red in the gaps of the curved shoulder carapaces a harbinger of glorious bloodshed. A wide black sash encircled his narrow waist, embroidered edges fluttering with each predatory stride like dark pirate flags. On his brow and cheeks were strokes of black warpaint that sharpened the battle-hungry gleam in his grey-blue eyes. His ears had been freshly pierced just the night before with silver earrings inlaid with glints of opafire gems. The bespoke twin swords fastened to his back were crafted by a legendary master smith from Ginaz, shaped and weighted specially for his bearing and particular combat style.

“Fight well,” his uncle had said to him. “Do not shame me on this day of your crowning.”

Feyd knew well what he meant. There was no question that he would emerge the victor against a handful of ill-treated gladiator slaves. The trick was to make it look graceful, yet not without effort; to be a heroic ideal rather than a mere bully. Grace would be a challenge with the swaying of a ship when Feyd, like most of his kin, had barely even set foot near water for all his life. But it was a challenge he would rise to. This was what he had been shaped for. The reason for the powerful immortal’s blood coursing through his veins marking him as chosen.

His alluring Atreidean consort stayed silent beside him, resolutely stoic beneath the Baron’s appraising gaze of the kind that could strip someone bare without a word. Vladimir took hold of his shapely jaw and forced Paul to meet his eyes as a pale bulbous finger stroked the inside of his lower lip. Feyd held back a hiss. The touch felt as intrusive as if the hand had slithered between Paul’s thighs.

Then his uncle swept off to take his place at the high seat raising above the crowd, while Feyd accompanied his consort to the other place of honour that ensconced him in an untouchable aura while putting him on clear display. The flush Paul had held back from his cheeks – as only someone with his training could – now coloured his face in full, still burning from the Baron’s touch. He locked his ringed fingers together to steady his trembling hands.

“You’ll get used to it,” Feyd murmured, clearly meaning it to be a comfort. “I did.”

Paul’s eyes widened. “What…?” 

He would have said more, but was interrupted by a hard, breathtaking kiss. Feyd smiled fondly when they parted. “You look very fine, my love.”

The words made his heart race, a confusing  sensation amidst the anger and shame. Then his lover turned and went to claim his rightful place as his uncle’s heir and the people’s hero.

“I hate to admit it,” spoke the unwelcome presence materialising by his side. “But my little brother is right. You do look very fine.”

Paul bowed his head with curt politeness at Glossu Rabban as he sat, all too aware of having been turned into a resplendent vision that did nothing for fending off attention. He had been draped in a deep crimson palla and a matching long train that trailed in his wake, bleeding from black to blood-red where the glowglobe’s light fell. The plunging front bared a hand’s breadth of skin down to the navel to highlight the subtle swell of his belly. The garment also left the upper half of his back exposed: a smooth expanse ornamented with strands of gold and a row of small turquoise opafire gems that matched the ones in Feyd’s earrings. More such gems adorned the web of chains that draped his brow and delicate slopes of his cheekbones, framing eyes that were lined in black and gold. His hair had been fashioned into a lustrous tumble of glossy curls crowned with flowers that bloomed from the barbed inkvines fashioned by generations of Harkonnens into cruel slave-whips. The blossoms were prized for their translucent white petals shot through with crimson veins as if stained by the wounds of those marked by their stems.

Seeing those striking bloodshot petals framing his face in a mirror had sent a shiver up his spine. He felt like a handful of clay being shaped into a weapon against his will.

And yet when he gazed upon Feyd-Rautha at the height of his magnificence – a commanding figure astride the slender warship of blackwood timber, the Harkonnen flag unfurling from its main mast – admiration and desire swelled anew like an undying song in his belly, in his heart and throat and fire-lit veins.

He was in love with a monster, no doubt. A monster who had taken his virginity and tried to impregnate him against his will. A monster who treasured and adored him. Who had sworn to protect him and the child seeded by the greedy ambitions of forces larger than them both.

Only when he saw the slaves on board the other ship did his desire chill and turn to horror.

Even without the telltale vivid blue eyes, and the announcement by the gamesmaster, the drawn crysknives and the tongue of their war-chant in the face of death marked them as Fremen. Desert natives snatched from Arrakis to fight for their lives – snatched from an arid land where water was sacred and thrown into an arena brimming wastefully with this precious resource for the sake of spectacle. Their distinctly shaped crysknife blades, carved from a sandworm’s tooth, were ritualistic weapons often handed down through generations. These warriors’ knives would be taken upon their death to adorn the Harkonnen vault where their greatest value would be that of a coloniser’s trophy.

“The Fremen give their water back to their people when they die,” Paul whispered to his unborn child. “Back to the land, to their sacred wells. These fighters will spill it into a meaningless sea.”

The budding life within him stirred as if empathising with his abhorrence. But of course the foetus could feel nothing beyond a living thing’s basest instincts. Rabban’s hand brushed his naked back, and he wondered if the child’s womb-slumber was disturbed by his surge of revulsion.

“They drape you in jewels and call you a bride of noble birth,” the brute whispered. “But we both know you’re a common brat beneath that pretty face, brought here solely for his ripe cunt and what lies beyond.”

A hand slid up the parting in the palla’s skirt to knead his thigh while inching ever closer to the part of him it aimed to violate. Paul would have liked nothing more than to spit in his face again. How dare Rabban call him common, when he was the one behaving like the very lowliest and grasping of creatures? 

Tears of dread and anger pooled in his eyes. He could barely summon the focus to hold them back, nor the presence of mind to decide what he should do. Somewhere in the distance, he heard the roar of the crowd as his master cut down the first of the Fremen fighters. Feyd could not save him now. If only Paul was armed, he’d have sliced off the rapacious hand and watched as his red raiment masked the bloodspill masked by the red of his raiment. How long had it been since he’d held a weapon?

His mother’s words emerged from the depths of memory in a blade-sharp susurrus. Your mind is your best weapon. Never forget that.

He recalled how Rabban had reacted to his futile struggles in that beastly grip when they first met, delighting in his evident frailty before that hulking strength, the bottomless bloodlust further inflamed by Paul’s unwillingness to be subject to his touch. How the man’s determination to subjugate him had been roused by resistance and fear.

If the path he must choose lay neither in haughty resistance nor fearful hate, then so be it.

He laid a hand on the loathsome face, lowered his lashes coyly, and pushed his mouth against Rabban’s. He let a soft moan of want escape his parted lips while his other hand groped at Rabban’s crotch. “My lord,” he uttered in skilful mimicry of breathless want.

His dangerous gamble paid off. The other man shoved him away so hard he tumbled to the ground and drew a brief murmur of attention from the surrounding spectators. Then it was Rabban’s turn to wet his face with spit. Paul would have liked to return the gesture with a twisted triumphant smile. Instead he continued with his simulacrum of desire and grasped at the man’s cloak, his tongue peeking from between his teeth like a whore inviting his patron to bed.

“Do you no longer desire me, my lord –?”

Rabban responded with a hand around his neck, making him choke for a good few seconds as the finely wrought necklace made marks in his flesh. “If you weren’t carrying my brother’s child, I’d teach you a lesson you’ll take to your grave. And a short journey that may be.”

Then the finger loosened, and Paul collapsed back into his seat, left to gather the scraps of his dignity. He knew he would be left in peace now that the image of a precious blossoming bride had been replaced with a shameless harlot of the sort that could be bought at a pleasure house for enough solaris.

The price of this small victory made him sick. Rabban had walked away without a backward glance, leaving him feeling lowly and soiled. The fine web of chains upon his face was wet with the man’s foul saliva. Paul tore them off and watched the glints of gold and turquoise rain upon the hard floor.

A volley of gunfire shook the air. Feyd leapt onto the slave-ship and threw himself at the threat of warriors who, for all that they’d been starved and beaten, were toughened by a lifetime in the desert and moved with the wiry coiled speed of vipers. They were armed with spears as well as their ancestral knives, and sank both these sharpened ends into every sliver of unarmoured flesh they could reach. But they did not sink them deep enough. 

Feyd’s grip found the weakest of the three; he drove his own wicked knife through the man’s heart and threw him into the black waters below. “A quick death,” he said to the wild-eyed woman perched on one of the masts, his words echoing off the arena’s curved walls. “Lucky for him. Yours will be slower, I’m afraid.”

Paul watched the Fremen leap and dodge and strike, locked in a tenacious yet losing war for her life. You’re only making it better for him, he wanted to tell her. Then the conflicting urges made his heart clench: the delight her triumph would bring, the horror at Feyd-Rautha’s fall if her spearhead found his throat.

He thought of Feyd’s lips upon his, Feyd’s hand pressed lovingly against his back, against his belly which now held the beating heart that bound theirs together. The tenderness of the velvet rasp in his ear waking him from a nightmare on those nights where they slept with the curve of their bodies cleaving perfectly together as one.

The audience grew raucous, and he opened his eyes to see his lover’s knife tearing a wide gash in the woman’s belly. He turned his head too late to miss the spill of dark slick guts onto the ship’s planks. His own guts tightened and lurched; he had to struggle not to throw up.

A smattering of restrained laughter and fascinated whispers caught his attention when his head stopped spinning. It came from a flock of lords and ladies sitting under the banner of House Moritani. They were ogling him openly, or as openly as the language of courtiers allowed, darting scandalised glances at him. And suddenly he thought of their eyes upon him while he played at whorish seduction, throwing himself at Glossu Rabban’s feet while his brother was occupied in the arena. He thought of the rumours they would spread of his promiscuity. Yet to speak in his own defence felt premature, as much an admission as a denial.

I did what I had to, he wanted to declare. I’ll shame myself a hundred more times if I must.

“This is what we’ve been reduced to,” he murmured under his breath to the baby within him. Perhaps I’ll die of shame before something greater kills me. “This world is beyond cruel. I can’t let you bear the burden of trying to heal it.”

He glanced once more at the Moritanis. Their eyes had turned from him, but their whispers continued, the damage done. The weight of such underserved judgement – and the whole sordid spectacle surrounding it – was too much to bear. He needed to escape it or be crushed to madness, consequences be damned. He reached for the glowglobe and curled his fingers around it until the pressure deactivated the minute organisms within to put out their light. Then he rose, now masked in a sea of greys and whites, and left largely unnoticed by the spectators who were engrossed as one by the prowess of their proud warrior prince, their stalwart na’Baron whose beauty and gifts were the pride of a nation.

His long silken train hampered his stride; he tore it from the shoulder fastenings and left it rippling to the ground in his wake. From the corner of his eyes he saw the three pale sisters draw near to surround him like orbiting moons. Now that he was with child, they had been tasked to guard him as fiercely as they did his master. The guards at the exit would not let him pass at first – he was not to leave before Feyd-Rautha’s ascension ceremony. But the bared teeth of his honour guard was all that was needed to clear the way.

Paul had been so full of dread at the very prospect of this child forced upon him. Yet it seemed that being its mother was the one thing that cloaked him in esteem. Servants actually paused in their stride to bow when he strode through the hallways dressed in a queen’s finery. Their deference should have brought some small comfort. Instead he felt more like a thing than ever, a precious object that would lose its worth as soon as it ceased being fruitful.

The doors of Feyd’s chamber closed behind him at last. He let his shoulders slump and spilled a sob of relief. Then the single sob turned to a waterfall as he fell onto the too-large bed and wept his pent-up misery into the pillow that smelled of his beloved while outside the bloody Naumachia reached its thrilling climax.

“Mama,” he whimpered in the broken cries of a little boy, ashamed of his childish need. It had been enough at first to know his mother lived; but knowing so now made his ache for her greater. The bouts of abject loneliness he’d managed to keep at bay threatened to drown him like a monstrous yet tempting sea, beckoning him into the arms of madness and oblivion. 

Magdalina wrapped her lean arms around him. He thought of her still as his father’s killer; yet he had ceased to resent her for it. She had done nothing but what she’d been ordained for. So it was with himself, with Feyd-Rautha; perhaps even with the hateful Glossu Rabban, who marched to battle at his uncle’s behest for little reward save for the honour of being his family’s warhammer. Rabban, so greedy for power and recognition that he would take his younger brother’s leavings even while stewing in resentment at being the lesser of the two.

“We’ll take care of you,” Lera crooned. She kissed the inside of his wrist the way Feyd sometimes did, then hummed a lullaby from her own childhood – or what little she remembered of it – while Magdalina caressed his hair and Uko pressed her face to his belly, fascinated by the minuscule pulsings of life. 

His sobs died down eventually, and his body felt lighter for it, drained like a wound surrendering the worst of its infection. Cocooned by his three guardians, he let himself drift off to sleep and dreamt briefly of the moment when his champion would return to claim him.

Chapter Text

Feyd watched the swirling waters calm into oily black ripples as the blood of the last Fremen fighter seeped into the wood beneath his feet. Then he lowered the ship’s narrow bridge to stride back aboard the Harkonnen war vessel, the dark flutter of its victorious flag matching the sway of his flamboyant waist sash and the warpaint on his face now rakishly smeared with the blood of fallen warriors.

“Dispose of the dead with dignity,” he commanded the attendants. “They have fought well for our pleasure.”

A chorus of admiring applause greeted his honour-bound gesture, loudest of all those snobs turned sycophants who knew it would serve them to bow before him now: the young lord whose star was on the rise. Only those like Paul, foolish enough to cling to such ideals that had no place in the Imperium’s great gameboard, would have appreciated such acts with his stubborn sentimental streak.

He looked to the front row where his uncle was gifting him with a rare smile of praise. But of his consort there was no trace.

The pang of disappointment – of sour, regretful emptiness – came as a shock. What did he care for the Atreides boy’s simpering approval anyway? He had been brought here for one purpose; he had fulfilled it. And they owed each other nothing more.

The rest of the grand ceremony made him feel like a player in an arcane form of theatre, where gaudily costumed actors stomped upon a stage reciting lines to a crowd who knew what was coming and applauded all the same. He smiled where a smile was anticipated; he strode with a cockiness that painted the picture of manly youth in its prime basking in well-earned glory. 

Well-earned indeed, he thought with mild scorn. The earning of a trophy should not involve starved, beaten desert rats going up against a preternatural creature who’d had all the thick warm bodies he could gorge himself on.

But that was the game all Houses and their heirs must play. That was life. Fairness had no place save as a pantomime of justice where such propaganda was required. This entire charade was propagandic in nature, as was his obligation to receive each and every guest who wished to congratulate him on his ascension. The free flow of expensive spirits from Kaitain and Gamont, accompanied by even more expensive morsels carved from sea life imported from the blue waters of Caladan, barely helped make his growing boredom more palatable.

His thoughts wandered inevitably to the absent Paul Atreides. To that fae sharp-boned face grown rosy with the first bloom of pregnancy, whose bejewelled beauty and wit would have done much to enliven such an event. And he began to fume.

He was still fuming by the time he was finally left alone to traverse a cool black corridor in peace. The doors to his quarters were just ahead, and his mood improved a little. He was busy devising delicate torments in his head – ways to tease and punish his missing bride without too much duress on their unborn child – when he was rudely interrupted.

“The bacchanal is about to commence, my lord na’Baron,” said the bowing manservant. “I’ve been told to inform you that…you’ll be expected to –”

“A bacchanal requires no officiating,” Feyd interjected. “I’ve had enough of necessary obligations to bore ten years off my life. Do not bother me with needless ones.”

The servant knew better than to challenge him. Already he was keeping a wide berth, and gladly disappeared around the corner as soon as he was bidden. Feyd deliberated on whether to grace the clandestine event where a selected few would be turned by the Baron, given the blood-gift to bind these most loyal allies to House Harkonnen for all time. A contract sealed in blood, followed by orgiastic revelry where the prized spice-melange would be consumed in its rarest, most potent form.

That last part was admittedly tempting. He had yet to taste the fabled blue liquid drawn from a sandworm and regurgitated from the body of a powerful Fremen weirding crone. Stealing such a prize was a greater achievement than a sea of staged battles and performative bloodshed. The ultimate proof of Harkonnen might: the acquisition of that most sacred liquid none could put a price on for its exceedingly limited quantity. Arrakis might have no shortage of spice. But there were only so many daughters it could yield to bear the gifts and burdens of a Reverend Mother.

A skittering in the deep shadow drew his attention. Like a large insect, but fleshier. He knew immediately what it was: a thing that should have been put down long ago but for his uncle’s penchant for such perversions.

The black many-limbed thing cocked its head at his passing – or the featureless, eyeless nub that passed for one. Much of its body comprised two bulbous segments joined by a waspish waist. But its most striking feature were the arachnid limbs that ended in perfectly formed human hands, shocking in their delicacy, their perfection.

They might have been Paul’s hands, with a different twist of fate.

Feyd felt the sudden urge to shudder. Yet the endlessly curious part of his intellect could not help admiring the inventiveness of Tleilaxu craft. That large abdomen with its insectoid gleam had held a swarm of abominations, all woefully short-lived: hybrid maggot-like things with human limbs, squalling in human voices. Feyd had seen them with his own eyes. Such wonderfully nightmarish terrors his own seed had been used to call forth.

What if the thing growing within his bride ended up as such a being?

His desire for Paul chilled somewhat at the thought. The thought that his Atreides boy might have met such a fate as this wretched creature who was once a woman should have fascinated him. It was no matter, after all, what nature of body made for a fulsome fertile womb. And yet to think of this pitiful beast in place of the sylph-limbed vision with a crown of lush curls and bewitching green eyes, those petal-soft lips and the sharp tongue behind them, all lost forever to the grotesque marvels of such manipulations…

The distraction of an orgy grew ever more tempting in the wake of such perturbing thoughts. Feyd summoned a servant to disrobe him of his cumbersome ceremonial drapery till he was stripped down to a kilt and sleeveless under-tunic, then strode towards the little chamber in the south wing where the spice that had built the wealth of these walls called to him in a lover’s whisper.

| | | | | | | | |

Paul awoke to the sound of drums. He thought it at first to be remnants from a dream, then from the thrum of rain hitting the windowglass in toxic trails that gleamed silver in the sickly evening light.

But no; the rhythm seemed to be coming from the next room. Though surely this was impossible –

He pitched forward then, and bit back a cry as he hit the floor to bruise his palms and knees. He was not in bed, but somewhere in a dim passageway. 

Where…how…? Thoughts started and sputtered out in disorienting fits until he realised he’d been sleepwalking. 

Dizzy with this revelation, he remained in an awkward heap for a moment before rising to catch his reflection in a stretch of polished basalt. The fine palla he had fallen asleep in was creased and pulled askew, the flowers crushed and wilted. He removed them from his hair and let the bloodshot white petals fall to the floor, then followed the trail of the loudening drumbeats.

He barely realised he was doing so until he felt a tiny hand press against his belly, and gasped. The movement was one full of intent. Surely the foetus could not be so formed yet – not when he was nothing but a slight swelling in Paul’s belly.

“You want me to go…” he whispered. Go where?

In reply there came a tightening in his belly that sharpened into a stabbing pain. He gasped and doubled over. “Stop it,” he choked out. The fiery clawing sensation was all too close to the torments of Reverend Mother Mohiam’s iron box.

Don’t fight it. Acknowledge it. Let it pass over and through you. Once more his mother’s Bene Gesserit wisdom rose to the fore. Nothing is forever – including pain. In the end, only you will remain.

Such wisdom would have worked well in his favour…except that this time, pain was not the enemy, but its bringer.

As he leaned into the agony scorching his insides, he unwittingly let something in. The will that had led him to sleepwalk his way to its destination; that transcended the known laws of nature to seed its intentions into its host like parasitic tendrils.

Paul found himself led on as if in a dream, freed of pain, somnambulistic. He arrived at a small circular door that seemed to him like the very one in his own lost home: the entrance to that windowless room where he had first confronted his terrible fate and felt the sting of his mother’s betrayal.

His mouth parted to speak a string of words he would have no recollection of. And the sentinels standing guard parted to let him through.

Warm smoky air enveloped him: thick, cinnamon-scented, sharpening every sense to an almost painful degree. And all he could think of was: I’ve been here before.

But he was not thinking of this small yet cavernous room. His mind was somewhere else: a temple carved from sandstone in the heart of the desert, where half-clothed worshippers writhed and slid against each other in loving abandon. A ululating wail carried in the air like a haunting song that invited him to spill his sorrows into the waiting arms and heaving chests ready to embrace him. And he did, the built-up torment breaking free unbidden from the cage of his ribs and heart. It began with reluctant, quivering sobs. The sobs became wails, and then he was screaming his months of agony and anger and confused love into the hard ground while a quartet of bodies held him safely.

Then he tumbled, emptied and weakened, into a soft lap. A hand cradled his face.

“Drink, lovely one, mother of us all,” came a soft coaxing command. “Drink, and you will be free.”

A flash of blue drew him back to the present. Cool glass touched his lips; cool liquid fed his hoarse throat. He swallowed before he could ask what it was.

And then the shreds of his angst melted away, and he rose on trembling knees like a newborn foal. His surroundings sharpened into a hypnotic sway of entangled pale bodies, his lover, his magnificent na’Baron towering above them all. A haze of smoke and glitter filled the air. Spice, he realised. The burning fragrance they inhaled with every breath that warmed the blood and quickened the senses. 

Was this how a draugr saw the world? The blue liquid pervading his system expanded his senses to such heights that he was briefly aware of every sensation in every corner of the cavernous room. He felt light and euphoric despite the watery weakness of his limbs. A tongue parted against his wrist, his thigh, delicate and careful. None would feed on him or even touch him without Feyd-Rautha’ permission. He saw that most of the orgy’s participants hung back, gazing upon him with something close to reverence. The mirrored ceiling above them that turned the world dizzyingly on its head showed a lone crimson-draped figure amidst a swarm of humans and blood drinkers both. Like an image from a cathedral; messianic.

“You abandoned me, my love.” Feyd’s whisper brushed his neck. “But I knew you would return.”

Paul began to reply, but he had been robbed of his voice and mind. His sex was starting to throb in perfect synchrony with the insistent sonorous drumbeat. Within seconds he was reduced to nothing but a wet pulsating want. Feyd passed him into strong waiting arms to hold him up while his robe was pushed upward past his hips to reveal his glistening sex. He whimpered, realising he was being put on display, that Feyd would not be the only one laying claim to him.

And yet he was rendered helpless by his own need. He was quivering with lust – burgeoning, hungry, welcoming. He closed his eyes and saw a cool blue swirl that pulled him into an endless maw of pleasure.

“Be gentle with him,” came Feyd’s orders. “He carries my child.”

Two fingers were oiling him up and loosening him from behind. A cock was already plunging into his cunt while this happened; he cried out and shuddered, his face hot with shame at being so sopping wet and needy. Then a second cock pushed into his other hole, and another cry escaped him. He was reminded briefly of Feyd penetrating him for the first time, forcing Paul into climax with just his fingers. And now he would be violated ten times over, or twenty, fucked and filled repeatedly while hoping his unborn child would not feel any of it.

“Feyd,” he whimpered.

“I’m here, love.” Feyd was clasping his hand, the full lips kissing his knuckles, his wrist, his palm. Then he was being surrendered into the hands and mouths and hard slick girths ravishing him. The bodies against his soon became indistinguishable. Yet he felt sharply the texture and shape of a mouth, a tongue teasing his cockhead before swallowing and suckling his entire length, the slide of teeth against his nipple, the downy hairs of an arm around his waist. When a thick cock penetrated his mouth, he felt every hot vein on the underside of the shaft all the way down his throat. Its considerable size made him choke and gag. Feyd cradled his head through it all: the pistoning of that relentless sex, the burning in his throat and the resulting tears mingling with the sticky trails on his cheeks and chin.

“Good boy. You can take it all, I know you can.” A hand cupped his chin to hold it in place. “Open wider – yes, keep your mouth open like that, such a clever, precious thing you are.” Feyd was praising him ever so tenderly in that velvety rasp full of fondness and pride. And his body did indeed blossom like a hothouse flower to accommodate this abundance of assaulting bodies. He was stupid with need, existing only to be taken, to be used, a vessel for the endless streams of come filling him until he was leaking copiously with it. Dripping from both his openings, trailing down his thighs, streaking his face as he swallowed each stream of hot spend and was praised for how much he could take. And still more followed, and more. Tongues and cunts and swollen cocks that took what they wanted with no regard for his will.

His amplified senses could feel the touch of a draugr even before their teeth emerged to lap at his flesh, the bare skin that would be a perpetual map of little bruises were it not for his witch-body’s ingrained habit of quickened healing. He could feel the slide of their cooler, harder flesh, the minute differences in how they drew breath, the hungry reptilian twitches that manifested unrestrained without the facade of civility. 

There were ten of them here: Feyd, his trio of concubine-bodyguards, and six men and women – three of them newly turned and still lying half-conscious on the floor where the gift of the Baron’s blood was slowly overtaking their weak human organs to transmute them into something made to last. 

The Baron himself emerged from the deeply shadowed enclave from where he had been presiding over the orgy with a watchful, lascivious eye. When Paul was brought before him, the pale eyes bore right through so that he felt flayed to the very bone. The spice-induced ecstasy thinned like a dissipating veil, and he was touched with a cold terror. His thighs were being spread before the Baron to show off the tight rosy cunt that had been fucked into a wet gaping bloom. He sobbed at the humiliation of being presented in such a manner.

Then another small draught of the sapphire-bright elixir was poured down his throat. “A privilege accorded no other,” he was told of this second dose. “May it quicken the kwisatz haderach into being.”

Too late, he recoiled to push the spout from his lips. The child was stirring even now – rising to full, knowing consciousness, tormented by its own awareness. A tiny clawing hand gripped its own umbilical cord. It sent a blossoming hot-cold fire from his belly to his head and pushed through him a ragged cry that reverberated through his every vein. A cry that echoed through time.

“What is his name?” asked the Baron in a voice like a rasping death knell.

His son told him, having named himself, having foreseen it even before Paul himself.

“Leto,” Paul gasped as if was being forced from him. Leto II. Leto the Terrible.

“Most fitting. May his coming be blessed.” Vladimir touched his head as if anointing him and his child. He spoke the sacred words that in his mouth became a foul perversion of the sacrosanct. “May his passage cleanse the world.”

As if to seal this monstrous ritual, Feyd reclaimed him with a kiss that made him swoon with the depth of its ardour. The taste of the hallowed nectar on his tongue passed between them like a promise laced with cinnamon and poison, and the terrifying fate that lay in wait for the strange fruit of their union.

He felt the tendrils of a touch from the future: a gnarled yet still-human hand scaled with ridges, and eyes that saw right into him to predict his death.

“Father,” Leto II whispered, in a voice that sounded like Paul’s own. “Do not be afraid.”

The strange horror of it all was too much to bear, and he fainted in Feyd’s arms. The last thing he saw was the mirrored ceiling above turning him into a splash of red – a splinter of blood against the pale morass – before its obscene gleam faded into merciful shadow-soft blackness.

Chapter Text

Night crept over the citadel, pouring oily shadows into each crevice, trailing its long fingers over the figures that lay heaving in the aftermath of orgiastic pleasure, and the bloodless corpses that had been the very first feast of the newly turned scattered amidst them. Feyd-Rautha himself had been remade in a clandestine feast not so different from this one. A fact he was reminded of when a feverish whisper brushed his ear in the settling dark.

“The Baron made you in his image, to be his heir eternal, in an orgy of spice and blood.”

Paul was speaking in his sleep. His half-lidded eyes were glassy, his forehead fever-hot and sweat-beaded while he twitched faintly in the cage of a dream. The words emerging from that soft pink mouth were not his, though his voice carried them, the shape of the syllables markedly different in a way Feyd could not articulate.

“You were afraid of him before. And yet you love him; you hunger for his praise.” The words crept up Feyd’s spine like icy shards. “You went willingly because you were weary of being afraid. You were only a child when he –”

Feyd bolted up from bed, rigid and ready to strike. Then Paul’s hand shot out to catch his wrist. The long thin fingers were shockingly steely, the green eyes open and probing. But they were not Paul’s eyes.

“You fear the truth, Feyd-Rautha.”

“Shut up,” he hissed, his insides trembling, his neck and chest cold with sweat. Weak.

“You need not fear for much longer. Your uncle will meet a painful end he would have avoided had he not made a bid for endless life.” 

“Keep speaking and I’ll cut you out, you little freak.”

You’re the little freak, came the unbidden thought: a flash in the black of night laced with cold crawling fingers. Intrusive fingers. You were the one who lusted after him. You all but gagged for it, begged to be seen and heard, to be his favourite. He heard his own accusing voice, a terribly young voice, insisting he was the one to blame.

“I tell you this to bring you solace. Your greatest fear now is that he will live forever – that he will never let you go –”

“Enough!” With his other hand he went for the neck that looked so slender and milk-pale in the moonlight, and squeezed. 

He was barely aware of his wrist being freed, or Paul gasping and flailing weakly beneath him. “I will kill him before he tries to make me fear him,” he snarled, both hands now around Paul’s throat. “Whatever this painful death is you speak of, it will come at my hands. Who are you to dictate my past or future to me, you little…”

A sound like a death rattle rose to brush his face: a last desperate attempt for air that found the tiniest gap between the fingers rigid with fury, and spoke his name. “Feyd.”

His name, spoken in Paul’s true voice.

Alarmed, he withdrew and blinked away the haze of fury to see the angry red marks his fingers had left. “I…I didn’t mean to…you were…”

He cursed himself – for this brutish, stuttering stupidity that was beneath him. In a few more breaths he would have caused a miscarriage and committed murder.

Somehow the very thought of Paul dead, and by his hands no less, was horrifying.

Paul lay gasping for air until the colour returned to his face, which was hot to the touch. Sweat-dampened curls clung to his temples. His eyes were filled with terror, but also pity.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured hoarsely. “H-he showed me – I didn’t mean to – he told me everythi–”

“You’re delirious, and dehydrated. Shut up.” 

Feyd wanted to cut out those lovely eyes so that they would never look at him that way again. Instead he lifted Paul’s head and shoulders and pressed a cup of water to his lips. Paul gulped it down gratefully; his throat had been well used during the orgy. Feyd had lain awake for a long time after carrying his unconscious lover to bed with blissful visions dancing behind his closed eyes of his beautiful bride being worshipped and ravished at the altar of pleasure. Those lovely pink lips wrapped around a thick veined cock; that perfect little cunt dripping with spend; the slim angled body grown slightly more succulent from pregnancy, delightfully resilient in its willowy pliancy.

That body was now scored with little bruises and bite marks like tiny violet and mauve wildflowers against a pale smooth landscape. There were no flowers native to Giedi Prime save the inkvine blossoms that had crowned Paul’s head. Feyd was reminded of those rare little buds from his icy homeland of long ago, the impossibly delicate petals that pushed through hard earth but once a year for a single turn of the moon before disappearing back into the endless cold.

But that part of him was dead. He wondered if it ever crossed Rabban’s mind. He wished for his brother’s simple, brutish intellect, one entirely preoccupied with its own lusts. Rabban, whose greed for power far exceeded his ability to make the most of it.

Paul was struggling to say something. But his sickness had exhausted him, and he sank back into sleep immediately after accepting a second drink of water. Feyd followed suit some minutes after, though his dreams were dark and twisted and full of cold hands that made him feel like a helpless child. A touch that filled him with loathing – self-loathing, mostly, a horrible weakness he had spent years sloughing off only to find that it had never left. That he wore it still like a layer beneath his skin.

A studious knocking at the door made him jerk to wakefulness. It was Yueh. He opened the door, and the doctor bowed his head.

“Your uncle sent me, my lord.”

Feyd nodded brusquely. Vladimir would want to ensure his precious Atreides breeder had not been damaged by the events of the bacchanal. And Paul did appear to be in need of attention. His breathing had turned shallow, the sheets around him damp and oven-warm around his feverish flesh.

“He is fighting,” Yueh muttered, fingers pressed lightly against Paul’s neck and abdomen.

“Fighting what?”

“His body is fighting the child’s growth like an infection. Like a war between mother and child. And they both have prodigious regenerative abilities, which only complicates things.” Yueh’s perpetual frown deepened. “I’ve not seen such a thing before.”

“If he wins, the child will die?”

“He will miscarry, yes.”

“And if it wins?” Strange how Feyd still thought of his spawn as an it. As if he could not see its humanity, only its monstrosity. And it – he – was a monster. How fitting that Leto should have seen the most monstrous parts of his history.

“Paul may live. If he is lucky.”

“He was bred for this. Surely he’s strong enough to survive the birth.”

A heavy sigh escaped the doctor, as if reminded once more of his great betrayal – and was now realising he might have delivered the boy to his death. “He will be strong enough to survive all the way to term. The baby will emerge unharmed. There is no promise of that for his bearer.”

“And there’s nothing you can do?”

“I will try everything in my power.” He added, bitterly: “This child should never have been made.”

As Yueh was gently peeling back one of the long-lashed eyelids in his examination, Paul’s unintelligible mumbles sharpened into something devastating.

“It is too late for her.”

Yueh froze. “What did you say…?”

“Do not let hope imprison you here.” The murmurs began in the softer timbre of Paul’s own voice, but slipped seamlessly into one with a more defined edge; the voice of a young boy both childish and ancient. “It is too late to save your wife. Her mind is no longer a human one; barely even a beast’s. Grieve for her as one grieves the dead, and let her fade into memory.”

Yueh’s steady hands began to tremble as his perpetually sombre dignity came apart at the edges. The man looked to him pleadingly, refusing to accept these terrible truths as anything more than a fevered madman’s ravings.

“What is he saying??”

“I don’t know,” Feyd lied. “He’s been raving senselessly for a while now.”

The moving tapestry of doubts and fears and drawn-out misery on the good doctor’s face was fascinating. But as ever, his inquiring nature could not help pursuing the truth. There was no more of it forthcoming, however; Paul lapsed into comatose silence as if worn from the battle with the parasitic foetus. Feyd continued watching him after Yueh had left. His chest housed a strange maelstrom of emotions he had no name for, except that all of them ended in fear.

He was afraid of how weak Paul Atreides made him. Afraid of the dangerous preoccupation with keeping him safe, the warning pangs he felt at the first threat to Paul’s safety. Of course, Feyd had every reason to shield him for as long as he carried their spawn.

But that sharp quiver of weakness rising from his gut at Doctor Yueh’s warning that the birth would kill Paul…it sickened him. Grotesque images that flooded in unbidden: Paul screaming through an agonising labour; Paul smeared in his own blood from being torn apart by his own baby; Paul’s green eyes frozen in death into an accusing stare that said You did this. You and your family’s greed have wrought this.

“I wanted none of this.”

Except it wasn’t true, was it? He relished having Paul Atreides in his grip: this lovely changeling boy with a duke’s pride and a witch’s fire, who had dared to defy the Baron by walking away from his nephew’s ascension ceremony. Feyd had been too occupied to witness it. But much as it had enraged him, he could not help replaying the scene as he imagined it: the slim regal figure in red and gold with his beautiful haughty head held high, asserting his will one last time before his malignant child began to devour him.

To have his hard-won heir, he might have to lose its mother. A sacrifice he was unprepared to easily accept; for such was the make of their bodies that they were inextricably bound. They could barely be separated for more than a fortnight before the need for each other became all-consuming. If Paul perished, would he follow shortly thereafter? Had the Bene Gesserit foreseen such an outcome for their great experiment, their sacrificial lamb? He had the urge to drag the Reverend Mother Mohiam to his bedchamber and choke the truth from the smug old crone.

Except that perhaps – if he dared be honest with himself – he did not truly want to know.

He pulled Paul close so that the latter’s head rested on his chest. The draught provided by Yueh had calmed his sweating fit, which was now being replaced by persistent chills. He was tensed and curled up, whining softly until Feyd pulled the duvet around him – shaking his head at how his actions resembled that of a damned mother hen. Paul’s whines of discomfort faded as he relaxed in the cocoon of warmth, his cheek and spill of curls baby-soft against Feyd’s own smooth hardness. His breaths evened out and his face eased into the careless innocence of a child’s slumber.

“How much did you see of my past?” he murmured against the nest of curls still sweet with traces of the scented soap he had been bathed with after the spice orgy. “How much did Leto tell you?”

For now, neither Paul nor Leto spoke. The drug that calmed Paul’s fever had also pulled him into a deep dreamless sleep. He looked peaceful, free from the grip of gruesome pasts and futures beyond their control.

Feyd was suddenly gripped by envy for such peace. He pressed his mouth to Paul’s as if he could draw from that well of untouched goodness that still lay deep within his cousin, and shivered faintly with pleasure when Paul’s lips parted even in sleep to welcome the kiss. With that small seep of warmth settling in his belly, he fell asleep to the scent and softness of the body nestled safely against his.

But when he awoke, the soft weight of Paul’s head was absent from his chest. The boy was gone. And he was struck by regret and loathing, as if something precious had been stolen from him. 

Don’t be ridiculous.

There were only so many places Paul could go, for the vastness of the Harkonnen fortress was full of locked doors. It did not take a lengthy hunt to find him huddled in one of his favourite places aside from the library: the circular room that served as both an ecological preserve and a herbarium, where species of plants that could survive nowhere else on Giedi Prime were cultivated. The air was warm and sweet and moist. It smelled to Paul like home.

The warmth was not quite enough to soothe the chill in his bones. His shivering back was pressed against a corner, arms locking his knees to his chest. The fever-glazed eyes obstinately refused to meet Feyd’s. His tousled forelocks hung thickly about his elfin features, making his face look small and narrow and strikingly fragile.

“You shouldn’t have let me drink it,” he said hoarsely as Feyd approached. “The Water of Life.”

“Ah. The Fremen elixir.”

“It awakened him. Even now he’s trying to exert his will. And it’s taking all of mine to stop him.”

Feyd frowned. “This version was only a stimulant. Passed through a priestess’ altered body. It should not have affected him so.”

“Nonetheless, it has.”

“And you’re blaming me, when we were both ignorant of its effects?”

Paul curled tighter in on himself, the absence of an answer an admission of defeat. But it seemed the sacred stimulant was not the only source of his distress.

“Why did you give them to me?”

“What do you mean –”

“Why did you let those strangers use my body? Why did you let them fuck me?”

His words were rough with tears, with anger and hurt. And this in turn hurt Feyd – which was utterly alarming.

“You seemed willing enough…” he said, cursing his flimsy words. A more clear-cut answer would be “You’re mine to do with as I wish.” 

It had once been that simple. And yet something had changed.

“They hardly think less of you for it,” he added. “To the Fremen, it is a bonding ritual. A spiritual one, even.”

“I know what it is to them. To you, it’s just revelry. And a chance for you to show how little you value me beyond a –”

“You were the one who walked into that room,” Feyd interjected. “You were aware of the nature of the occasion. Don’t lay the blame on me just because you’re bent on preserving some stupid, irrelevant ideal of purity –”

“I was drugged, and you let them rape me!” 

Feyd was at a loss for words. “That was not…rape,” he stuttered at last, and hated himself for the unsteadiness of his words, the lack of conviction. “You don’t know what rape is.”

His hands started to tremble. And do you? He curled his fingers into fists until his nails cut into his palm. He was reminded of what Paul now knew thanks to their aberrant unborn son. The unspoken things that paralysed him so that he simply stood and stared as Paul’s flush intensified and his shivering worsened. 

“You promised to take care of me,” said Paul through the tremors of his breath. “You promised…”

The chattering of his teeth pierced the humid air, and Feyd was compelled to shed his outer shirt to pull it around the shivering shoulders. “I’m taking care of you now,” he grunted. “You shouldn’t be out of bed yet.”

“I love him, you know,” came the painful whisper. “I would end him if I could. Yet there are times when I love him so deeply it hurts.”

“It’s just biological attachment.”

Paul glared through tears that only sharpened the loveliness of his long-lashed eyes. “That doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

A misty silence hung between them, and Paul made a prideful attempt at covering up just how sick he was until Feyd grew tired of his resistance. “You need your rest. I’ll ask you nicely once.” He stood and extended a hand, which was duly ignored.

“Fine.” Feyd grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet, then lifted him clean off the ground. Paul fought like a wildcat, albeit a weak little kitten still suckling at its mother’s teat.

“Put me down.”

“I’ve carried you to safety twice now, you know. You just weren’t awake for it.”

“I doubt it. Surely you have servants for that sort of thing.”

“I do. It’s simply more fun this way.”

The hiss between Paul’s teeth turned to a stifled whine with a bout of nausea. His hot forehead fell against Feyd’s neck, and Feyd could not help noticing how good and right it felt. When Paul gave up resisting and curled an arm around his neck, the piercing warmth that spread through his chest made his knees weak.

Stop it, he nearly snarled. 

Don’t stop, his body countered.

“You can only have one of us,” Paul whispered faintly against his collarbone. “He told me so.”

So Yueh had spoken true, then. Only the truth was worse. “Your own child foresaw your death?”

“There are a multitude of possible pathways. Only one where I live. The narrowest one, thin as a thread that might snap at the slightest change of wind.”

“And what is that narrow path? How would one realise it?”

Paul went quiet for a moment. “You would choose me, over the child on which your future rests?”

“I prefer not to settle for half a prize.”

There are other ways, besides, he thought. The Bene Gesserit have plans within plans. This golden child was part of their plot centuries before the Harkonnens were even a speck in the Landsraad ranks –

He realised then, in his heart of hearts, that Paul already had his answer. He found his arms tightening around his bride, his treasure, as addictive as he was irksome. The boy who had wrought such a change in his body that their very heartbeats began to synchronise with every touch.

He hated himself for this attachment. But then, hating himself was something he was used to. Something he could live with. And he knew now that there were some things he would rather not live without.

Paul’s arm slid further along his neck, the mop of curls filling his senses with that sweet warm scent he could not get enough of. For a brief, dizzying moment, Feyd thought of a moment frozen in a long-ago time in the land he had been taken from. A place and time where he had felt completely, carelessly, unconditionally safe.

Perhaps that was what it meant to be loved.

Chapter Text

The biannual hearing with the barony’s squires and property tycoons regarding contractual disputes, inheritances, and threats of labour unions were a tedious but unavoidable part of a na’Baron’s duties. The proud powerful figures whose grievances needed settling would be heard; for they were an integral part of the structure on which the barony’s might rested. A symbiotic relationship that all parties present fed off like a network of fanged tongues latched onto the arteries of the land.

The mood at such an event was unfailingly contentious, and on occasion outright hostile. Feyd, having been witness to several ‘polite debates’ between warring parties while sitting silently by his uncle’s side in preparation for such a role, had regaled Paul with accounts of several venomous clashes and one outright stabbing while the Baron watched with his cold fish-like eyes as if taking pleasure from the low spectacle. But there were ways one could modulate such an air of tension. Paul’s presence at this particular hearing – which marked Feyd’s first time presiding in his uncle’s stead – was a delicately placed suggestion by the Harkonnen Mentat Piter de Vries, a human man so pale and plucked and stone-cool both in blood and demeanour that Paul had thought him a draugr.

“The unwashed masses worship him unabashedly,” Piter had said to them; as usual, he spoke of Paul as if he was not present. “But even the baronets and captains of industry are not above such influences.”

Paul had been sure he was exaggerating – though a man like Piter did not, as a rule, deal in hyperboles. But when the mentat showed them the exquisite cameo pendant of the sort commissioned by wealthier adherents, he could not help gasping at his own visage. The artist had seen fit to capture him at his most magnificent. Gold-lined eyes that radiated a power he did not feel; rosy lips parted as if to deliver words of salvation; a halo of curls that possessed a serpentine life of their own. The delicately carved and painted relief was draped in jewels in such a manner usually reserved for the sainted dead.

Though his actual appearance, seated now by his na’Baron’s side, was much less ostentatious – a simple if flawlessly cut deep blue tunic and flowing pants with plain gold circlets at his neck and wrists, small gold droplets hanging from his ears – he knew well the strength of indelible impressions wrought by these little talismans bearing his likeness. He was brimming with apprehension as the first of Feyd-Rautha’s subjects entered the room and bowed deeply. Their demeanour towards the na’Baron was that of deference. Their demeanour towards him was something else.

The patriarch of House Sarobella and his mistress glanced at him with an intriguing mix of wariness and worship. When their eyes met Paul’s, he was suddenly gripped by knowing, their minds parting to reveal themselves like the peeling skin of strange fruits. He saw that the man had plotted the murder of his wife as part of a greater plan to keep his wealth within the grip of the scheming cousins to whom he owed his ascension. He saw that the elegant concubine by his side was not in fact the Kaitanian high-born she introduced herself as, but a Harko factory girl who had been used and abused as she clawed her way up from the gutter. He would have sympathised with her more were it not for the barbs radiating from her every breath and intention. Her pitiless psychopathy very nearly marked him deep enough to scar. His breath caught in his throat as he struggled to calm a fit of vertigo and the sweat breaking out on his back.

He steadied his breath, kept his head bowed and spoke to his lord with barely-moving lips, the way he had been schooled in for when diplomats had to whisper in full view of daggered eyes.

“If you grant him full rights over the land, she’ll kill him in his sleep. This leads to a string of events that ends his line.”

Feyd pursed the corner of his mouth in subtle acknowledgment. House Sarobella was one of the Harkonnens’ greatest allies; he could not offend them, nor could he risk the crumbling of their dynasty. After some deliberation, he split the assets equally between the viscount and his cousin. His decision was met, if not with satisfaction, then at least with grace.

“I was right to value you as more than a broodmare,” Feyd remarked with a smile after the two proud figures left the room.

“It was his Sight, not mine.”

“But you are gifted with some prescience. You had those dreams long before Leto was awakened…”

“Not enough by half to read futures so finely. Even my dreams are erratic. Though lately they’ve been more frequent.” Paul felt the grit-laced weight of eyes darkened by lack of sleep, though the artfully applied powders kept his countenance as unblemished as the virginal image revered by the masses. He had been lifted from the status of a slave into a sacred child-bearing demiurge. And he was no longer sure who he truly was in between these two extremes.

The next few hearings were, to his relief, relatively free of murderous plots – though he fought not to flinch at a gruesome image of a slave maimed and broken by the courteous, comely young man who stood before Feyd looking every inch the noble squire. He began to fear that he would become bitter and twisted and aged inside from the curse of glimpsing the worst of humanity.

Why do you show me only cruelty? he asked of the one whose visions became his own. Even the most ruthless must have known moments of joy or care.

I see the parts of humanity which must be cured, came the eerie reply. I see that which must be most urgently remedied.

Then keep your Seeing to yourself.

But he knew it was not something either of them could help. Leto II had both the gifts of a supreme being, and an utter lack of control over them much as might be expected of a being not yet wholly formed. It was terrifying to think that one so physically fragile could receive such knowledge of the kind that would drive a grown adult to madness. A mind powerful enough to bridge space and time: that was the unimaginably vast burden of the Kwisatz Haderach. 

And yet Feyd appeared willing to gamble away such a priceless source of power that would topple whole kingdoms with a word.

“You can only have one of us. He told me so.” That was the lie Paul had whispered into his ear with such convincing earnestness. Leto had told him no such thing. Paul had wanted, needed, to know just how far Feyd was willing to go to save him. To choose him even if it meant losing that which his existence and purpose had been shaped for.

But perhaps he can choose. If I can be free of this fate – perhaps we can both be free…

“My liege,” greeted the small wizened man whose embroidered overcoat weighed down his frail frame. He bowed before Feyd, then bowed even deeper to Paul against the demands of protocol. But the gesture was not born from defiance. Paul felt a surge of alarm when he dropped to his knees and his fingers brushed Paul’s sandalled feet. The bristle of guards standing to attention filled the hall like a warning murmur, in accordance with the decree that no guest, be it a slave or lord, was to touch Paul Atreides without his consent.

“Praise be to the Divine Mother, to the Twin-Face of the Universe,” said the old man tremulously. 

Then, in a lower murmur only Paul could hear, he added: “Forgive me.”

Leto’s warning pierced him like a shriek. Paul cried out and tumbled backwards just before the assassin’s needle pierced his ankle. Then the guards rushed forth at the same time Feyd reared forward with drawn knife and bared teeth. A burst of chaos ensued – brutal, blade-sharp and brief, ending with the old man sprawled rigidly in a pool of his own blood, Feyd’s knife buried in his eye.

“The abomination must not be allowed to live,” he croaked before going still, the torment of his unfulfilled mission writ on his gaunt face.

Paul's heart hammered painfully as he gazed down at the man who had been sent here to die. To sacrifice himself in killing the child whose power was a threat to those who would rather not see such a weapon in Harkonnen hands. He choked back a shudder and pressed a hand to his belly where a storm of distress was roiling.

Be still. It’s alright. I’m here.

He rose to leave the room, cold and shaken, only to be stopped by Feyd. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“What would you have me do? Sit demurely by your side and suffer more assassination attempts?”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m calling off the rest of it. At least until every last guest has been inspected twice over.”

Paul struggled to summon his years of training, to calm his frayed nerves and shaking hands. “His scream, Feyd…if only you could’ve heard it. He failed to foresee this, and he was furious and-and fearful at the same time. It was the first time he actually felt afraid.” The echoes of his unborn child’s alarm made him sick with guilt, and he leaned into Feyd’s hard assuring embrace, glad for the hand firmly cradling his neck. “I failed to protect him.”

“If he couldn’t see it coming, then how could you? If anything, I failed to protect you.”

A sob rose in his chest at the fierce tenderness that so precisely fulfilled what he needed in his moment of weakness. He let Feyd pull him into a secluded corner and draw from him a lengthy, lingering kiss.

“Stay.” It sounded more entreating than commanding, which almost seduced him into acquiescence. But Leto was restless in the womb, turning endlessly in a way that made Paul nauseous, his baby’s anxiety becoming inseparable from his own.

“I can’t sit by your side while he keeps moving and clawing like that. He doesn’t want to be here.”

Paul did not add that Leto was reacting not just to the threat of hired killers or suicidal fanatics, but to Feyd himself. The baby could sense Feyd’s growing antagonism, and the possibility that the man might choose to save Paul over him.

“If I start yelling in pain, or passing out, it won’t exactly look good –”

Feyd relented with a scowl. “Fine. But you’re not going alone.”

And so Paul found himself freed of his role as a strange quasi-religious figurehead as he walked the corridor with Lera and Uko by his side. Paul was used by now to their company, and cherished Uko’s small hard hand clasped around his own, keeping him grounded against the foetus’ restlessness and whispers he was training himself to wall off at will lest he be driven mad.

But the vision that came next was too strong to push away. He stopped and braced himself against the nearest wall, and saw in his mind’s eye the dark outline of an ancient vessel buried within the Harkonnen fortress, its name etched into its flanks in faded bone-white.

No. It can’t be. The ship was lost to the stars centuries ago…

Leto replied in that familiar tone of eerie, unshakeable certainty. It was lost to all but a few. Vladimir’s grandfather, first of the line to welcome the blood-curse into his veins, hid it here and allowed the tales of monsters in the deep to pass into myth. So that the gift might be seeded in his chosen descendants in secret, shared with only those who could make them stronger.

“Paul. Paul.” Lera’s fingers were tight around his arm, trying to shake him from the trance. He heard and felt her with half his senses; the other half were buried in a sand-whipped wind, in sloping dunes that glowed so entrancingly in the rose-gold sunset that one could forgive its punishing blaze at the height of day. He parted his lips and spoke in the voice of a terrible half-human god whose blue eyes stared out from a huge, grotesquely larval body.

“My road leads into the desert.”

His two guardians stared back with enquiring frowns. But Paul regained enough control as his son’s next words poured forth to keep them to himself.

The stories were partially true, said Leto. It is a no-ship – that is how they kept it hidden. A prescient-ship, capable of interstellar travel without a Navigator. We must find it and command it. Together we will find our way home.

“It’s not my home,” Paul whispered as Uko wrapped her arms around him, sensing his need for her grounding embrace.

Your mother awaits you. She has received word of your coming. Paul’s heart ached anew at the reminder of her existence, his ache stretching out across the stars that marked the vastness between them.

She is our surest bastion, Leto continued, she who will command the might of Fremen devotion to shield us. Less than a month from now, she will ascend to Reverend Motherhood when the high priestess of her tribe passes –

“No. She cannot. I won’t let that happen.” His words sounded silly and shallow as soon as they left him. Of course he could do nothing. And who was he to protect his mother from such a fate – the fiercest and most tenacious person he knew – when he could not even protect himself from all that had happened?

“To be so burdened is a curse,” he declared. “I’m sorry that you’ve been made to bear it. You’re not yet born, and already you’ve been robbed of a childhood…”

Leto did not reply, and Paul wondered if he finally felt the full weight of his monstrous destiny. He closed his tear-stung eyes and let his head fall against Lera’s sturdy shoulder.

I will not lose my mother to the same curse.

He knew what he must do. He wondered how Feyd would respond to the slowly hardening resolve forming in his mind. It would hurt every fibre of his being to be parted from his lover. But it was what he must suffer to make things right.

A soft strange sound touched the edges of his hearing: a mix of insectoid skittering and the light pads of human footsteps. Except his trained senses insisted that they were not quite human. Their rhythm was not that of a two-legged being, but a cluster of feet all moving in an eerie rhythm, an uncanny dance.

The thing emerged from around the corner. His breath caught in his throat. 

“What is that?”

“The Baron’s pet,” Lera replied. But as soon as the spider-limbed creature stepped fully into the light, Paul saw that it was more than some mutated beast. He saw what his child knew of its making. A long scream made of many smaller nightmarish cries for help built up in his head, forming a tangled tapestry of pain burned into his eyeballs; burned into a sense-memory that was not his, but hers.

Her memories. Or what was left of them. She recalled them as if they belonged to someone else; somebody who was once a clever, smiling woman wed to a healer who loved her.

“Wana,” he croaked. A black spider-hand reached out to him as if responding to a familiar name. The perfectly formed human fingers brushed his calf as he collapsed from the barrage of images flashing through his head like a filmbook of fictional lurid horrors. But these horrors were real. And Leto’s vision – born from the too-vivid Sight he had yet to develop control of – was plunging him right into the one who had suffered them firsthand. The unspeakable things that had been done to this woman while her husband was strung blindly along with hopes of an eventual reunion.

“Stop it,” he gasped – or tried to. His own words sounded somehow muted, contained within his own head, as if he no longer had a mouth. As if he’d been sealed up in a body not his own; a faceless, mouthless body doomed to house a failed monster-womb, then to be a plaything for the amusement of its twisted master –

STOP IT!

He was flung back into his own human body. The spider-thing had fled from sight, but Wana’s screams were embedded still in his head, his chest, his throat. It came spewing forth like a bloody ribbon being pulled taut right from the core of his soul, and he could not stop screaming for a long time.

Gradually a semblance of sanity crept back over him. He became aware of Uko’s hand clamped protectively over his mouth, her black eyes full of alarm. He blinked the world back into focus to see Doctor Yueh standing over him with worry etched deep into his face.

“Is he in pain? What happened?” 

The question was directed at Lera, for Paul was still breathless with echoes of terror, gripped by chills and icy sweat as Yueh’s hands kneaded the nerve points that would help calm him down. Their conversation slid senselessly off him as he turned away and threw up on the cold stone floor. His body was so wracked with retching and trembling that he was sure he would miscarry on the spot. But Leto clung on with those tenacious little claw-fingers and drew ever more determinedly on whatever nourishment and strength his body had to offer. He imagined the baby draining him dry until he was reduced to a husk, meeting the same fate as his late father.

By the time he was carried away for a detailed examination at Yueh’s behest, his fever had returned with a vengeance, the ceiling above throbbing in rhythm with his head and the blood vessels of his searing eyelids. But even with his eyes closed and his seer child going silent for a time, the outline of the no-ship loomed from the blackness as clear as a curved sword-edge. The legendary Ampoliros awaited them both. The ship whose crew had turned on each other in a raving bloodthirst, and whose empty maw now lay in wait to bear a future God-Emperor to his kingdom.

Chapter Text

The baliset notes lingered in the dry air with a resonance they had never quite achieved amidst the wet hills and heaths of Caladan. A melody spilled in a mournful yet soothing murmur from a man who’d had much to mourn in life, who found solace and softness and smiles in song. He offered some of that solace now to the woman by his side, whose proud countenance hid a world of pain he knew more than any other only because he, too, had lost loved ones to the cruelty of his former masters.

“Thank you, Gurney,” said Jessica with a smile that strained her cheeks. She made an attempt nonetheless, for she felt it to be the least he deserved.

“I sing as much for myself as you, my lady. The days here are long and scorching and miserable. We could all do with song and cheer.”

“The land and its people are not without beauty. And I’m not a lady of anything. I never was.” Only a concubine; but a beloved and privileged one who could ask for nothing more, save to be free of selfish ambition.

“You will be more than that, soon. I hear the Reverend Mother is not long for this world.”

Jessica nodded. “Her visions grow stronger as she weakens. In each one that she shows me, he comes ever closer, until he’s within touching distance.” She shut her eyes to recall the image that both soothed and tormented her. “I keep finding reasons to refuse the anointment. But a part of me would consume such a curse only to see him for myself. To know that he is safe and well.”

The sweet string-notes came to an end, and she clenched her fists and turned her angered sobs into sighs, already growing accustomed to the waterless ways of a water-saving people. “It chafes me to wait. Never have I been so powerless, except when…”

As if instinctively knowing to fill the taut silence of her hesitance, the warrior-bard began plucking a new melody on his aged baliset. “Except when, my lady?”

“When I first learned of the fate intended for my would-be daughter.” She looked up at the stilltent’s low roof, at the condensation gathered from their breath and bodies turning into fine rivulets that trickled like tears down the piping to be gathered in catchment pods. “I willed the change in his sex just a little too late. Part of me already knew it. That I would be living a lie, and ensnaring him in that lie.”

“You raised him well. You trained him well. You did everything you could to save him.”

“It wasn’t enough, Gurney. It will never be enough – you know why.” Her guilt was a useless thing she carried with her as if she could not bear to be parted from it. “He had to live with the consequences of my choices. I should be the one to be snatched from my house and tortured and punished.” 

The tears came at last, an inevitable product of pent-up pain from a heart not yet hardened, though she had successfully pretended for a while that it was. She caught them with her fingers and pressed them between her lips so as not to waste the precious moisture.

“Where is Duncan?” she asked after a brief silence. She could have used Idaho’s company. He somehow always knew what to say in dire times. And when there was nothing to be said, he would embrace her or press his lips to her hand in a gesture of comfort that lacked no respect for its familiarity. Such was Duncan’s gift that both Gurney and herself lacked. All they could do was sit in mutual understanding and pain with an unconscious distance always between them.

“He’ll be back from the hunt shortly.” Duncan had adapted remarkably well to life on Arrakis, and his keen senses quickly became welcome among the scouts who went in search of meat so that the tribe’s scant livestock could be spared. “Perhaps this time they’ll bring back a fox or two. If game gets scarcer, we’ll be scampering after scorpions and muad’dib next.” The tiny kangaroo mouse was revered for its remarkable ability to draw water from the arid air, known in the old texts as One Who Points the Way. It was considered an act of ill luck to kill a muad’dib, but not unheard of in truly lean times.

“They believe that Paul and his child will bring an end to such hard times,” Gurney remarked as he added a few more wistful notes to his song. “Not just your sayyadina sisters and their followers, but the most hardened and practical of hunters. Even they are starting to spout myths of a paradise on earth, of green hills sprouting right from the dunes.”

“And what do you believe?”

“I believe in what I see, my lady.”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “I can only believe in what she sees. Mother Ramallo. She tells me that…” Her breath caught in her throat, unwilling at first to speak of intimate matters to the warmaster. But she knew that if anyone could hear strange or sordid truths and take them to his grave, he would.

“She says he has found… love in the enemy. That he and his captor are bound, somehow, through their coupling. That Paul is unwilling to part with him, to lose him.”

“That is normal enough for captives in duress, my lady. Normal to form bonds with one who has the power to decide your fate. To crave their kindness and mistake it for affection.”

Jessica knew he spoke from experience. She also knew in the deep place inside her – a place that men like Gurney Halleck could not grasp, that even a gentle heart like Idaho’s would only ever begin to understand – that the Reverend Mother spoke true. They had been drawn inextricably closer as the crone edged nearer to death and held the thread of her chosen successor’s life tight as if to say: You will not escape. Jessica felt the thin fingers curl tight around her heart each time they spoke and found herself fighting them as much as Paul had surely fought against his own pre-woven fate.

But with this inescapable pull came a closeness that allowed Jessica to occupy, for minutes at a time, the Reverend Mother’s psyche before it overwhelmed her. She saw that the flesh-bond forged between the sons of House Atreides and Harkonnen flowed both ways: that Feyd-Rautha held Paul close to his heart, in a sort of protective possessiveness that was perhaps the closest a Harkonnen could come to love. She saw them stunningly deified in marble and precious metals as entwined figures, Feyd-Rautha’s hand cradling the swell of Paul’s gravid belly. The miracle of a saviour child born from the body of a man was one that inspired awe and mythmaking, even – or perhaps especially – amidst the hardened people of a hard land.

She did not know what to make of it all. Enmeshed somewhere within the artistic aggrandisement and perilous messiahdom was her son, the child she had raised and sworn to defend with her life. Her serious sweet-faced boy, precociously clever in ways that should have served him well. She wondered if he was that same boy still. Or if surviving the larger forces at work had hammered and twisted him into something hard and cold and unknowable.

“I wish only that he be uncorrupted by the cruelty that befell our family,” she whispered. “That such things not change who he is at the core.”

“Everything and everyone changes,” came the bard’s reply, gentle in tone but unflinching in truth. “To resist change is to atrophy and die.”

“And what if being forced to change brings one a thousand little wars, a thousand little deaths?”

Gurney did not say anything for a good long while. They stared beyond the tent’s sheer fabric that the dying sun would soon cease to pierce, ears trained on the sounds of the hunters returning from their chase across the dunes. “There is a little war in each of us,” he uttered at last, in a low melodic lilt, the words becoming a song that danced across the strings.

Jessica closed her eyes and saw a vision of a red sunset. She smelled blood in the air, felt dying life slip through her bloodied fingers. But when she blinked and emerged from the tent, her hands were dry, and the air was tinged only with the faint scent of spice and the sweet melancholia of the warrior-bard’s symphony.

| | | | | | | | |

Not for the first time, Feyd marvelled – with a touch of familiar scorn – at the human frailties that his transmuted heart and veins and flesh no longer knew. He cradled Paul firmly with one arm and with the other forced another dose of Yueh’s carefully measured elixir past the lips that struggled weakly to resist. Had he known how much he looked like a seasoned nursemaid instead of the magnificent monster who had stormed a castle to claim his prize, he might have withered with chagrin.

Paul must survive this pregnancy. That was all he required. That was what he would work towards, with whatever means needed.

After the assassination attempt, Feyd no longer trusted just anyone to watch over the fever-struck Paul and push him toward recovery. He even entertained the dreaded possibility that his faithful darlings might well have been seeded from the very beginning as sleepers who would awaken at an opportune time to strike. To slay him and his kin and cause irreparable damage to a House that had only recently regained supremacy.

“If you don’t cooperate, I’ll let the Tleilaxu have their way with you,” he threatened when Paul whined and tensed at the taste of the liquid. “They’ll keep you alive just enough to get another baby off you once Leto emerges.”

Paul shuddered and acquiesced, coming as close to a sulk as he could in his current state. He tried to say something in a string of urgent but unintelligible murmurs. Feyd thought he heard snatches of Leto II’s voice tangled in those thin threads. Then the drug took effect. The tightness left Paul’s brow as he sank back into peaceful slumber, and their child along with him.

So, Paul had seen his uncle’s exquisitely grotesque pet for what it was; what, or who, it had been. What had been done to achieve this twisted masterpiece. More than once, Feyd had entertained the thought of killing the spider-thing, only because it put him in mind of a lame puppy he had seen as a boy. One whose withered leg had left it vulnerable to some ruthless beast who had torn it apart while it mewled and begged for death.

He might have had a fondness for dogs once. There had been a family mutt in his childhood home: a large, stupid, loyal creature with amber-hued eyes and –

Stop it. No use yarning on about the past like some doddering elder. 

He watched Paul sleep for a minute more, thinking of how he was a little too thin for his advancing pregnancy, before forcing himself to leave lest the insidious roots of this enervating attachment devour him.

He’ll be fine. He was bred and tested for this. Feyd forced his feet not to pause at the door.

Three days later, Paul was strong enough to spend his convalescence out of bed and in the library, where he would look up from a book every so often to gaze through the window at the forest of pilingitam trees: the sole stretch of estate carpeted with the verdance only a boy of Caladan could harbour such deep yearning for.

“Will you let me visit the plantation one of these days?” he asked one mild afternoon, doubtless knowing there was no better time to make such requests than when Feyd’s hand was buried in his hair.

“Maybe. If you’re good.”

“I’ve been nothing but good of late.”

“You’re as given to sulking fits as ever. And you complained ceaselessly at dinner yesterday about the fowl being overcooked.”

His pink lips turned pertly downward. “I mentioned it no more than twice.”

Feyd’s fingers tightened around a cluster of particularly thick, lush curls, savouring the softness filling the curve of his palm. “I see you’re still a haughty little dukeling.”

“I’m not a duke of anything anymore.” The sulk turned abruptly into quiet mournfulness. Paul could be mercurial like that. Every once in a while, he would remind Feyd of the part he had played in the decimation of House Atreides. And Feyd would remind him that he had been given little choice in the matter.

He was tired of saying the same lines like an actor in a tired play. He lowered his lips to bite into tender skin and suckle gently until Paul melted into his arms with a whimper.

“I’ll make you a gift of a new castle in Caladan,” he whispered against the curve of Paul’s neck. “You can be a proper little bride, with a new second home as your bride-price.”

Paul made a half-hearted attempt to pull away. “Don’t mock me.”

“I was thinking it would be a fitting statement of Harkonnen dominance,” Feyd continued, wrapping one of the curled locks snugly around his forefinger. “To have a grand house occupying the fine hill on which the Atreides castle used to stand. And perhaps a fort in the heart of Cala City, too.”

Were it entirely up to him, he’d have loved to bequeath another kind of gift: one that cost nothing in material wealth, but that would bind his bride to him and the small coven of blood drinkers who would be his only kin, giving him entire lifetimes in exchange for surrendering the warmth of the sun. The Baron would oppose this, of course. He intended that Paul’s life-giving body be used to its limits before disposing of him in some thoughtless undignified fashion as if he were nothing more than a cleaning servant.

Yet Feyd was at conflict with himself regarding the merits of turning Paul Atreides. For one, he was unsure if being turned changed one’s very nature irreversibly. Vladimir Harkonnen had been a great gluttonous leech for as long as Feyd and Rabban had known him. It seemed an inevitable part of becoming what they were. He was not so sure if he enjoyed the thought of Paul being as he was: hard, cold-blooded, his yearning need laced with something icy and knife-like.

The change would be outward as well as inward, of course. With the new enduring body came the loss of every last trace of hair. Feyd had kept himself smooth and shaven since he first became a Harkonnen, adopting easily enough the fashion that grew only more widespread with the rise of the Baron’s influence, when the high echelons of society began to mimic such baldness as an emblem of refinement. But once he came into eternal life, he had never once needed a shaving blade or follicle-stunting ointments.

It seemed such a trivial thing to miss. The lush dark thicket of curls he enjoyed burying his fingers and face in, the denseness of Paul’s eyebrows, the fine long lashes that framed his alluring green-gold eyes, the soft down framing his exquisite sex. But miss them he would. He would have Paul remain beautiful and unchanged, bound to his side until perhaps they tired of and began to claw at each other.

For now, all he could do was draw another fire-sweet mouthful of that blood-nectar he could never get enough of, and wonder if the thick rush would lose its flavour with the gift of eternity.

“Tell me when to stop,” he groaned, a little too deep into his own ecstasy to pay heed to how much he could take before both Paul and the baby would suffer for it. He had been holding back for so long, dreaming more and more frequently of drinking from those tempting veins, of taking more than the maddening nibbles that only enflamed him further. He would wake with the taste of Paul on his tongue and fear he would turn to find a lifeless husk lying next to him thanks to the grip of his mindless hunger.

But Paul, too, was too far gone. He could only cling to Feyd and sigh his need as his cock hardened and his cunt grew hot and slick. Feyd slid his fingers into that wet quivering slit and moved them in undulating motions to draw out a string of strangled melodic moans. Warm wetness spilled onto his fingers and drove his thirst further. He withdrew his fangs briefly to lick the taste of Paul’s sweet sex off his fingers. He pushed them into Paul’s pink panting mouth and made him suck on the rest of it. Then he plunged into the waiting artery again until Paul swooned and went limp in his arms.

“Gods be damned,” he said hoarsely, licking his lips and holding his half-conscious lover snug against him, warming the clammy flesh with his own blood-flushed body. “We will be the death of each other.”

He pressed a hand to the swell that marked Leto’s steady growth. It pleased him, on occasion, to feel the throbbing life in Paul’s belly. That is, when it did not rouse a confusing tangle of emotion – in which the anticipation of his preternatural child battled with the knowledge that Paul would not survive the birth. Or if he did, he might well be reduced to a pathetic enfeebled thing incapable of feeding or cleaning himself, robbed of dignity and of everything that made him delightful. And Feyd would be forced to consider killing him out of mercy the way he had considered killing the Baron’s terrible pet.

You would still have your prize , said his uncle’s slithery voice: the one that never left the darkest corners of his mind. Do not forget why Paul Atreides was given to you. If he fails to deliver, then he serves no further purpose.

He thought once more of that fanciful vision of a house on Atreidean land. A place just for Paul and himself and their strange precocious son. A place far from his uncle’s reach, from the memory of cold slithering hands that left a young boy clutching at his pillow with white-knuckled hands – 

His grip on Paul’s thin shoulder tightened. “You’ve infected me with foolish dreams. You cursed thing.”

He sat there holding Paul for an indeterminate stretch of time. His hands clung on as if sensing that the latter would slip through his fingers one way or another.

Indeed, four days later, Paul would vanish silently in the hours between night and dawn.

None could surrender any inkling of information on this impossible disappearance – not even under most inventive interrogation methods at Piter de Vries’ command. The Harkonnen fortress was so impenetrable and inescapable as to be the stuff of legend. Yet a fragile human slip of a boy, weighed down by a gravid belly, had somehow passed undetected into the most hidden part of the citadel and burrowed his way out.

Only after two sleepless nights would the shamed and furious Na’Baron curse himself for not seeing earlier the small silver scroll tucked into a crevice of Paul’s favourite seat in the library. It was inscribed with a message that only Feyd’s own touch could reveal. With shaking hands he read by moonlight the words that etched themselves delicately and indelibly into his brain.

My need for you has not waned. I am yours, as you are mine. But I need to do the right thing instead of waiting for a miracle. I’ve left on the hidden ship. If you must come find me, come alone. Love – your Paul.

Chapter Text

The dark was long and starless, starkly different from what Paul had envisioned from the filmbooks that romanticised its mysterious depths. His old childish envy of explorers and their starsearchers of legend became laughable three days into the great nothingness of space. Captain Fregonokon may have been a dashing personage with an intrepid crew. But it was unlikely they had sailed half as far as the stories claimed. The Ampoliros was not even a starsearcher, nevermind a Class 9, though it was sturdy and surprisingly well-preserved. It would serve his need well enough.

Its streamlined interior had awed him at first simply by virtue of its reputation: first as an undoubted masterpiece of engineering for its time, and later for the horrors that had taken place in its steel womb. At the same time, he came to realise that its grandeur had been largely exaggerated. A no-ship was by necessity spartan in design and function, made for safe travel without need of a Navigator’s knowledge and spice-enhanced perception. Only its stealth cloaking and the underground exit – likely custom-built in the time of the Baron’s grandfather – made Paul’s escape possible. He could only hope the punishment meted upon Feyd for letting him slip loose would not be overly harsh, at least by the Baron’s standards.

The Ampoliros was very likely the last of its kind. After the Spacing Guild began to exert control over every minute aspect of interstellar travel, there were no more incidents of rogue ships and missing crews. The blackness between moons became a safer place, no path left unchartered, no great seas of uncertainty to fascinate with a sense of the unexplored.

He had been overwhelmed at first. Even the simplified system interface was a foreign language to him. Then Leto, with the time-defying vastness of his knowledge, bid him surrender control and allow the mind of a future all-knowing emperor to steer the ship.

He gave in, only partially, with trepidation and a precise exertion of will that exhausted him. He could not allow Leto to glimpse that part of his mind he had painstakingly constructed and finessed. The one part his prescient child could not access, where he kept the secret he meant to carry right into his mother’s hands and pass to her the burden of a terrible deed.

My road leads into the desert. Paul was following their foretold path to the place where Leto Atreides II would build his empire. But he had his own reason for treading this path.

As if sensing his father’s hidden intent – even if he could not divine it – Leto tightened his grip painfully, the beginnings of small teeth clamping down on Paul’s insides, not content to feed through the umbilical cord but sucking on womb-tissue like a fully formed creature. Paul gasped and fell to the floor when the pain sharpened into serrated blades that mirrored almost perfectly the gom jabbar’s test of endurance. 

“Leto, please,” he pleaded, his efforts to modulate the pain thinning his voice to a strained whisper. “Don’t do this. Don’t…”

Do you love me, father? The words that were so achingly young – not the utterance of a tyrant, but an ordinary little boy – pushed tears to his eyes.

“Yes, Leto.” A sob wracked his body as he curled up against a wall. “You are my flesh and blood. I can’t help but love you. I will always love you.”

The agony shooting through his abdomen was replaced by the shriek in his heart, a tightness in his chest at the horror of what he must do. “Help me, mother,” he cried softly into the great empty. Feyd. I wish I had the courage to tell you. I wish you were here.

Through the blur of tears, he stumbled his way to the sleep pod that would allow him to sink into a comatose state until he was awakened for landing. He carefully set the dials according to the estimated arrival date, then dragged himself into its cradling embrace. It did not warm at his touch as newer pods would. The Ampoliros had been made when space travel was in its juvenile years, and had few of the comforts the new era of travellers could take for granted.

But it had all he needed to reach his intended destination. He calmed his mind and body, ignoring the cold of the pod’s insides, and threw down the walls to his every thought lest he betray himself.

Leto must have detected this walling off, and responded with alarm – and the unmodulated hunger-distress of a growing foetus entirely dependent on its host for sustenance. He would draw every breath of strength into his tiny body while he could, alarmed perhaps by the prospect of being rendered unconscious and helpless. Paul’s insides endured another bout of agony before the glass lid slid shut to encase him and his blood and breath slowed almost to a standstill. 

“I wish I could protect you,” he murmured as sleep crept over him, a hand on his belly. “I would give you everything, if only…”

He never finished his train of thought. The cradling pod was enfolding him in its soothing embrace: lulling him to the sleep he desperately needed to gather his strength for what lay ahead, and to dim the madness of being alone with the child who had adopted the namer of his dead father. He hoped that the ship would not betray him and send them both hurtling to the same terrible fate that had devoured Fregonokon and her brave crew.

| | | | | | | | |

Vladimir looked down at the broken body of the tormented Suk doctor as the fingers stiffened in the midst of their last twitch, and the solemn clever gaze turned to dark glass. He had suffered long enough. Not that the Baron would not delight in making him suffer to the end of his days – which, as it turned out, had been drastically shortened.

“May you find bliss in joining your dear wife,” he said, soft slithery words dripping in echoes onto the cold floor. One would never have guessed that he had been two breaths away from lying dead next to Wellington Yueh. But Piter, dependable as ever, had caught the blade just before it landed in the Baron’s fleshy back. The metal had been blackened so as not to draw attention to its gleam. A quick test also showed it to be poisoned. A poetic and fitting choice, as the Harkonnens were once infamous for poison-laced instruments as a favoured means of cutting down foes.

But the man had not thought out his rash plot, mad as he was with the horrific revelation of his wife’s fate, and weary and aged by sorrow besides. He knew his move had been a suicide mission. But the mission had failed. And with that cursed knowledge he had, as the Atreideans would say, returned to the stars. His misery would haunt these halls no more.

The three silent staring women had reared forward when they first saw the doctor strike. But they would likely have made no real effort to save Vladimir. They answered only to his nephew. They guarded none but Feyd-Rautha and his bride.

The Baron hissed through gritted teeth. His precious breeder-bride, that cursed Atreides child. The boy who had succeeded in pulling off his greatest act of defiance since the endeavour to keep his body barren, and left House Harkonnen on the verge of losing everything he had built. Vladimir closed his eyes and envisioned a sweet revenge in which he let the Tleilaxu take Paul apart. But not before subjecting him to abject humiliation and a plundering of his body that would remind him what he had been made for.

“You summoned me, my lord?”

The words were an exact echo of the day Feyd had stood at the door when called to a rare feast as the Baron’s favoured heir. How alluring he had looked then, glowing with promise and the window-light that cast him in the splendour of foreshadowed success. There was no light to halo him here in the blue-black shadow of a murder attempt in the night. Feyd’s face was emotionless as he took in the sight he had walked in on.

“Your pet lies dead outside your bedchamber,” Feyd said in a cautious monotone. His body language was tense, prepared for anything, responding to his uncle’s renewed wrath.

“Yueh killed it. I imagine it must have broken him at last, that mercy killing of his beloved.” He recalled vividly the doctor’s terrible smile and glazed eyes as he drove the black knife towards its intended target. 

“I take it you have yet to recover your breeder,” said Vladimir.

“I have some news. It will not please you.”

Vladimir waved an impatient hand, and Feyd continued. “Paul has taken the ship. The one that your grandfather hid here after seeding his blood among the crew and watching them devour each other.”

“The Ampoliros.” His own voice was as flat as his nephew’s, and only Piter could have read in the minute nuances his dismayed shock.

“The child must have led him to it,” the mentat deduced.

“And my grandfather reshaped the ship’s controls so that only one of our blood could stir it to life.” Vladimir coughed up a bitter laugh. “He could not have foreseen that a boy of Harkonnen lineage but no Harkonnen loyalty would find and awaken it.”

“I cannot say for certain where Paul was headed. But he once let slip – in the words of his unborn son – that Leto’s empire will be founded in Arrakis. In their stronghold north of Arrakeen, where their Reverend Mother resides.”

“Then that is where you will go.”

Feyd nodded slowly. Vladimir watched the comely face carefully as he asked: “And how did you find out that he had taken the no-ship?”

The answer came a second too late, which was telling – but of what, he could not say just yet. “A message. Hidden in some crack I was careless enough to overlook.”

“Bring it to me.”

Feyd shook his head. “I destroyed it.”

“Destroyed it? Why?”

“Out of anger, I suppose.”

Vladimir stared down his nephew. Feyd could be a good actor, sometimes. But there was no lying to his uncle; no hiding from his lord and maker.

“You will leave first thing tomorrow, and reclaim what you so carelessly lost.”

“Yes, my lord.”

He ordered the guards to dismiss themselves after disposing of Wellington Yueh, then ordered Feyd to his private quarters. The boy was hiding something, answering with a flat, almost mocking monotone. It was high time he was reminded of how much he owed the man who had given him everything that made him great. Vladimir planned to get the truth from him. He would coax and wrest and force it from him if it came to that.

Once again, House Atreides threatens to be our downfall.

He made Feyd walk ahead of him, so the latter would feel the full weight of his stare. For a moment, the cocky saunter he so enjoyed watching – never mind that such cockiness was soon to be humbled – faltered just a little. The steady footsteps dragged to a pause.

Then Feyd straightened his back and strode onward with renewed vigour. His steps sped up and became business-like, as if impatient to get this over with, even while guessing that it would not be over quickly at all.

| | | | | | | | |

Feyd drew a deep breath to calm the thundering of a heart that had not beat so rapidly for so many years. A pale flicker caught the corner of his eye as he headed towards his uncle’s bedchamber: Rabban, whose piggish eyes were narrowed jealously in his direction. He had always been envious of Feyd: envious that his little brother had been given all the gifts, that he had been included in the immortal circle only because the Baron had deemed them stronger with their talents combined. But when Feyd began to outshine him in nearly everything, a quiet resentment began to unfold. A resentment that hardened when Paul Atreides came into the picture and became the unwitting subject of petty rivalry hardened into something more bitter.

And now he must be stewing in the show of attention the Baron was lavishing upon the favoured nephew. If only his dear brother knew of all he had been spared from.

Vladimir visibly bristled at Rabban’s passing presence. Feyd's brother served as a reminder of the minor scandal their uncle had had to stamp out before it grew out of proportion. The hulking fool who was a slave to his lusts had laid his grasping hands on Paul’s exquisitely adorned form in the stands of the naumachia; and Paul, it was whispered, had responded to his advances. Feyd had heard the story from both sides. The boy had done only what he deemed wisest in the face of the beastly warlord’s advances that could not be deflected without offence. He still did not know how to feel about it: the image of his Paul playing the whore to repel Glossu’s avarice for a virginal victim.

He only knew that he would have sliced off his dear brother’s cock had he been present.

Still, Paul’s quick-witted ploy had the drawback of room for doubt as to the child’s paternity. The bud of a wild rumour regarding Paul Atreides’ promiscuity – and the possibility that the babe might have been seeded by any one of the men he parted his legs for – had been severed just in the nick of time by his uncle’s sly machinations. In light of Feyd’s newest oversight, the Baron saw the opportunity to reprimand him once more for his carelessness. 

“I thought I had schooled you better in exerting control over what you own,” Vladimir hissed as his fingers sank lovingly into Feyd’s naked flesh. Feyd watched them cut painful crescents into his skin: a poetic sight in the half-light of a shadowed silver moonbeam. “You let your precious bride run wild during the day of your own crowning. He should have been tamed, or restrained.”

“As you tamed me, uncle?” Feyd pressed himself against the huge bulk spread across a sprawling chaise seat made for a gargantuan king. A gesture that said: you’ve trained me well. And in training me, you enslaved yourself. Indeed, his uncle was chained to desire as much as Rabban was in slavering after Paul’s lithe loveliness. 

“Hmmm.” A sound of concurment; of scorn; and perhaps, of greedy want. The man did not have to take hold of his hand to guide it to its destination, nor move it in practised strokes to elicit the desired sensation. Feyd did it all of his own accord. He closed his eyes, intending to imagine his lover’s pert little cock and the folds of that delightful cunt in place of this lecherous flesh. 

Instead he was abruptly gripped by a cold sickness. His move to assert dominion over his own disadvantage, and over the man who perversions held him in a death grip, turned on him like a spitting viper. His hand faltered in their skilled strokes. He cursed the unnatural child who had dredged the old ghost of a frightened boy from the depths of his being. That pathetic boy whom Feyd had killed and buried, but evidently not deep enough.

A small pathetic voice surged to the edge of his teeth. Please, my lord –

Feyd bit down on his tongue. SHUT UP, he roared with every fibre of his being.

His hitched breaths alerted Vladimir to his discomfort. This only excited the man, as he knew it would. The pale purplish tongue fixed upon his neck to draw thin teasing strains, then sucked harder to pull a steady stream from him. The bulbous cock that he suspected could only fully harden from his touch was an ugly throbbing thing. The shape and hardness of it felt familiar against the curve of his hand. He wanted to throw up.

The Baron’s own breath was quickening, dripping approval with each rasping exhalation. A thick finger crept past Feyd’s lips. He sucked on it before he could stop himself. Sucked as he had been taught to.

“There you are,” sighed his uncle. “There’s my boy.”

The cold hand cradled a tender boy’s face while his brother slept in the adjoining room. There’s my boy. Such a good, clever boy.

Something inside Feyd snapped and turned his nerves white-hot. He bit back the bile of nausea. Then his jaw clamped down – and a crunch of cartilage filled his ears as a gush of draugr-blood filled his mouth.

The Baron screamed, a terrible sound. His thumb dangled from the rest of his hand by a few bloody sinews. He surged up to wreak retaliation on his beloved nephew. But shock made him sluggish, and Feyd’s blood roared with the madness of a thousand nightmares. He struck before his uncle could and drove his thumbs into the pale grey eyeballs. Drove them in until he felt them give, until he opened his eyes – unaware of having even shut them tight – to see bloody sockets staring back at him.

“My boy,” Vladimir was gasping repeatedly in stunned incomprehension, some part of him grasping after a child who had died long ago. “My boy. What did I do…what…”

Then his next words dissolved into a gurgle when Feyd sliced into him like a fish, sternum to crotch, exposing a spill of organs flushed and hardened with preternatural blood. “You know what you did,” he spat. His entire frame was trembling; had he been human, he would be awash in icy sweat. “You know very well what you did to me.”

He stumbled from the cavernous room, almost as blind as his uncle, numb to everything save the hammering of his heart. The guards outside – desensitised as they were to the various twisted pleasures their lord indulged in – still recoiled at his appearance. Something in his wide seething stare or the snarl frozen on his blood-smeared mouth must be a sight to behold. Blood dripped from his fingers, leaving the impression of delicate red flowers on the white floor.

“Run,” he told them, in a voice that left no room for objection. “He wishes to be left alone. Let nobody anywhere near these doors.”

They would not have dared defy him for the world. He smiled grimly and felt a mad laugh bubbling in his chest at the knowledge that the great fearsome Baron would have not so much as a cleaning-maid within reach to save him.

Only later would he ponder on how he should have gone back to properly kill the monster who could not be slain as ordinary men could. But it was all he could do to hold his sanity together – if he even had any to begin with, if he had not left it behind in the land by the icy seas where the whale hunters roamed.

He had but one goal now that diminished all others before its urgent cry. He would brave the sun-scorched lands so perilous to his kind, and seek the runaway changeling boy whose slender hands held the threads of Feyd’s fate: the threads entangled with those of their strange monstrous child whose arrival into the world dawned ever closer.

Chapter Text

The cursed ship would have made the smooth stealth landing it was built for had a booming explosion not thrown it off course. The eruptions known as a pre-spice mass were a naturally occurring outcome of the strange, volatile chemistry of sandtrouts occupying pockets of water deep beneath the arid surface. Such an eruption would kill most of the larval sandtrouts and leave a glitter-tinged mist in the air: the remnants of their bodies that would become the precious melange on which kingdoms were built. The remaining survivors would grow to become the great sandworms that were the true kings of the Arrakis wilds.

Paul had seen the telling tremors through the viewfinder as they prepared to land. But it was too late to react, and they were too close to the ground. The sands began to shift and quake; and then the violent, self-destructive upheaval that was part of the sandworm’s life cycle sent shockwaves through the vessel and flung him to the ground.

“I think we’ve been breached,” Paul muttered as he struggled dizzily to his feet. “The ship’s been abandoned for centuries. It must be brittle from neglect.”

There was no answer. Leto was silent, which he found worrying. And yet a larger part of him was relieved. It would be easier this way. It would be better for Leto if he remained senseless, unknowing, innocent. He ached for the innocence that had been denied the feared and beloved child of his flesh. Such a birthright had been denied him almost from the moment of his conception.

Paul was relieved to find they were not far off route. By the time the Ampoliros crashed into the firmer grounds where the shai-hulud did not roam – what the natives called drum sand – the large sietch he sought, housed within a low sprawling rock formation, lay within sight on the horizon.

But it was still a long walk for someone nearing the end of his reserves.

He ate and drank the last of the scant rations he had brought aboard while waiting for sundown. There had been no room to carry more than what he could fit in a satchel hidden beneath the most voluminous robes he had while unobtrusively making his way through hidden passages in the citadel’s most unguarded moments. It was unfortunate that even the most modest garments in his possession was the kind made to flatter the figure rather than obscure it. And the material of what he now wore would not protect him for long.

Never had he been more thankful for the survivalist training his mother had subjected him to as soon as he was old enough to bear such duress. It had seemed downright cruel to force upon his child’s body the Bene Gesserit methods of manipulating the body to such a height of meditative stillness that it could live on the barest intake of fluids and food. Perhaps she had somehow foreseen this moment, or gleaned it from Gaius Helen Mohiam’s greater access to strains of prescience tapped from their vast web of seers. His loathing of the Reverend Mother was entangled with an odd desperate affinity for delivering the hope he had so needed. The message that his mother was alive and well, waiting for him just beyond that wind-worn rock face, had spurred him onward to this point in his journey. And he would pursue it to the very limits of his exhausted body.

He would soon find out that those limits were closer than he’d guessed. As the sun became a swollen, low-hanging orb in a red-streaked sky, he felt a trickle of wetness on his inner thighs that he thought at first to be an early breaking of birthwater – until he looked down at the alarming red smear on the pale fabric.

“Leto,” he gasped. At the same time, the voice of his guilt surged forth like a burn of shame. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?

He pushed aside its malignant hiss. There was no time left to waste. He exited the vessel that was breathing the last of its accursed legacy upon him, pulled the robe’s cowl over his head, and set foot onto the searing ground.

He was unprepared for the depth of its sear. The heat rose up like walls of invisible flame, mocking his scant protection against the sapping inferno that threatened to drain him dry. He should be wrapped in a cooling stillsuit that trapped his body’s moisture, not in fine silks and thin-soled shoes that had no place in the open desert. And all the while he bled that precious moisture away. The trickle was a thread-thin rivulet against his thighs. But it was a steady thread, thickening with every few steps. 

He forced himself onward, feeling the weight of his belly a little more with every few feet. And yet Leto had seen his own deliverance here amidst these barren dunes. Surely succour must arrive soon. Or he would perish right here, just a stone’s throw from safety, in the shifting spice-laced sands.

And would that be so bad?

It was so tempting to sink into these sands, to embrace the soft grit and let the spice take him. The faint smell of burning cinnamon was seductive in its promise of a death softened by mesmeric dreams. Or perhaps those dreams would turn out to be nightmares and visions laced with violence. There was no telling what awaited him, the witch-boy who was a freak of nature, an aberrant child about to birth or miscarry another aberration.

Then he raised his eyes from the tempting swirl at his feet and saw the gathering masses encroaching from a distance. They had been barely visible at first in the dimming light, like a spice-induced hallucination. They had come to greet the bearer of their awaited saviour.

“The mother of our Mahdi!” A tremulous, worshipful cry in Chakobsa carried across the dry air. The the single voice was joined by a growing chorus. After a while the scattered murmurings took on a defined chant.

“Lisan al-Gaib! Lisan al-Gaib!”

The Voice from the Outer World.

This outerworld speaker stirred in Paul’s faltering womb upon hearing their call, reaching out like a benevolent god. Tell them that paradise is upon them. Already their faith is rewarded. Unto the vale of the unknowable do they see because of me.

He saw himself then as a sturdy-limbed man with coppery curls and azure eyes whose heartbreaking beauty belied the monstrousness that would befall him. A man with an amalgamation of his delicate bone structure and Feyd’s strong brow and full sensuous lips. And then his hands were outstretched, and he was crying out into the vastness, haloed by the great crimson sun behind him. 

“I give you the silver skies, the golden desert; the green fields that will be! I give these to you. Bless the Maker and His water. May He keep the land for His People!”

The chant rose into a rapturous wailing cheer at the words that were not his. Leto’s possession of his body and will drained the last of its strength, and he fell to his knees. The strong young man was gone; only Paul Atreides was left. The last child of a decimated House being devoured alive by his own get. The world around him was losing its edges, blurred by the haze of a dying light and the shining flecks of sand. This dreamy mirage was disrupted only by a solidifying speck amidst the blur of devotees, growing larger by the second: a figure clad in shades of brown stained by the sunset into a roseate umber.

There was something deeply familiar about its gait.

You will not lose me, said Leto . Here, he comes to carry us home.

Paul gasped at the sight of the second figure running to catch up with the first. He recognised immediately his mother’s quick tenacious movements. And who was this tall broad-shouldered man in whose shadow she fell?

“It can’t be,” he murmured hoarsely through lips that felt like dry leaves. At the sight of the swarthy visage with its warm leonine gaze, he suddenly felt weak with the shock of gladness.

“My boy,” came the deep rumble, rough with worry and relief and love.

“Duncan.”

The name emerged in a sob. His faithful swordmaster, a bastion of strength he had grown up with and held close to his boyish heart, never realising how much of a hole the loss had left until it was filled in a rush that left him overwhelmed. Paul collapsed into his arms and felt the sturdy embrace assure him that all was right with the world, and that he was safe and loved. 

“He’s bleeding,” came Jessica’s urgent pronouncement as Duncan swept him off the ground.

“He’ll be alright.” The swordmaster’s words were a flimsy promise at best. Yet their solid unshakeable warmth held a truth of their own. Even if he perished by the time night fell, he would be with people who would stop at nothing to protect him. The very thought made him swell with tears.

Don’t waste your moisture, he thought, and let himself slip away in Duncan’s strong assuring arms.

There was a stretch of formless dark interspersed with the dreams of a god-emperor both haunted and driven by the enormity of his burden. Somewhere from within the depths of time and the faltering womb he was half-ready to burst from prematurely, a song emerged in a young boy’s lilt, which became the fuller voice of a man, and then somehow an eerie marriage of both.

“Pain and death, death and pain; but I bear,
As blood dries and hearts rend.
Sleep blesses my nightmares, now my days;
Days pace year-long where I live and cannot die
Lost in ways past help and hope, in the dark
I lie. But I bear, and wait. It comes; I wait.”

So went the prophetic doomsong of a demiurge’s child. And none could interpret what it meant save for two: the one whose weakening body he occupied, and the Reverend Mother Ramallo who lay dying and calling for the chosen sayyadina who would not come. Her heir had been called to an even more important task. She who was to be the blessed midwife to deliver the Mahdi; the doorway between the womb-water and the saviour-child.

Paul was aware of Mother Ramallo’s deathbed cries and his mother’s refusal, and the anxious flurries of whispers surrounding his arrival, even as he lay in fitful slumber. In his delirium, his submerged consciousness became one with that of his son’s – raising him beyond his own earthly self to see through the eyes of others. He was a young priestess-apprentice, a nervous girl whose fluttering hands attended his worryingly pale form. He was his mother, face drawn tight in a ghostly echo of her countenance on that moonlit night when she had roused him from sleep to be locked in a windowless room and endure unimaginable pain. He was a little boy sneaking a curious peek into this small sanctuary where only healers and holy women were allowed. Through the boy’s eyes he saw himself, and was startled. He had not realised how whittled-down he looked. His pallor had surely never been so waxen, nor his bones ever protruded so prominently from his shoulders and wrists. 

The bleeding had stopped for now. But his fate still hung in the balance. He felt it as keenly as every heartbeat of every soul within earshot: a perfectly suspended pendulum waiting to swing in one direction or the other.

“He is beautiful,” the apprentice girl murmured.

This awestruck pronouncement startled him. He had, on occasion, been taken by vanity; he was proud of his lustrous hair, the make of his parents’ fine features perfectly set into his own. But this enjoyment was often negated by a stark awareness of how different his body was from other young Atreidean men: the narrow elegance of his hands, the mouth that settled inescapably into a pert feminine softness at odds with the mannish jawline. But he supposed such things had an appeal of their own. Feyd had certainly thought so. And so did this careworn young girl whose own face appeared to have known no such softness.

As her reverent hand brushed his face lightly, he felt a tugging from his child. Entwined as he was in his father-mother’s thoughts, Leto saw at last Paul’s terrible intent in coming to Arrakis. He saw his own colourless lips part to form a child’s plaintive, painful revelation.

“Father. You mean to destroy me.”

Paul was pulled sharply back into his body, no longer hovering somewhere above it, wracked with misery and regret. His son spoke true: he had come here with the hard heart of a killer. A murderous mother wrapped in the aura of divinity. Come to cut short the fearful path his son was bent on taking, no matter how many other possible paths unfolded.

The cowardly part of him had dared to hope he would induce a miscarriage simply by the duress of the journey to deliverance. He would have appeared blameless; a tragic figure who had endeavoured to save his unborn baby and failed.

Paul reflected Leto’s words back at him. I live and cannot die. Lost in ways past help and hope, in the dark I lie. He was beset by a familiar vision of his son trapped in the massive form of a mutated, immortal shai-hulud. The tyrant of Arrakis who would all but destroy the Fremen way of life and lead their children to die in a long and vicious war.  

Is that the life you would choose, Leto? You would fester in your own loneliness while crushing all dissent beneath your might?

There was a minor fight breaking out near the entrance of the tent. Through the flurry of heated exchanged he made out the words “sacred wells” and “sacred water” repeated by both parties several times, each one with more vehemence than the last. They were coming nearer as they argued, and soon he could hear every word spoken at a passionate, careless volume, convinced that the subject of their debate was unconscious and dead to the world.

“If we do not draw from those wells to nourish him, he dies. And the child with him.”

“The Mahdi will live, as foretold. Did you not hear his declaration to his people? Silver skies and green fields – a man with a child-swollen belly haloed by the sun, exactly as the prophecy –”

“The prophecy.” Scorn mixed with frustration. “Prophecies are how they enslave us!”

The conversation was cut short when Paul jerked to life and his chapped lips parted once more: this time not in melancholy song, but in a threatening rasp.

“Save me,” came the jagged words of a grasping monster-child. “Paul Atreides means to kill me. Let him succeed, and your people will be lost, and the hopes of a peaceful paradise disappear beneath the sands forevermore –”

Then Paul’s long agonised gasp overrode the ghastly call for help. Leto had begun a desperate, vicious assault upon his insides. Jessica came running to his side, and he clung urgently to her sleeve.

“You must cut him out,” he choked in his own voice.

He could tell from the set of her brow that she had considered it already. “It may kill you…” she began.

“He’s killing me now.” Even as he said so, he felt the stab of his own selfishness, his bid at self-preservation. “He’s trying to tear his way out.”

Jessica wasted no time. With a few sharp well-placed orders that had seemingly been ready on the tip of her tongue, she commandeered the small but competent team of healers. He saw the gleam of knives being cleaned, heard the faint whir of the Fremen’s ingenious water-distilling devices, ready to purify his spilled blood into useful fluids. If he should die, no drop of his life would go to waste.

“I would have you put to sleep, but your body is too weak for such drugs,” his mother told him. “Besides, I need you here with me. I need you to calm him. You are the only one who can speak to him, to ease his going.”

He sobbed at this imminent end, his evaporating tears taken by the tent and returned to the catchment pods. She detached one of the fully filled pods and pressed it to his mouth. “Drink, slowly.”

He obeyed. The tepid water was marvellous against his parched tongue. “Do you think me selfish?” he said to his mother, filled anew with doubt at the choice he had made. “You would have died for me. Shouldn’t I do the same for my own?”

“I don’t have an answer to that,” came the honest reply. “I know only that I’ll do everything in my power to save you.” She kissed his forehead. “I have to right my wrongs against you. Will you let me try?”

She awaited his answer. He nodded his consent. A healer’s trained hands applied a numbing salve so he would not feel the full brunt of the blades slicing into him, severing from his besieged womb the toxic fruit of a union that had grown sweet for all its bitter beginnings.

He wished that Feyd was here. Gods, how his heart ached for his beloved, the father of his abominable child.

“It’s time for you to let go now,” he whispered. His tears still brimmed, yet he felt oddly calm.  

If I live, he promised, I will do what I can to make the world a safer one. You will be reborn someday into a kinder life. A full life, where you will love and be loved, and never know an eternity of madness.

The tune of a lullaby came to mind: a song his mother would sing him to sleep with in the earliest years of his life. An age of blissful ignorance of a world knit by cruelty and power-hungry plots. He drew it from the depths of his memories and hummed it softly, like a loving parent rocking their child to sleep, letting it seep into the blood of his child. Blood shares. Blood remembers.

He felt the tip of the knife breach his skin. He drew his life force inward – every shred of consciousness, his soul and psyche, everything that constituted his incorporeal being – and wrapped it around his baby like a protective cocoon. The melody ebbing continuously from his throat was woven into the fabric of it. I will be with you. I will love you to the very end. With my last breath, I will follow you to yours.

A growing peace bloomed from his core, faltering and fragile at first, then with a steadier certainty. The sense of peace he endeavoured to instil in Leto was reflected back and magnified like a bead in a kaleidoscope. 

You won’t be alone.

He felt the blade slice cleanly, painlessly, past his womb-skin and around what lay within. He heard his mother’s chant wash over him.

It’s time to let go, my love.

The lullaby reached its final note. The last thread of lifeblood was severed from the half-blossomed child. Paul sighed and went still, and released his grip on the world.

Chapter Text

The black-clad figure arrived in the dead of night, rousing the alarm of the sentries posted at the border of the Fremen stronghold as they recognised his armour as that of their overlords. The very ones they had lost so many fedaykin fighting. But their defeat had tamed them only partially. Their world stood on a knife-edge, on the tilting point of a revolution.

Still, this solitary invader caused a ripple of confusion – Harkonnens came in troops, never alone. They puzzled as to what a lone Harkonnen was doing away from the spice fields. They readied to strike, to stand to attention, frozen with indecision as the curved glass helm slid back to reveal a grim snarl and an ice-cold stare. 

“Bring me to Paul Atreides.”

“What do you want with him?” asked a fierce young Fremen woman. Her tone was modulated, but her bushy hair bristled like a lion with its hackles raised.

Feyd-Rautha would have cut her down without an answer, but an older woman’s voice sliced through the still night air. “Stand down.”

The words rang with authority. The woman who issued them wore the garb of a high priestess, a Reverend Mother. Feyd’s preternatural eyes traced her familiar features as he addressed her with habitual scorn. 

“The Lady Jessica, of House Atreides. Or what remains of it.”

“Follow me,” she said. “I will bring you to my son.”

“And here I thought you would be my most vocal opponent.”

“I’ve not forgotten the part you played in destroying all I hold dear. But Paul has need of you now."

He noticed that despite her elevated status, her face bore no ritual ink, nor were her eyes the startling blue of those who had drunk of the sacred Water. Was she only a stand-in, then? Or an usurper, a pretender to the place left empty by a dead crone?

It was irrelevant for now. His attention was needed for more pressing matters. He held his poisoned blade to her neck in warning should she try to mislead him. In response, she only smiled humourlessly, as if to say: I am past fearing death.

Feyd’s steadfast view that nobody was truly past the fear of their own demise had been shaken by the incident with the needle-wielding assassin, then by the suicidal revenge of Wellington Yueh. And he could not help being intrigued by this woman who was a spawn of the Baron’s loins. A Bene Gesserit of such wit and will, with a strain of draugr blood coursing through her veins, could have risen to dizzying heights of power if she so wished it. Playing queen to this ragged band of desert-dwellers at the edges of civilisation was a poor thing to settle for. Her precious duke of Caladan must have infected her with Caladanian softness.

And yet her steel-hard bearing radiated force with every breath as she entered the tent where her son lay, those gathered bowing to make way for her. The sight of Paul struck a needle of dread into Feyd’s chest. For a moment, he forgot how to breathe.

Paul lay as still as a cool stone tomb bearing his perfect likeness. The beautiful face haloed by the dark spill of curls was a marble-white death mask. Feyd’s preternatural senses that detected the pulse of every living creature nearby could feel nothing from the body he knelt beside. No breath, no heartbeat; no movement of blood. Nothing.

“He’s dead,” he stated in a cold flat voice. He can’t be dead.

“Not quite. His body has…stopped. Only you can save him.”

“How?”

“Blood,” Jessica replied. “Your blood.”

Feyd considered this weighty decision. He had never before turned anyone, though it was something his uncle might have initiated him into someday. Or perhaps Vladimir, with his bloated bottomless ego, had only ever intended that all drinkers stem from his own veins. That all who sought immortality would owe their gift to him alone.

But the transmutation was not a simple, single transfusion. It helped that Paul had already lost much blood; he would not need to be further emptied to make way for the invasion of this new substance. Still, Feyd would need to repeat the process. He would have to draw out the mingled blood from Paul after giving it, then have Paul drink anew from him. The latter might not survive the process. Only a body at full health could.

He said as much to Jessica. She turned those steely eyes on him and replied: “If we do nothing, he dies. There is nothing to lose by trying.”

“You presume to command me, woman. You forget your place. A high priestess of desert rats.”

She said nothing. And yet her silence was not in the least bit submissive. Feyd could have slit her throat in a blink. But he was distracted by the iciness of Paul’s skin, how his limbs were already stiffening. His heart was gripped by that loathsome fear, that loathsome weakness.

“Don’t you dare leave,” he whispered as he cradled his lover to his chest, wondering if he spoke to a corpse.

To the Reverend Mother, he said: “Clear this tent.” 

For the sake of her child, she acquiesced to this one order. A word and a gesture left the place empty save for the three of them.

Feyd sliced a line in his wrist and pressed it to Paul’s unresisting lips. “Drink,” he hissed. Seconds passed, then a minute. The wound began to clot and close up. Feyd reopened it and pressed it insistently against the pallid lips. “Drink, damn you.”

The deep red trickled down his tongue, but he remained unmoving and cold. If he died, and Feyd did not follow him into death, there was little left for him to return to. He had spurned his lord Baron. He would be a hunted man, an orphan once more, with nothing to his name. All he had now was this witch-boy who had abandoned him for the lost soul of a child who should never have been made.

Unbidden, a memory crept into his head of Paul’s head resting on his shoulder, a thick silken lock wrapped around his finger. Paul looking out the library window in a reverie that cast his face in child-like softness. Paul glaring at him in hurt and heartbreak while crouched in the herbarium that reminded him of home. Paul holding his hand to the subtly swollen belly, willing him to bond with their child, in the days before Leto become an all-devouring creature who would kill his own mother to emerge into the light.

That belly was flat and diminished now. “What did you do with the baby?”

“We sacrificed him, to save Paul. I helped cut him out myself.”

“And yet that did not save him.”

“It would have. But he followed Leto into death, or tried to.” Her face twitched with pain she did not bother hiding. “Such is the endurance of a mother’s guilt.”

“A useless sentiment.” He held Paul’s head fast to trickle more blood into his mouth, willing it to find its way into the lifeless body. “Guilt achieves nothing.”

“On the contrary. It can be powerful enough that one desires to be rid of it. It can move one to action, or to save a life.”

She looked to an emptied water bowl sitting on a low platform nearby. “I took the place of the Reverend Mother as she passed. There was no time for the full ritual, I insisted, for the Mahdi’s life was at stake.” A bitter smile curved her comely mouth that was so much like her son’s. “I took command for selfish reasons. So I would have the power to decree that the sacred water in the wells that none here, even dying of thirst, would touch – that it be drawn to nourish my dying son. Their reverence, and their guilt of withholding water from the bearer of the Promised One, led them to surrender it.”

Feyd failed to see anything damning in it. What use was clean water to a people if not to feed and wash and sustain? What was the duty of a parent if not to see one’s heir to useful adulthood? 

“Fools who are steeped in superstition before survival deserve to suffer.”

She smiled sombrely. “Those who can say so have never had to endure such conditions where superstition is all one has.”

Before he could refute her argument, a faint flutter of movement drew his attention, and hers. Paul’s lashes were twitching, his chest starting to rise weakly. Feyd heard his name formed by the blood-stained lips: his name, shaped by a breath full of desperation and love.

It felt as if air had returned to his lungs.

“You fool. You utter idiot,” he growled as Jessica wept. “You could have stayed and lost the baby where you were, instead of crawling halfway across the damned desert.”

“But would you have let him go?” came the faint reply.

Feyd had never had to answer that question barefaced before. Or perhaps he had simply been searching for the answer, and finally found it.

“I would.”

I never wanted it, he thought, with a rush of realisation so heady it made him weak. “I never wanted a child. I was made to sire one, repeatedly, each one a failure. It was my uncle. It was always my –”

His throat closed up at the very thought of Vladimir Harkonnen – at the memory of fleeing that chamber of terror after gutting the man like a fish. He looked sharply at Jessica, mortified that she should have glimpsed his weakness. But her gaze was averted in such a way to allow him discretion without being at all obvious. She had been a diplomat as well as a concubine, after all.

After a second or two, she rose quietly and left, stumbling as she did so. He saw her blinking frantically, blinded by tears. She would be back – the woman had the irksome clingy tenacity of tiger-mothers. At least she had the grace to give them some room, for now. He chafed at how little authority he wielded here. For all he knew the Fremen fighters might be at the door even now, ready to gut him; or, more amusingly, hold him ransom. They would have found that the Baron might not value him quite as much as he once would have.

Paul’s long fingers were curled around his arm. Feyd wanted suddenly to shake them off in spite. “You abandoned me.” The accusation left him like poisonous bile ejected painfully from his gut.

“I wasn’t thinking of… It wasn’t my intention.” Paul’s voice was a brittle whisper. “I meant to...to end him, Feyd. I had to hide my intentions from him, and all the while it was killing me…”

“You never wanted him,” Feyd stated bluntly, truthfully. “Neither did I.”

“But he was mine nonetheless.” 

Paul laid a hand on his flattened stomach. “It’s quiet now,” he said softly. “He’s not speaking to me. I’ll never hear him speak again.”

He wept quietly, wearily, each heave holding a world of sorrow Feyd had no means of dealing with. All he could do was hold Paul as he needed to be held, and feel the tremor of each sob ripple through his own body.

The sobs were abruptly cut off when a spasm of pain made Paul stiffen. “What’s happening?” he gasped.

Feyd reached out to wipe the traces of blood from his mouth, which widened in realisation. “You gave me your blood.”

“To save your life, yes.”

“Does that mean I’m –” Another stab of pain made him cry out. 

“Your body is changing.” Feyd could feel it by touching him, the minute transformations that his organs and nerves and veins were adjusting to. “But you’re not completely turned. I didn’t give you enough, not by half.”

“And what will I become?” he asked, almost accusingly. “Am I not enough of a freak already?”

“I don’t yet know what you will become. But better to be a freak than dead.”

Paul did not reply, his eyes closed as he rode out the fading flares of agony, modulating it with his restored presence of mind and the ways of his weirding-mother. Feyd recalled from Jessica that she had helped cut Leto out. There had been surgery, a wound. He pushed up the hem of the rough but clean homespun shirt Paul was now wearing to see a line marked by darkening blood and puckered by the sewing of it. They had stitched him up neatly enough. Yet the long slit was ugly simply by dint of its existence, the way it marked his body. Still, if Feyd’s blood had done its work, by morning it would be reduced to a thickly scabbed ridge. And soon after that, a scar that faded into nothing. 

The stiffness faded from Paul’s sinews as the pain faded, and his eyes began to fall shut, though his fluttering movements indicated restlessness. His hand ghosted over Feyd’s sunshield armour. “Take it off,” he pleaded. “I need to feel you.”

Feyd was reluctant to shed the only protection he had against the sun. It was dark now. But it would not be dark forever, and the fedaykin might take it into their head to drag him out into the open, if they could overpower him. He was as big a fool as Paul was, coming here alone.

And yet his most overwhelming need at present was the same as Paul’s. He undid the fastenings that could only be tampered with by his fingerprint and a particular combination of applied pressure, and lay next to the other to pull him close. He cradled Paul’s head as the latter drew solace and renewal from the press of his flesh. Paul skin felt as as soft as ever, his blood as warm. Perhaps he had not been changed that much after all. Only time would tell.

For now, all he could do was stay awake and alert, on guard against the danger of dozing off and falling prey to daybreak as he had already fallen prey to the allure of this ragged, precarious existence. This was danger of a different kind, a different flavour from what he was used to and had been shaped to face. The kind that came with freedom from the shadow cast by a man to whom he had once been prisoner.

Paul’s breathing had evened out, his soft exhalations a soothing rhythm as he curled up in the protective curve of his lover’s broader frame. He looked utterly exhausted, but at peace for the moment. A familiar surge of frightening tenderness welled in Feyd’s chest; a tightness that came with the protective instinct compelling him to keep Paul safe. One that had nothing to do with the keeping of an heir.

Except that this time, it did not frighten him as much as it once did. He let it settle into his gut and felt it slowly solidify into a rock-hard certainty.

“If anyone tries to harm you,” he whispered against the spill of soft curls, “a quick death will be a mercy next to what I’ll do.”

Chapter Text

For three days and nights, Feyd-Rautha did not sleep. Jessica kept a hawk-eyed watch on him only to be met with the truth that he was indeed bonded to her son – as inseparable as he was deadly.

“Damned bloodsucker nearly ran me through when I got near them,” Duncan told her. “Showed me that tongue of his, then laughed when I threatened to cut it off. He called me a ‘nice warm juicy morsel’ and told me not to tempt him.”

“An utter madman,” Gurney had concurred, having been similarly acquainted with Feyd-Rautha. He added, most reluctantly: “But Paul couldn’t ask for a better bodyguard.”

Jessica had run through the possibilities of what the Fremen might do with the man: kill him, hold him hostage, exact their due revenge upon Harkonnen flesh. None of these paths boded well with Paul’s involvement. He would not have borne any of it well, especially in his fragile state. The lovers were knit around each other like vines that would snap if one tried to tear them apart.

And so she issued orders that kept the most antagonistic of the sietch’s residents from their door. The mood in the air was one of outrage and uncertainty. The word of the promised child being stillborn had shaken the foundations of a faith that owed its roots to the Bene Gesserit’s insidiously influential seeding of their Missionaria Protectiva.

So much turmoil have we wrought here, she thought. That which should make a proud people stronger have instead sowed crippling superstition.

“How much should I do to reverse what my kind has done?” she whispered in a prayer to no one, as she had been doing often of late. There was a constant loneliness within her that could not be filled; not by Duncan or Gurney, nor by the acolytes who looked up to her despite her refusal of the Water of Life.

I am not worthy of such power, after all. Perhaps I never was.

The pale, hairless young man twitched to alertness at her appearance. She would never have imagined being grateful for the Harkonnen’s presence – even if that gratitude was touched with resentment. Following Leto II’s demise, Paul had fallen into a quiet despair punctuated by bouts of unfeeling numbness, and appeared to respond only to his beloved. To his touch and his voice alone. It cut her deep like a serrated crysknife, this unwitting exclusion that made it clear how Paul’s need for the father of his dead child outweighed his need for her.

“How much will your blood change him?” she asked as she sat opposite Feyd-Rautha, her silent son between them. His long-lashed eyes stared blankly downward in a way that hurt her to notice.

“He’s not changed that much,” Feyd replied, the neutrality of his voice masking uncertainty. He likely knew very little himself of what he had wrought. “Except for the fast healing.”

The long wound that marked the exit of Paul’s lost child had scabbed over completely almost overnight. When Jessica last examined it, the ridged skin was already settling into a shiny stretch of pink scar tissue. Such miracles were beyond even the Bene Gesserit skills Paul was steeped in. Her boy was now somehow more remarkable than ever: not quite human, nor a full-fledged blood drinker. 

He had thankfully shown no signs of needing blood. Jessica had been plagued by a dream in which her son’s lips parted to reveal a fanged tongue. Her waking hours were plagued more by worry that he might never recover from his shell of stillness. But they would cross that bridge when they got there. For now, there was the matter of what Paul’s flight from Giedi Prime meant for House Harkonnen – and by extension all those affected by the ruin of the Baron’s schemes.

“What is your plan now?” she asked Feyd-Rautha, who only shrugged.

“Survive, for as long as this sun-scorched planet will let me.”

“And as for feeding? Can your kind live on animals?”

He did not answer, no doubt unwilling to reveal too much about his biology lest she find ways to exploit its weaknesses.

“Your uncle will come for you eventually,” she added. “Or your brother.”

“Then let them.” A cold half-smile dented his lower face. 

It was, she could admit, an eerily beautiful face. The kwisatz haderach would have been a lovely boy to behold. A saviour shaped for the artist’s brush and chisel, just as her Paul had been. Already a large bas-relief was forming in the great temple housing the sacred wells of a holy figure cast in the radiance of a red sun, his arms outstretched as he spoke the words of his prophet child.

“You still haven’t told me why you came alone.” She employed her most penetrating stare, willing him to speak. “You defied the Baron to do so. Why?”

“You speak as one used to having your questions and whims answered.” His voice was as cold as his humourless smile. “Doubtless you are in an advantageous position. You could have me attacked at a word, though it would cost quite a few lives before I was defeated, and dragged into the light to burn. I am sure it has crossed your mind countless times, as the scheming concubine you are. Only the fact that Paul is bound to me stops you.”

He was right, of course. “And what would you do if nothing bound you together?”

“Far more interesting to ask what I would do if the task of my family’s continuity did not rest on me.”

“But House Harkonnen is not truly your family. Is it?”

His pale blue-grey eyes turned suddenly baleful, no longer the gaze of a sly feline but a cornered beast. “Leave,” he hissed. A single cold command from a young lord used to the obedience of a world ordered around his will and well-being. She reflected wryly that Paul had, at one time, been almost as spoiled before his father taught him better.

Paul had been an only child, naturally given to the overprotective care of his mentors no matter how rigorously they trained him. How, she wondered, had Feyd-Rautha been raised? Had he been a lonely child in a vast citadel whose path had collided with another lonely boy?

Then she recalled all he had done to Paul, and her heart soured once more. “You spoke true,” she replied. “I do have the advantage. It is you who should leave, before I resort to forcing you out. Better to have your dignity intact than be reduced to an insolent boy who must be taught respect –”

He reared forth so fast that she saw only a pale blur. A tongue emerged from between the bared teeth and split at the end like a monstrous blossoming lily. His inhumanly cold breath was upon her neck when Paul spoke for the first time in days.

“Feyd, no!”

Jessica had been on the verge of throwing her Voice into stopping him. She was taken by a wave of relief to see Paul come to life, his arms wrapped around the snarling draugr, his features alive with emotion once more. 

“Please,” he begged. “She’s the only family I have left.”

“I wasn't about to kill her,” Feyd replied, teeth still bared despite the retracted fangs. “Merely reminding her of what she’s dealing with. She’s part monster, after all. There’s a cold-blooded killer in her. Like recognises like.” His head whipped around to stare at Paul as soon as he was released. “You think she wouldn’t have slain you before you emerged from her saintly cunt, if you posed half as much a threat as –”

Paul’s eyes widened and his mouth gaped in shock, in inexpressible hurt. And something in that naked hurt made Feyd fall silent.

Then Paul’s hand shot out to slap Feyd with vehement passion.

“I didn’t want to kill him,” said Paul, trembling from top to toe. “I would have died for him. He was my child. Unwanted at first, but still mine, and yours…” His chest was heaving, but he had run out of tears, or perhaps was making an effort to conserve them.

“I’m aware of your reluctance to do what had to be done.” The hardness faded from Feyd’s words. His hand slid along Paul’s face, and Paul did not push it away. “I’m only saying that –”

He did not get to finish his sentence. A tremor shook the earth: not the low thrum that had announced Feyd’s arrival, but the roar of a much heavier ship. Outside, shouts of soldiers being called to battle rung through the air.

Feyd-Rautha did not look in the least bit ruffled. He rose with the deliberation of one facing fate squarely with a grace that was almost admirable. 

“It seems my dear uncle sends his regards,” he said.

| | | | | | | | |

The tall Harkonnen vessel with its domed bulbous top made Paul think of a colossal black tick as it descended upon the sands in a spice-tinged haze. Its few small windows were darkly glassed and tinted. Paul remembered Doctor Yueh – poor, mad Yueh, who according to Feyd had died trying to avenge his wife – whispering to him of the drauga’s one great weakness: the light of a sun other than that of the dark star over Giedi Prime. Even with Feyd fully sheathed in the protective suit, he felt a jolt of fear when his lover first stepped into the fierce golden day.

“I’m not new to Arrakis,” Feyd had assured him, with a trace of his old smugness. “Nor a sheltered soft leech of a noble who shrinks at the very thought of a foreign sun.”

“No,” Paul had agreed. “You’re the hardy son of a Bjondax whale hunter.”

“That’s right.” The small smile was almost gleeful, almost child-like, in a way that made Paul’s heart flutter with a feeling he could only describe as love.

That love made him terribly afraid for Feyd. He watched the black-clad figure walk towards the huge black vessel and was reminded of the proud warrior-prince of the naumachia, boarding a seaship with a pirate’s rakishness. He was briefly distracted from his anxiousness only when he stepped into the light himself. He stopped and gasped at the new sensations of its heat, at the smoky tingle of spice carried by the wind from the dunes where melange was thickest.

Draugr blood. So this was what it did to the body – every sensation magnified, with a greater sensitivity than ever to the precious melange which prolonged life and heightened the senses. The sky was so beautiful it made him want to weep wasteful tears. The golden evening was edging close to sunset, the burn of its touch lightening into a deeper, milder heat. A lightness pervaded his healed body, which was a far cry from when he’d been drained nearly to death as he struggled across the sands in the form of a messianic mother figure.

He looked down at his hands and saw for a moment his long fingers growing even longer, freakishly stretched out into flesh-coloured rivers. He saw minuscule crevices in his palms, each tiny line vividly deepened in the low sun’s glare. The sound of a heartbeat passed by his ear, strikingly familiar in its rhythm, its shape. He looked up to realise it belonged to Duncan. But Duncan had not been near him at all, only now approaching with a smile that was more assuring than the man truly felt.

And he realised that he could gauge such feelings – by the quickness of the pulse, the subtle swelling or shrinking of of blood vessels, a trace of sweat that was not merely heat-induced.

“You alright, my boy?” 

Duncan had asked him that countless times for as long as they had known each other: sometimes in casual greeting, other times in deep concern that dug lines into his handsome leonine face. This was clearly a case for the latter.

Paul squeezed his hand gratefully. A part of him would always be Duncan’s boy. “I will be,” he replied.

“That’s the spirit.” Duncan’s hand clasped his neck briefly. Paul wanted to tell him to keep it there. He wanted to confess his deep if short-lived infatuation in the early years of his adolescence: one that had left in its wake a lasting fondness. He remembered Duncan sweeping him off his feet and carrying him to safety as the blood of miscarriage soaked into his clothes. Though he felt a little less vulnerable sheathed in a stillsuit, he could not be gladder for his swordmaster's familiar loving presence. He closed his eyes to savour the steady throb of the warrior’s heart and the hand that rested against his back.

When his eyes next opened, they were fixed upon a menacing form that seemed a scaled-down version of the Harkonnen ship: dark and bulbous, with arachnoid legs that walked in smooth mechanical motions over the sand. The gleaming black armour housed a man’s massive bulk; Paul felt the distinctly inhuman nature even from this distance, and recognised the armoured being as the Baron himself.

So intimidating was his figure that it took a while to notice the man walking with strident anger before him. By the bullish shoulders and hulking gait, Paul knew it to be Glossu Rabban, as securely shielded from head to toe as his younger brother. The two siblings were facing each other down, speaking in modulated tones that did not take long to grow sharp and heated. Paul found that despite the building storm around them – a small tide of white-clad Sardaukar against Fremen fedaykin in shades of dun-brown – he could, with a little focus, make out the shape of their words.

“I have no quarrel with you, brother.”

Rabban growled. “Of course you don’t. When have you had true reason to fight for respect? All you do is take, as if the world owes you greatness. Thinking you can scurry offworld as you please – and for what? To cower among sandrats like a lowly coward?”

“If I were a coward, I would hardly choose a planet with so much sun.”

“Oh, we know why you’re here, and not hiding in some plush whorehouse in Gamont. You’re after your whore.” His voice was raised now, enough to be heard by everyone within a stone’s throw. “You’d abandon your House, your duty, your own blood. You’d spit on everything we’ve built for being a slave to his cunt!”

Rabban jabbed a finger in Paul’s direction. The open reminder to all of the unusual nature of Paul’s body made his face burn. His mouth went dry and his heart began pounding at the memory of the beastly hands on him, how he’d kissed his predator lasciviously and hated himself for it. How he’d felt sick for shaming himself while wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake.

Then Jessica’s blade-sharp Voice reverberated through the air. All present felt her white-hot rage at the insult to her son. Rabban actually stumbled back and nearly fell on his rump. Paul imagined his face turning an angry purple behind the black helm, his mouth clamped shut as if stapled in place. He would have been more vindicated if not for the residual echo of his own humiliation that made his eyeballs pound and his feet sway.

Then Duncan’s protective arm was around him, a steadying hand on his chest guiding his panicked breaths.

“Hey. Listen. Don’t let that worthless fool shame you.” Duncan clasped his face. “Look around. Look at all who stand with you.”

On Paul’s other side stood his mother and Gurney Halleck, hands on their weapons with faces like steel. And at their backs were a whole row of fully armed Fremen. Paul himself was equipped with a knife once wielded by his bullfighting grandfather. He curled his fingers around its hilt and thought of how he could barely recall his combat training. When he tried to summon the lessons he had been drilled in, his mind turned horridly blank. He kept thinking of the night he’d been snatched from his home, and how all those drills had been useless in the end.

“We’ll defend you with our lives,” said his swordmaster. “Against every last one of them.”

“But will you defend him?”

Paul looked to his beloved, then back at the frowning Duncan. “My mother has told you of our bond. To protect him is to protect me.”

Duncan stared at Feyd, and exhaled heavily. “He is merely paying for his actions. He chose his path.”

“No. He didn’t. It was foisted upon him, and he was abused and brainwashed into seeing it as his only hope for power. For control over his own destiny.”

“Are you so sure he didn’t brainwash you to see it as such?”

“I’m sure.” Paul bit his lip hard to hold back the images of the Baron doing unspeakable things to a young frightened boy. He watched the despicable overlord, who had thus far remained silent, step forward in his mechanical suit. He appeared to either be declaring a duel or meting out punishment. Then the black-helmed heads turned as one to where Paul stood. The gesture lasted for a split second, no more – visible only to his sharpened perception, and perhaps to his weirding mother. But it was enough to rouse his alarm. Distracted, he could do no more than grasp at their snatches of conversation, like trying to catch flies with his bare hands.

“Are you sure letting him live will not endanger us?” asked Duncan. “Like saving a scorpion, only for it to turn tail and sting you because it’s in its nature?”

“Being a killer was not always his nature. Not before he…” 

“Before he what?”

“Before he was…changed.” Paul could not say anymore without betraying the secrets that were Feyd’s alone to divulge.

“By ‘changed’, you mean turned into a blood drinker.”

“More than that.” When Duncan remained doubtful, he added: “He told me nothing himself. He would rather have everyone believe he is a heartless killing machine than the boy he once was.”

“Then who told you what he did not?”

“Leto,” he replied, in a painful whisper that constricted his chest. It still hurt him to speak of the child he had lost. The child he had come to Arrakis to kill. 

Duncan drew him close, an arm firm around his shoulders, encircling Paul’s narrow frame in his large assuring one. Paul did not speak until he trusted his voice not to tremble and waver. Then he swallowed to clear his throat and spoke softly but clearly, in a tone that held an echo of the late Duke.

“It is my wish that you stand by him should his life be in danger. I would have your word, Swordmaster Idaho.”

Duncan took Paul’s hand and held it, for a moment, with the tenderness of a man asking his beau for a dance. His thumb moved softly across Paul’s knuckles as if memorising each undulation. And Paul wondered if perhaps his unrequited boyhood infatuation had ever, if just for a flicker, been quietly mutual after all.

Then the swordmaster pressed a kiss to his knuckles, to the finger that should have inherited his father’s ring. “You have my word,” he said softly.

Chapter Text

The world went still around Feyd-Rautha as Baron Harkonnen’s ultimatum fell upon the sand like the chimes of a death knell. The pronouncement was such: Paul Atreides would be surrendered back into Harkonnen hands, or death would fall upon Arrakis, and all who chose to protect him – including Feyd himself.

“And what will you do with him?” Feyd asked, despite knowing the answer that rested sourly at the back of his throat. “You wish to get another heir? It takes two to make one.”

“No,” came the calm reply. “It takes only the breeder. I believe you know that already.”

He thought of the Tleilaxu and their grotesque chamber in which they turned living bodies into birthing tanks. It was a miracle that the Baron had not punished him more severely for his defiance in snatching Paul from that hidden laboratory. “He barely survived this birth – which turned out a failure, in a long line of failures. Your truthsayers have misled you. He’ll be of no use to you.”

For a moment, Feyd was sure he had made a grievous misstep. If Vladimir was convinced that Paul served no purpose to House Harkonnen, there was no reason not to end him. The Fremen might retaliate, and what shreds remained of House Atreides. But their fight would be laughably brief against the Sardaukar that stood ready to kill every man, woman and child at the Baron’s word.

A silence fell between them, each passing second like another deepening inch in a deadly chasm. The setting sun cast strange long shadows with penumbra that spread like inkblots across the ground. The day always darkened rapidly at such an hour; enough that he could slide his helm back with a smooth hiss.

“It would be easiest to let the Bene Gesserit cultivate another breeder,” he concluded. “There is time, after all. Creatures like us have nothing if not time.”

“And how do you plan to use yours?” Vladimir slid back his own protective helm. He looked rather poorly, thought Feyd, though surely he would have gorged on enough bodies to heal from being sliced up. “You made a rather dramatic exit. Do you seek to overthrow me, dear nephew?”

Feyd smiled darkly. “I don’t care for your throne. Perhaps I did, once. But now…” He shrugged, if only to try and ease the tightness in his shoulders. “You may give it to my brother. Or you may rot upon it for another five hundred years. I couldn’t care less.” Anger was rising in his chest, pounding in his head, its burgeoning tide pushing at the volume of his word so that those who stood nearest to him – Rabban, Paul, his mother and swordmaster – could hear them clearly. “There is nothing you can offer me, uncle, that will persuade me to whore myself in your bedchamber. I had quite enough of that when I was a little boy.”

Paul spilled what sounded like a gasp of pain. Rabban glared at him with a strange mix of helplessness and denial and outrage.

“What are you suggesting…?” he choked out. “How dare you throw about such – such lies –”

“I speak the truth, brother. Now you know what conspired while you were sleeping safe and sound all those years, just a wall’s breadth away. Now you know why he insisted we sleep in separate rooms.” His humourless smile was twisted into a grimace that made his face an ugly thing, ruining the beauty his uncle so loved to praise while his hands were busy schooling a young boy to take pleasure in what he most feared.

Disgust can turn to pleasure.  

One of the first lessons he had learnt at his mentor’s knee.

“You may speak as you wish. But all here know you are hardly a man of your word.” The Baron’s words rang as clear as Feyd’s. “You swore fealty to me, to your brother, to the House without which you would have died a starving little orphan. You would have been a great man, Feyd-Rautha. But you’ve shown yourself in the end to be an ungrateful little maggot wallowing in the rot of your petty lusts. A rabid cur who bites the very hand that fed him.”

The soldiers closed in, and Feyd smelled his death in their intent. “A rabid animal must be put down before it destroys those around it,” his uncle continued with a graven sorrow that seemed only to mock him. “You were a fine boy, and a finer man. I had such hopes that you would fulfil your potential. That you would show the world who you are.”

“I am showing them.” Feyd kept his voice raised and hard-edged so it would echo off the rock walls of the sietch. “I am the monster you made me. I am, or was , the na’Baron of House Harkonnen. I am the boy you began training at the age of nine to pleasure you.” He felt a strangely calming smile settle on his face. “And I am the son of Abulurd Rabban the whalehunter.”

Vladimir’s eyes narrowed into an ugly gleam in the darkening light. Feyd’s refusal to acknowledge the Baron’s inheritance spoke a thousand words. “You will be nothing but dust, boy,” he said softly, “if you do not step aside.”

He felt Paul standing a few paces behind him, and turned to see the lovely face pale but resolute. Then Paul’s words reached his ear in the same covert manner he had employed during the hearing with the barony’s landowners.

“Hand me over. Everything will be fine. Trust me.”

Feyd pulled him out of earshot and held him close, as if whispering threats into his ear. “What is your plan?” he hissed.

“Leto foresaw the Baron’s death. There were a number of paths he could have taken. When he chose to come to Arrakis, he chose to die here. He will die in the sun.”

A thread of memory was dredged up at his words: an echo of their child’s prophecy. Something about his uncle meeting a painful death thanks to what he had become.

“How sure are you?”

“Sure enough. I don’t want to be taken from you any more than you do, Feyd.” Paul’s eyes were welling with tears. “I know Leto spoke true. Even in death, he’s saving my life. Saving us.”

He drew back and let a trickle of precious moisture escape. All who were present saw it. The tears could not have come at a more opportune time; it made their apparent surrender sweetly convincing.

“Take him then.” Feyd shoved him forward roughly, and he fell to his knees like a man without hope. “Take him, and leave me in peace.”

As two Harkonnen soldiers dragged Paul to his feet and led him towards the tall dark vessel, Jessica and Gurney both ran forward. “My lord Baron,” Jessica said in tones of strained defeat. “Father. I beg that you let me accompany my son to the shipmouth. Please.” She took his hand and pressed her forehead to it.

As heartless as Vladimir was, it flattered him to have the newly crowned Reverend Mother address him as her sire. Beside her, the warmaster looked appropriately humbled as he surrendered his weapons so that he would be allowed to chaperone his lady.

He gestured grandly in his role of a benevolent overlord. Jessica went to her son, and they walked with all the penitent sorrow of a mother and child about to be forever parted. They had it all planned, Feyd marvelled. For a good long moment, he was angered by knowing he had been excluded from this scheming. Tempering that anger was a more sensible if equally cynical voice – Do you think they’ll ever treat you as their own? You are an unnatural, immortal creature who will outlive them all. Paul may live a little longer thanks to your lifesaving blood. But in the end, you will be alone. You should get used to it.

Gods, how he hated that voice. It always ended up sounding like his uncle.

Yes, your uncle, the one whose abuse made you stronger. You rose above it in the end, didn’t you? Perhaps you should follow him onto that ship. However much you hate each other, he and Rabban are all you have.

He suddenly could not bear to be left with that insidious whisper in his head. He strode almost frantically towards the shipmouth, filled with a terrible fear that Paul’s plan would not work, that surely they were hopelessly outnumbered…

Paul leaned close to the Baron as if begging for forgiveness, distress written on his face. The Baron reached out to stroke his face with lecherous fingers. A thick pale thumb penetrated the soft mouth: a sight that made Feyd hot with rage.

At that moment of distraction, Jessica’s witch-Voice rang through the air to disarm the surrounding guards. They collapsed in a heap where they stood.

And everything fell into place.

The closest encroaching soldiers were taken down first – shot by small lasguns hidden in Gurney’s boots. He tossed another to Duncan so he could make short work of the enclosing soldiers. In the chaos of the melee, Jessica stabbed out the Baron’s eyes in an eerie yet appropriate echo of what Feyd had done. She rendered him speechless as well as sightless when she sliced out his tongue before cutting open a red river in his pendulous neck that glistened darkly in the last of the fleeing light.

Feyd saw for the first time how helpless the Baron truly was behind the smokescreen of his unassailable largeness and his armies and the terror of his reputation. This revelation shocked the stone-faced Sardaukar, who were briefly shaken as they awaited the orders that would never come. Then a sharp order from their commander got them back into working order. But something in their fierce movements and shouts held a note of desperation. They were no longer sure what they were defending, unsure of whether the empire they served and benefited from would still be standing by tomorrow.

In the meantime, Paul was left fighting Glossu Rabban, some of his training coming back into play as awkward feints and strikes quickly slid into a steady grace. Feyd admired how well he moved in between chalking up a body count of soldiers himself, men who were once on his side. He had never had a chance to see Paul in combat. But he could not risk Rabban’s own considerable talents in battle besting the slender dukeling. Not for nothing had he been employed as the family’s warlord. Feyd could see that Paul’s agility had improved further with his newly sharpened senses. But there were moments where he faltered; where the sensory assault became overwhelming. Feyd remembered well that feeling. And he had not been called to fight for his life so fresh from turning.

Paul was already beginning to struggle. As for Rabban, his immortal body would not tire anytime soon. If only it was daylight, he would find the fight far more equal. But night had properly fallen now. The time of the draugr had come.

Feyd felled the last man in his path and made a beeline for his brother. “Stand aside,” he told Paul.

Rabban growled and wasted no breath in coming for him. The fight was quick and brutal. Feyd lost a finger in the process, but did not let it slow him down. Bones were fractured, noses and lips pounded into pulp before mending swiftly, the sunshield armour threatening to shatter beneath their relentless force. The pendulum of victory might have swung in either direction. Both brothers were evenly matched, their respective strengths and weaknesses perfectly interlocking in ways that trapped them in a tie.

Then Paul dove in unexpectedly, sliding beneath Rabban to grab his calves and topple him in a moment of imbalance. It was all the advantage Feyd needed. He grabbed Rabban’s head and did to him what Jessica had done to their uncle, robbing him of sight and speech.

“Stop whining,” he grunted as Rabban roared tonguelessly through a spill of viscous blood. “You’ll live.”

A thrum shook the ground. “What is that?” Paul began, then gasped as his industrious studies of Arrakis paid off. “Sandworms!”

“What?”

“Sandworms!” Duncan echoed as he ran up to them. “Lasgun tremors tend to set them off. We were prepared for that. Come on!”

“Wait…Feyd!” But Duncan had no room for Paul’s objections, practically carrying him off and leaving Feyd in their wake. Feyd smiled grimly at the thought of feeding his brother to the first worm to appear. But then something in him decided otherwise. He hauled Rabban to his feet and shoved him along. And Rabban, blinded and helpless, was forced to submit to his guidance. 

“Thank you, brother,” he muttered in a garble that was just barely comprehensible. Feyd could not deny that it was a most gratifying sound.

“You’ll get to make it up to me later,” he replied smugly. They reached a low tunnel in the sietch: one of many that were opened for use only in times like these. “Now get in.”

They reached safety not a moment too soon; the first of the shai-hulud burst through the softer ground that lay just beyond the drum-sand as the last few Fremen, who had been anticipating its arrival, dove into the sietch. The Harkonnen army, unprepared as they were for the environment abruptly turning against them, disappeared into the colossal long-toothed maws. A handful narrowly escaped falling into the abyss. They were inconsequential now; lordless and aimless until they were reclaimed under a new name.

The largest worm emitted a deep, almost melodic groan that shook the earth for miles around. All watched in awe and terror as the huge black Harkonnen vessel sank slowly but inexorably into the shifting ground. For a moment it seemed that the worm might give it up after all; the hard carapace of armour could not make an appealing meal. But it soon became apparent that the great devourer-god, the Old Man of the Desert, had come to destroy all that did not belong to the land.

“Bless the Maker and his Water. Bless the coming and going of Him.” The murmurs spread through the Fremen, Jessica and Duncan picking up the chant along with them. All that was left now was the black bulbous top of the ship peeking from the impossibly large maw. In the distance, Feyd thought he glimpsed a dark figure stumbling away on large arachnoid legs. He wondered if it would meet its just fate.

“May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep this world for His People.”

The last of the ship disappeared from view. Feyd became aware of Paul’s breath against his neck.

“I thought I’d lost you. When we left you behind.” Paul’s voice was small and jagged with tears.

Feyd was glad to feel the weight of his head on his shoulder, the sweat-dampened softness of his tangled curls. Yet the first words from his mouth were: “You didn’t tell me of your plan.”

“It was mostly my mother’s. It hurt her to imagine it, to see me fall back into the Baron’s hands, even for a moment. But she knew it was the most likely course to succeed. And we had the surety of Leto’s prediction.”

“So that prediction wasn’t a lie.”

“Feyd.” Paul looked hurt, though he should know Feyd better by now.

“Don’t look so stung,” he scoffed, pulling one of Paul’s curled forelocks teasingly.

In truth, Feyd might never fully trust him not to lie. Paul was clever, and with cleverness came the ability to manipulate truth to suit the circumstance. He had been taught that constant suspicion of both foes and allies – especially allies, and most especially lovers – was simply a survivor’s mindset.

He was tired of being suspicious. A deep weariness had begun to bubble up within him; he felt it all the more keenly when Paul’s arms encircled him. And along with that weariness was a deep, quiet relief.

“I love you,” Paul whispered in between the kiss with his dangerously, unbearably soft lips.

“I know.”

Chapter Text

The sandworms left in the night with the same uncaring, sudden speed that had marked their arrival. When the dust settled, the handful of Fremen who had made it their mission to hunt down the Baron of House Harkonnen – even if the attack brought war and the Padishah’s wrath upon them – met with success when they saw the large spider-like silhouette traversing the dunes in search of shelter.

He was sharp enough to hear them despite being blinded. For a minute or so, he kept them fearful and at bay, for they had heard tales of the monsters who reigned beneath the pale light of the black sun. Then someone struck a flare that parted the darkness of night to reveal the extent of the still-healing wounds his own daughter had inflicted.

“He is tongueless,” exclaimed a wiry bushy-haired girl. Her teeth were bared in a triumphant snarl. “I heard they suck the life from you with their tongues.”

“Then he cannot harm us,” crowed her compatriot. To the rest, he called: “Take him!” 

They went first for the mechanical legs that were his only chance of escape. One of them he crushed with his preternatural strength, relishing the crunch of bone and the wetness of blood that he had to suck on pathetically with a slobbering mouth and the stump of his tongue to draw what little strength he could. He needed to properly feed; that would have strengthened him enough to tilt the odds back in his favour.

But they were too numerous and too strategic, driven by the steady embers of vengeance for lives lost at Harkonnen hands. They subdued and bound him and dragged him into an intercepting ornithopter along with their fallen warrior, whom they wrapped in one of their jubba cloaks and said a brief prayer over. The thopter flew them back to the sietch grounds, where their sledgehammers went to work on his armour. It took longer than they anticipated; the material was one made to endure blows in battle without cracking enough to let in light. But they were tenacious and unafraid, and did not cease their blows until most of it lay in splinters around his incapacitated form.

The next few hours following the capture passed almost peacefully. Feyd, who had slept at long last after a stretch of wide-eyed days and nights, woke up to the velvety dim wash of predawn. Paul was also stirring to wakefulness while clinging loosely to Feyd’s back. His mother was already up and on guard, as expected. Her head turned hawk-like to Gurney Halleck when he entered bearing news.

“They’ve found your uncle,” he said to Feyd. “Thought you’d like to know.”

Feyd rose and pulled on his armour. He heard the Baron’s attempt at negotiations with his captors, and realised what was happening. Leto II had indeed prophesied true. Yet this knowledge did nothing to prepare him for the sight that greeted them.

Vladimir was half-naked and chained to the thopter that had borne him here, his pallid bulk like a spreading tumour when so exposed. Feyd was almost dismayed to see the man he had once feared and revered reduced to such indignity. He felt a brief surge of shame, filled with the urge to hide this ghastly sight from the flaying stares of all those gathered to witness the humiliation of their oppressor.

“Feyd. My dear boy.” Vladimir’s severed tongue had grown back, though his eyes had yet to catch up. A single half-formed eyeball – a gelatinous bloodshot mass with a pale iris at its centre – fixed upon Feyd, trying to draw him closer. “You must know that your future, your survival, rests on my own.”

“And what future is that?”

“Your rightful place as my heir. And a life where every privilege is yours to command.”

“What if I have no need for that? What else could I gain from keeping you alive?”

The Baron chuckled, a dry rasp that masked perhaps a hint of desperation. “You forget how fiercely contested our place is, boy. Half the Imperium kneels at our feet to receive our boons; the other half would wipe out our House at the first sign of weakness. You think they would not come after you?”

“So you’re offering your protection.” Feyd felt a terrible smile twist his face apart. “I can see you did a fine job of protecting yourself.”

“Feyd!” A stunted half-grown tongue formed his name. Rabban was stumbling towards him, still blinded in one eye, the other almost fully regrown and wide with alarm. “We have to save him. Listen to him. You think we’ll survive two days as soon as news of his death reaches –”

“Shut up.”

“You haven’t heard what I have to say – what I can give you.” The Baron intonation had shifted subtly into a persuasive lilt. “Feyd, Rabban. Hear me out. If after you decide I’m of no further use, then drag me back out into the sun. But first you must consider what lies ahead if I perish.”

“I know what lies ahead for me.” Feyd had already formed his decision, though it took the act of looking upon his uncle’s decrepit form to seal it. “Giedi Prime was never my true home. I’m not returning to the barony. Rabban can take my place, and much joy may he have of it.” He looked to his brother. “Listen to Piter. Flatter him; make him see how your rise will aid his own. The truthsayer Mohiam may help you, or she may not. That is no longer my concern.”

Rabban stared back incredulously. “I don’t believe that. You don’t give things up easily. You cling to them like a damned barnacle.”

“Only to what I’m bent on having.” Feyd walked up to the sibling he had warred with almost for as long as he could remember. The sibling who had made life bearable when they were first orphaned, who had been his shield when he was a small scrawny child. “You may have everything that was once mine. But first, you will do one last thing. Or you can choose to throw in your lot with our dear uncle.”

He nodded to their surroundings. Almost every sietch resident were gathered to witness this momentous downfall, armed and ready to slay any remaining Harkonnen loyalist. “Prove your fealty to my will, and I will see you depart unharmed.”

“What would you have me do?” Rabban asked with loathing trepidation.

Feyd called to his lover, who materialised readily at his side. “What are you…” he began, but Feyd quieted him with a gesture, then turned back to Rabban.

“Kneel before him and kiss his feet.”

Both Paul’s and Rabban’s eyes widened. “You cannot be serious,” the latter choked out.

“I am perfectly serious. His arrival led to the prospering of our family. You’ve treated him poorly for one so valuable. You molested him several times without his or my consent, including at the very public event of my ascension, which cast us in a less than favourable light. I am willing to forgive your faults against me, brother. But amends must be made to my mate.”

“Mate? He is a breeder, nothing more –”

Feyd stepped forward, lightning-quick, and kicked him in the gut. Rabban fell to the ground in an ungainly manner to find Feyd’s hard sole on his neck when he tried to rise. 

“Time is running out, brother. The sun is almost up.” His face was shoved to where Paul’s feet were planted. “Make your choice.”

Rabban was wise enough, in the end, to know that his remaining shreds of pride were not worth dying painfully for. With a tremor of loathing, he abased himself before the last Atreides child and pressed his lips to the sand-dusted boots.

“I forgive you,” Paul said quietly. He spoke in a manner that suggested Rabban was beneath him, barely worth his anger.

Rabban looked up – and for a strangely euphoric moment, he saw the Atreides boy in a new light. The sculpted features and halo of wind-whipped curls were touched with a soft glow that made him appear as the godly figure of legend come to life. A god who had graced him with mercy, who saw through his shortcomings to the heart of a craven creature desperate for approval, for admiration.

The warm glow was also a warning. Rabban snapped his sunshield helm in place just in time to see the thin glimmer of pale gold widen on the horizon. The defeated baron began writhing in his chains, the pale grey pupil in its blood-crusted orb shrunken in fear. He looked pleadingly at his nephews with the last sliver of hope wrought large upon his face. Then the first flare of light fell upon him. The first layer of his flesh began to blister and burn as if pressed against red-hot steel. It wasn’t long before the sun that was so merciless even to human bodies took him apart and filled the air with the stench of searing flesh: not that of an ordinary man being burnt, but something that smelled somehow putrid, enough to keep even the most curious or the most vengeful at a distance that would not make the eyes water. His ragged gasps and moans coalesced into a string of long, unearthly screams. 

Paul watched in morbid fascination until the screaming became too much to bear, then turned to bury his face in Feyd’s shoulder. Rabban was manacled and hauled away to be held in confinement. He did not offer any resistance, his shoulders slumped and slack in disbelief, shocked beyond speech.

Feyd held Paul while cradling his head protectively to dampen the sounds that so perturbed his lover. All the while he never took his eyes off his uncle and abuser. Vladimir died screaming his name – be it in desperation, or in rage, or the shock of being betrayed by the boy he had raised to fear and please him, Feyd would never know. And neither did he care. 

Only when the ancient, infallible Baron of House Harkonnen was reduced to a mass of scalded flesh-tissue amidst tattered remnants of clothing did he cease his unblinking stare.

“It’s over,” he said softly. He can’t hurt me anymore.

The realisation hit him like a wall, and he felt faint with relief. Then it was Paul who was steadying him, holding him tight, protecting him. The moment of weakness shamed him. Unworthy, he thought. He should tear off his armour and join his cursed uncle in death. Only the look on Paul’s face kept him from falling headlong into these fantasies of self-immolation. There was none of the pity he feared anywhere in those delicate features that hid such resilience, only a quiet triumph.

“You’ve won,” Paul whispered. “You could have become like him. But you didn’t, in the end.”

“Are you so sure of that?” Feyd laid a hand on his narrow waist. “He shaped me to be an extension of him. And we are kin. A part of him lives in me, as your dead father lives in you.”

“I am not my father,” said Paul. “I carry the memory of him, of what he taught me. But I am not him.”

Feyd scoffed at his reasoning. “What are we, if not memories and lessons? We tumble from the womb knowing nothing.” Paul flinched a little, perhaps from the thought of the unborn baby possessed of too much knowing tumbled prematurely from his own womb. “Everything we are comes from someone before. You with your Bene Gesserit bloodline should know that.”

The order Paul’s mother had once sworn devotion to drew their highest power from the ancestral memory-river of the women before them. Countless thousands of women, stretching into eternity. How did one forge an identity when moulded from birth by unyielding hands?

Such questions could wait. He realised with a start that he was Baron now. And his subjects, or what remained of them, awaited his next move.

“We can argue about philosophy later.” Feyd walked towards the ruined corpse, unchaining it from the thopter. “I have a body to dispose of and a barony to hand over.”

The surviving Harkonnen soldiers were tasked to dispose of the late Baron along with the rest of their deceased in the time-honoured manner of giving the dead back to the land – to the jaws of the shai-hulud. As was their custom, the Fremen drained the bodies of precious fluids to be filtered and distilled for their reserves before delivering them into the hands of the desert and its devouring titan-gods. The only body they truly had no use for was the heap of flesh that was once Vladimir Harkonnen. “Such a creature has nothing but poison in its veins,” said one. “It’s apart from any people, apart from the land. It is part of nothing.”

Feyd denied none of this. He had once delighted in the strangeness and horror of what he was, in knowing it made him stronger, with only one weakness that kept him now from touching the man whose touch he would need every so often to keep from degrading into mad desirous despair.

Of course. Not one weakness, but two. Paul Atreides would forever be his lover and his downfall. Yet he could not claim to regret it.

Later, after nightfall, they made love hungrily while ensconced in a small stilltent that caught the vapour of their heaving, sighing bodies. Paul’s cunt quivered and throbbed and dripped at the skilful manipulations of his fingers. Feyd lapped eagerly at the clear fluid leaking from the flushed opening and from the small hard cock above, cherishing how Paul squirmed at each thrust of his tongue, and noticing the subtle change in the taste of his sex; a sharp new complexity that was not at all unpleasant.

“Does it please you?” Paul’s breathless query was somehow both teasing and sincere. He was the sort of lover inclined to please, to submit, or so it seemed. Feyd was curious to discover what sort of inclinations would unfold away from the place that had imprisoned him and the ordeals forced upon his body. Would he grow more demanding, more querulous and tempestuous? He could be difficult enough as it was. There were times when he spoke with a touch of the imperiousness one could expect from the beloved only child and heir of a once-powerful duchy.

“Pleasing enough that I would have more,” Feyd replied. His fingers continued tormenting his beloved, who moaned in ardent protest and surrendered forth more of the slick nectar that Fremen couplings very likely had precious little of, so intrinsic was moisture-saving to their way of life. Here between a monster and his hybrid companion, two beautiful and unnatural children, such waste could be their shameful, delightful little secret.

Feyd pulled the narrow hips against his when at last he could no longer bear the ache of his rigid sex. He plunged into the wet folds and felt Paul quake with an effort to bite back his cries. He could be deliciously loud during sex, something that Feyd could never get enough of.

He grabbed Paul’s slender wrists and pinned them in place above his head, then clamped a hand firmly over the lips that were already dented with bite marks. “Don’t hold back,” he rasped. “I want to hear you.”

Paul’s lashes fluttered frantically as he thrust upward in response, evidently further aroused by being so restrained and silenced. He did as he was told and let his stifled cries fall wantonly against the palm that had made him shudder the first time he felt it for how monstrously smooth and hard it was.

Feyd removed the silencing hand just after the first peak of orgasm so he could claim Paul’s mouth with his own and catch each shuddering moan between his lips. He loosed his own long, low groan into Paul’s gaping mouth as his own climax arrived and his gush of spend spilled deep into the hot, wet vessel that seemed eager to welcome it.

He wondered if perhaps they would ever have another baby. One who was free of the ambitions and plots woven long before their births, conceived away from the watchful gaze of the puppetmasters who had attempted to breed and mould them into the perfect progenitors of a new race. He tumbled loose-limbed beside Paul and lay awake for an hour after their coitus, his eyes absently tracing the textures of the tent’s cunningly woven fabric. He sat up for a while to watch Paul’s peaceful, slumbering form, the elfin face so young still in its nest of curls that it was hard to believe all he had been through.

Then Feyd lay back beside him and adjusted himself so Paul’s head lay on his chest. With that fall of warm weight on his chest and the sweet smell of the thick soft hair like a balm to his senses, he let himself drift off into sleep.

Chapter Text

Paul spent his last moments on Arrakis kneeling by the small makeshift shrine marking the place his dead child was interred. He had visited several times since its installation, speaking softly as if Leto could still hear him. The surroundings hummed with activity from the carpenters and stonemasons – all of whom circled quietly around him, respectful of a grieving mother – building a proper memorial to which the tiny shrunken body of the fallen Mahdi would be moved upon completion. In this temple, those who still believed would come to lay offerings at the altar that marked the day of the saviour’s coming while awaiting his rebirth in some nebulous future.

Above the place where the memorial would be erected was the beginnings of a masterful bas-relief mural that stretched all across the wall. The artists bringing forth the scene of deliverance had gone to great lengths to create a tableau that believers and their children could look upon with reverential awe. Even with the rough-hewn stone not yet shaped into more intricate forms, he could see what it would become: the ethereal father-mother of the divine son draped in flowing silk, a huge setting sun haloing the slender figure with the swollen belly and an abundant tumble of curls so unlike anything found in the native populace. He doubted this artistic rendition would include the rivers of blood trailing down his thighs and soaking into the robe. Then again, it might. Blood and suffering were unflaggingly beloved as signs of martyrdom. 

It would be a slightly more accurate depiction than the saintly personage carved into the pendants that had become such coveted charms on Giedi Prime. But he would rather neither of these creations existed at all for what they made of him: a deified bearer of life who lived only in a collective imagination. The artworks that made a god of his child who had been killed before he even drew a single breath –

The pain rose like a sharp surge of bile. It left him breathless and sick with guilt. The guilt would take years to truly, completely leave him.

“I’m leaving this place,” he said heavily. “But I’ll carry you with me always. Just as I carry the one you named yourself after.”

“Don’t,” his mother spoke softly, having come to remind him of their impending departure. “We need to let the dead go. Or we become ghosts ourselves.”

“I made the choice to kill him.”

“You made the choice to save yourself. And save him from a life of –”

“Please. Don’t…” His breath caught in his throat. “I don’t want to push it aside. I can’t live with that denial, it’ll drive me mad.” A tear leaked out and slipped down his nose before he could catch it. “I don’t think I ever apologised to him. I wish I had.”

“You made his passing the easiest passage one could ask for. I felt you doing it, wrapping yourself around him. Comforting him. He was at peace when he left.” She was crying now as well. Such blasphemy in this place of worship.

“I wish I could bring him with me.” He wiped his face. “I-I know it’s just a…a body. Barely even a…” He wanted to break down in her arms. “They wouldn’t even have taken his water. There was nothing to give. He was so small.” His sobs were dry, but they came forth nonetheless in great hollow gasps. Jessica held him tightly and stroked his hair. “I should have held him,” he murmured against her chest. “I couldn’t even do that. Hold him before he was laid to rest.”

“But you already laid him to rest. He was stillborn. He was at peace, thanks to you.” She kissed the crown of his bowed head. “And you very nearly gave your own life for it. To make him feel safe and loved. You very nearly died.”

Heavy assuring footsteps approached, both deferential and dignified. “My lady. My lord. The ship is ready to depart.”

Jessica nodded at Duncan. “We’ll be with you in a minute.” She squeezed Paul’s hand. “Say your goodbyes. And then let him go, for the both of you.” 

Paul nodded. He waited until she had left, then knelt and pressed his head to the cool flat stone beneath which the remains of Leto II lay. “I love you,” he whispered. “I will never stop loving you. Be at peace now.”

Then he rose and turned resolutely from the memory of a doomed god-emperor, and walked towards the life that lay ahead.

| | | | | | | | |

Feyd had never been aboard a ship that was not of Harkonnen build. He spent a good deal of time running his eyes and hands over details that caught his eye, something that everyone present collectively allowed him to do undisturbed, for as long as it could keep him occupied. Despite Paul’s assurances, they were understandably nervous about being trapped in a vessel with “that bloodsucking madman”, in Gurney’s fond words.

The stoic warmaster came as close to breaking as anyone had ever seen him when he stood at the mouth of the sleek heighliner. For they were departing on the Ampoliros II: the very same ship on which Duke Leto and his crew had fallen prey to Feyd-Rautha’s darlings. It was the only ship available to them. Its interiors had been scrubbed clean and its parts were in perfect working condition. Yet it was unable, like its famed predecessor, to lose entirely the shadow of what had taken place within its holds. The lingering superstition was not aided by the presence of a blood drinker in their midst.

Two nights before their departure, Feyd-Rautha had officially handed the barony to his brother. He was grudgingly compelled to ask the aid of the Atreides swordmaster – who had made friends and allies among the Fremen – in assembling a rather motley, unorthodox council of all who could be called upon to witness a formal change of rulership. The Harkonnen warmaster and the Sardaukar general, who respectively chose two men each to stand witness with them, made up the representatives to his own name; or at least the best he could get under the circumstances. It was a poor gathering by the standards of a great House, he could admit, even with the addition of five Arrakians including the solemn-faced sietch governor Stilgar Ben Fifrawi.

Formalities were exchanged and drawn contracts were signed. For the first time since he could remember, Feyd bestowed a smile on his brother that held no trace of hardness and mockery. Though he could not help a teasing jibe.

“You are the head of House Harkonnen now,” he said. “Try not to fuck things up.”

“You sure you won’t come back with us, at least for a term?” Rabban replied. “Surely you’ll miss being a pain in my side, not to mention a judgmental little prick.”

Feyd snorted. “You’re just dying for a chance to lord it over me now that you’re in charge.”

The air between them was lightened to a shade of what it had been when they were two nobody boys who had not yet been turned against each other. He even dared to briefly envision what life might be without their bitter rivalry. But he had no intention of returning to Giedi Prime. The citadel held enough horrors for him that he wished no sight of it for at least the next few years. The sordid truth of what had conspired hung between the siblings like a cold weight that neither could bring themselves to give voice to. Someday, perhaps, they would speak of their dead uncle’s worst crime. But for now, neither had the means to ease the way for it.

“He did more than use my body,” he had confided to Paul of his uncle. “He would make me watch the torture of criminals and prisoners of war. To prepare me for a future in which I must someday do the necessary.”

Paul gasped as if he’d been stabbed when he added, “I was about ten years old then.” 

That was the wonder of Paul, he thought: the fact that he could make someone’s pain his own. Feyd thought it a remarkable, if remarkably useless, talent. It was a wonder that he had not been hardened by everything his body had gone through; that with his mingled blood making him stronger, he had not also become cruel.

It gave Feyd much to think about. And he had plenty of time to let his thoughts unravel.

The Harkonnen barony was not the only power to see a change of hands. Jessica had elected to make a young sayyadina her immediate heir. It was only right that the role of a people’s spiritual leader be held by a native and not an outworlder. The new Reverend Mother, Chani Kynes – the one who had faced Feyd-Rautha so fiercely when he first landed on Arrakis – had been a fedaykin; a fighter as well as a holy woman. Now she would fight for the future of her land and her people. She was the sort who saw things as they were, with a perception unclouded by deep superstition. This sharpness of wit coupled with her tenacity made up for what she lacked in age.

At last, the land could begin to shake off the unseen hand of the Bene Gesserit, the manipulations of its Missionaria Protectiva. With the Harkonnen reign now in flux, there was every chance the Arrakians might win back a part of the spice trade as well. Jessica thought of what Paul had told her about his prophet-child’s vision of paradise – what would have come to be known as the Age of Leto’s Peace. Perhaps there was a way for a people to pave their own path to paradise. It might be a dirty, bloody uphill battle. But their tomorrow was one they would shape with their own hands, and claim proudly as their own.

She sat beside Duncan and saw her smile reflected in his own. “Will you miss the dunelands?” she asked. Of all the refugees, he had been the one most at home in the desert. She had thought at first that he might elect to stay behind.

“I will. But I miss home even more. As well as my other home, Ginaz, land of my sword-clan.” He looked to where Paul sat with his countenance as sweet and thoughtful as if such harrowing things had never befallen him. “And I would miss my boy. I wish to see him grow fully into manhood. Or…well, whatever one of his kind grows into.”

“I think he’s already been forced to grow up more than he should.” She reached out to squeeze the swordmaster’s hand. “But it does feel good to be going home.”

| | | | | | | | |

The full moon hung like a huge speckled pearl over the temperate night, casting its soft silver glow on the slender figure rising from the water like a mythical sea-sylph. Feyd sat at the edge of the grassy beach and watched Paul relish the gentle waves that buoyed him along and lapped at the smooth black rocks. He had never felt grass against his naked skin before. Neither had he ever been faced with a body of water so vast that one could not see where it ended. He felt vaguely threatened by it.

Paul returned to his side in a third attempt to coax him into the unknown. His sharp-voiced admission that he could not swim had done nothing to dissuade his lover. “All you need to do is wade,” Paul had insisted. “At least give it a try. A child could do it.”

He had felt keenly insulted then, and strode off to put some distance between them. The realisation sank in a while later that he was in fact behaving like a child. Still, Paul stood before him now, ready to forgive his churlishness.

“You don’t have to go in if you’re really afraid,” said Paul, rather too loftily for his liking. “I didn’t mean to make you feel small –”

“Small?” Feyd rose swiftly to his feet. “Just when I thought you were done belittling me.” 

“I didn’t mean to –”

He cut Paul off by grabbing him roughly to kiss him with painful, punishing force. Paul tried to twist his body away; he could seldom best his lover’s greater strength and years, but they both enjoyed the fight all the same. The tussle for dominance always ended most unfairly, according to Paul, especially when Feyd’s fangs emerged to draw out his blood and blissful shivers along with it.

“Stop it,” came the half-hearted protest against the small tongue-teeth buried in the tender flesh just above a stiffened nipple.

Feyd lapped up the last trickle of blood from the tiny wound that was already beginning to close. “If you say so, my liege.”

Once in a while, they were both reminded of Feyd-Rautha’s absence of command here on Caladanian ground – and that he was, in almost every aspect, at the mercy of Paul Atreides. He had waited for the circumstances of his drastically changed station to chafe and humiliate him. He was half convinced that he would be locked away in some small dark hole as soon as they stepped onto the wet earth of Paul’s homeworld. After all, the little duke had no need of him beyond the craving of bodily contact every so often.

He kept waiting for the hammer to fall. For the final pronouncement of justice against the part he had played in the Atreides’ fall. And it never did. 

Paul was hurt, if not exactly shocked, by the assumption when he gave voice to it. “Did you think I’d been lying to you with every breath all this time?” he asked with affront.

“Never hurts to check,” was Feyd’s reply. Paul had responded with a sulk that lasted two whole days. Knowing him, it could have been longer.

Feyd soon found that his existence was not greatly perturbed by the need to stay indoors until dusk. The Caladanian sun was a markedly different incarnation of the merciless orb that presided over the harsh Arrakian dunes, obscured half the time by opaque clouds that seldom ever lightened in a land shaped by constant rains. On particularly grey days, he would even chance a walk in the open and feel a mild tingle on his resilient skin. The danger of it made his blood rush as if he was once more a little boy on a rash childish dare.

Once, an unexpected wind had parted the rainclouds to let through a few pale rays while he found himself on a stretch of shelterless ground. Paul had chanced to cross paths with him, and promptly flew into what Feyd thought to be an unreasonable fit of panic. He had thrown himself upon his beloved as if hoping his willowy frame might shield him from the deadly light. Then he frantically shrugged off his shirt so Feyd could cover himself with it while fleeing to shelter. He had been furious with worry, and Feyd had let him rage until tears sprang to his eyes, feeling terribly moved that someone could care so deeply for him. That a fractured, monstrous thing like him could be worthy of that resource both precious yet seemingly bottomless called love.

But then, he had been loved once. Even if he couldn’t remember fully how to reciprocate. 

The sea was still beckoning, the lapping waves picturesque with their fine scalloped foam breaking and reforming in an endless rhythm. Feyd knew now that Paul would never let him drown. Would it really kill him to conquer this fear, when he had conquered such horrors that he still could not speak of at length?

He stepped into the water. The waves felt like an intrusion of silk and lace between his toes. 

Paul’s gentle words of encouragement were silenced with a sharp flick of his hand. “Don’t patronise me.” He was submerged up to the ankles now, then to mid-calf. It seemed no time at all before the water reached past his waist. The gentle rippling tickle against his skin was pleasant enough. But he was distracted from any enjoyment by the shifting of silt and sand beneath his feet. It made him queasy, as if the ground might be pulled out from under him entirely. 

“This is ridiculous,” he remarked. “I don’t see the appeal at all.”

That was only partially true. He would have braved the dark sea just to see his lover emerging from it looking like a creature of ink and moonbeams, wet curls clinging to his cheeks and neck in delicate tendrils that tapered into the finest silken threads to form marbled patterns against the pale skin that had taken on a faintly luminous glow. Was it the preternatural blood that made him so radiant, he wondered, or just a trick of the smoke-soft Caladanian light?

“You just need to let it reach your shoulders. It’s cold now where you are. The water is nice and warm once you’re more immersed.”

Paul held out a hand when he just stared back warily. “Do you think I’m going to pull you under?” he teased when Feyd hesitated. His lips looked so succulent with saltwater drops clinging to them.

“No. But I might do that to you.”

On impulse, he grabbed Paul’s arm and pulled him under the surface. There was a great deal of indignant sputtering tailed by a burst of high boyish laughter. He came to realise that his own laughs were interwoven with it. He could not even remember the last time he had laughed like this.

For a while they remained locked in a slippery salt-foamed tussle. Then Paul exacted his playful revenge by pulling him headlong into the water. 

That was when mirth turned abruptly to panic.

As soon as his feet lost grip on the shifting sand, he was suddenly weightless and anchorless, made only of fiercely flailing limbs trying desperately to find a grip on something – anything. And the only one present was Paul. He grasped at a slender limb, but it was slippery and moving. Stay still, damn it! His nose and throat were filling with water. For a half-second he broke the surface. But his own thrashing limbs pulled him back down.

He heard his lover call to him as if from a great distance, the sound of his cries muffled by the water in his ears, water clogging his senses. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning – it was utterly stupid to drown in the shallows, so close to the coast, except he didn’t feel close at all. Solid land had become a distant thing – there was nothing here but cursed silt and the nothingness of water, and Paul’s voice was fading away, farther, farther, unreachable now…

Then at last he resurfaced, and this time his head stayed there, supported by Paul’s arms holding him tightly. Shockingly strong for limbs that looked so breakable. “I’ve got you,” came Paul’s urgent, repeated assurance. “You’re safe. I’m bringing you back to shore.”

Paul held him fast as they waded back to land. Feyd accepted his assuring arm until the sand was solid enough once more to tread surely. He collapsed at the edge where the foamy waves swept in and out and violently coughed the briny water from his throat and nose. When at last his vision cleared, the first thing he saw was Paul’s wide-eyed face, tight with contrition as he stammered his apologies.

“I’m sorry. Feyd, I’m so sorry – I never meant to –”

“Oh, stop your blubbering,” Feyd replied hoarsely. “It’d take a lot more than that to kill me.”

“Still, I know you were sc…I mean, you weren’t ready. I shouldn’t have pulled you in…”

Feyd scoffed. “You worry too much, you know. If you weren’t part immortal, you’d have frown lines before you reached twenty.” He reached out to tug at a wet curl. “And you don’t want that. I wouldn’t have saved you if you weren’t so pretty.”

Paul’s frown dissolved into an incredulous smile, then a laugh. Feyd thought of how he’d giggled while fighting the attempts to push him underwater. Such a strange and buoyant sound; and one that had been so rare when he was torn from his home and kin and his body forced into producing an heir for an empire that might now well go without. Then again, Piter de Vries’ machinations were not to be underestimated. Certainly he did not pity the woman who was to be matched with his coarse, bumbling brother. He wondered briefly about the future of House Harkonnen, and what would become of the place he had reigned in yet could never fully call a home.

Then he looked at Paul sitting naked by the water’s edge bathed in moonlight, a trace of sand glittering on his arms, the waves sliding over his calves like moving lace. And he forgot about everything save for what was right in front of him.

Once, he had been told that the world was his for the taking, and that the world was what he wanted. It had turned out to be a lie: one he had absorbed into himself to let it shape him, and led to believe that the prize was worth whatever it took to win it. 

It was time at last to find out what he truly wanted.

Paul got to his feet and turned back toward the sea, then looked over his shoulder at his beloved with eyes full of longing and contentment. Feyd was behind him in a heartbeat. He reached out to take Paul’s hand. And together they walked into the water, into the vastness of the unknowable where the only certainty was the devotion that kept them safe against the tides of the world.

Chapter Text

Love Eternal – twice have I.
The first a sturdy ship afloat
Across the tides of time – 
The second a fragile passion flower
Whose essence never dies.
Both golden, precious,
One will richness to the other bring.
Between the two drift I
Forever, love lies in remembering.

The Book of Voices
(Dune Encyclopedia)

– 2 YEARS LATER –

A ragged cry broke through the quiet of the velvet-dark hour preceding daybreak. The doula filled another cup from the large vessel of honeyed elacca-wood brew that was always on hand to soothe labour pains during a birth. Paul had refused it at first for fear the drug would affect the baby before she could make her exit. But the contractions were becoming too much to bear. The last prolonged upheaval of his abdominal muscles had nearly made him pass out. He parted his lips gratefully for the trickle of cool liquid down his throat.

When he had first realised he was with child – waking suddenly in the darkest hour of morning with the telling bud of life stirring within him – he had been overwhelmed with a cascade of emotion. Disbelief, elation, giddiness, fear, despair. He had wanted to shake Feyd awake. But then came the unnerving uncertainty of how his lover would react. Would Feyd stare in quiet consternation at the news before replying that he did not, in fact, want a child, or anything to do with one? Would Paul see something in his eyes that suggested he would strangle the babe in its sleep?

Such terrible thoughts to have of the man he loved with every fibre of his being.

In the end he had slid quietly from the bedroom and knocked on his mother’s door to break the news he could not keep to himself a moment longer, and spent the rest of the pre-dawn hours curled up in her bed, his head on her lap as if he was a child again. There was a lost tenderness to be made up for from the years when she had seemed hard and heartless in training him for survival against the dreaded hand of fate. And there was no better time to return what she owed than in such times of need.   

She cradled him now in similar fashion, kneading the muscles and nerves that softened the knotted hardness in his sinews and eased the movement of blood through his tortured limbs. It was alarming that all of the prescribed pre-labour preparations, and his skill of regulating the finer workings of his body – not to mention the strain of inhuman blood that made him so resilient against injury – could not abate his pain. Only Jessica, so finely attuned to the moving layered tapestry of her child’s emotions, knew the reason for this pain that stemmed from more than the contractions of birth. Only she could discern the threads of trauma and terror woven into Paul’s recent history that were returning from the dead with a vengeance. The echo of tiny claws tearing at his insides, the fear of losing a child while simultaneously wanting to give it back to the stars, the searing memory of braving a cruel desert with dark crimson rivers streaking his thighs.

The voice from within that had tormented him. The child that had loved him even while dragging him to the edge of death.

“I’m here, my darling. You’re safe.” She kissed his hot forehead. “I’m here.”

“So am I.” 

Feyd strode into the birthing chamber, spitting in the face of custom that kept men from this sanctum of women’s labour and women’s blood. Paul needed his touch; he had wept for his beloved in a way even the most hardened sentinel could not refuse. Not that Feyd wouldn’t have slain without a second thought the first one who dared stand in his way. He knelt by Paul’s side to cradle the distressed mother of his child, and the latter calmed visibly in his embrace, to the relief of all. The lines that pain had dug into the youthful face softened and shallowed as Feyd stroked his hair in a manner that always soothed him while his mother held his hand fast.

“Always a needy little thing,” Feyd scoffed, the familiar teasing bringing a twitch of a smile to Paul’s lips before they began to tense again with the strain of the last hurdle.

“She’s coming,” Paul announced breathlessly after a minute or so. “She’s –”

Then he gasped and stiffened, and a last cry tore its way from his throat. The doula chanted a melodic prayer as she laid her skilled hands on him and received the baby as it emerged along with a flow of slick bloodied fluids. Feyd cringed at this deluge that seemed to him needlessly messy and grotesque. 

“Is that normal?” he asked as Paul fell back limply against him.

“It is.” Jessica was smiling, crying, hurting from relief and from joy. She let the baby undergo the ritual bath and anointment of her name even as the infant protested the gentle handling with hoarse hearty squalls.

Paul had, to Feyd’s alarm, briefly fainted in his arms. For a minute that stretched into a taut eternity, he looked as lifeless and bled-out as when Feyd had narrowly saved him from death in Arrakis. But a closer look showed his cheeks to be faintly flushed, and his chest rose and fell steadily as the doula’s helpers cleaned him swiftly and effortlessly.

Then his eyes flew open at the sound of his baby’s wail, biological instinct overcoming all fatigue.

“Let me hold her.” The softly swaddled raw-faced infant that Feyd found both ugly and mesmerising was placed in Paul’s open arms. He cradled his daughter and kissed her forehead, and his face blossomed with love.

“Ghanima. My treasure.”

At the sound of her name, the tight crumpled flesh that made up the baby’s eyes parted, and she stared up at Paul with perfectly bright, blue-green eyes with streaks of silver radiating from their centres. Paul could have wept in earnest at the sight of those eyes; except that he was both too full with happiness and too emptied of pain to do anything but let the rich well of emotion spread through him with a radiance so sweet that it hurt.

“Everything we can give will be yours,” he murmured. “You’re free, my love. And I’ll make sure it stays that way.”

And though no supernatural voice reverberated forth from her tiny body or through his head and heart, she gazed back at him as if she understood. The swirl of hair on her crown was touched with a hint of red. He brushed it with his thumb, marvelling at its silkiness and how thick it already was.

“That’s Harkonnen blood for you,” Feyd said when he remarked upon it, how it would darken into a deep auburn hue as she grew. “Some things are inescapable, more so than fate.”

“Good. She’s half yours, after all. I’d hope she carries a bit of you with her.”

“Hmm. You may come to regret such hopes.”

Paul frowned. “Would you love her less if it was so?”

When Feyd stayed silent, he added: “I love you, you know. I love that she is made of us both; and a bit of my mother and father, perhaps, and of yours too –”

“And my uncle?” came the soft but serrated reply.

For a second, Paul’s hands tightened around Ghanima. And Feyd was too quick not to notice. 

“What he was, he planted in me as well,” said Feyd. “When you took me in, you took something that he helped make.”

“And what were you before that – before he tried to make you in his image?”

“Before? I was a dirty ignorant runt of a boy.”

“Perhaps. But also strong and skilled, and bold, and clever. Though if she was none of those things, I would love her no less. I’m glad I had her with you. I’m glad that she…that she…”

Then he thought of a small stone slab above a woefully small, almost-whole, dead child. And he began shaking with a wave of silent sobs, struggling to steady himself around his baby girl so that she would not feed off his distress. He pressed his tear-streaked face against her body, that unbearably tender curve of belly and chest, and breathed in the smell of her. “You're safe, my love. My darling."

A tiny hand clutched at his hair, pressed against his cheek, as if in a gesture of comfort. From the entirety of her being flowed love, endless love, and a sturdy sureness as if she had been here before.

He looked up to see Feyd watching him with fascination. He had the watchful, almost respectful air of someone allowing two tremulously beating hearts the space to be acquainted. But it did not feel right for a newly made father to keep such a distance. Paul held Ghanima towards him.

“Hold her,” he urged softly. 

“Must I?”

“She is yours. Someday she will be her own person. But for now, she needs you. As much as I need you.”

With reluctance, Feyd allowed Ghanima to be placed in his hands. They felt clumsy around her. He could crush her head without even trying, and this frightened him for some reason. Holding her felt like holding Paul in his most fragile, breakable state.

He saw how full her lips were even for a raw newborn’s – rather like his own. How her eyes were almost exactly the same shade as Paul’s but with some of his pale grey-blue infused into the irises. And suddenly it struck him, with the force of a tidal wave, that this whole and undamaged thing had come from his body as well as Paul’s.

His fingers trembled for a heartbeat. He almost did want to kill her.

It was dangerous to feel such things for any creature; more so for one so helpless and dependent. He should end it immediately. Only the strong were allowed to live – only the strong could survive terrible things, the terror that lived in him, that would emerge someday to feed on another victim. For of course it needed to feed. Needed it like blood –

“Feyd.” Paul’s voice was full of alarm as he took Ghanima and handed her to Jessica. He must have seen something fearful in Feyd’s face. Good; better that he learnt the fact of things before it was too late.

Feyd was halfway down the corridor away from the birthing chamber when he heard Paul’s faltering footsteps in his wake. He wouldhave heard them sooner if not for the rush of blood in his ears – the echoes of horrors that must come to be, that none here could escape with him in their midst.

“You idiot,” he cursed as he went to Paul’s side and allowed the latter to lean heavily on him.

“Please, Feyd. We need you.”

“You’ll do fine without –”

“You’re free of him,” Paul interjected. “What he did to you is part of your past – horrid as it was, it’s not part of you. You’re not the monster he was.”

“No. I’m a different kind of monster.”

“You are.” Paul clasped his face. “You’re my monster.”

He swayed a little, still drained from his long night and day of labour. Feyd swept him off his feet and savoured the feeling of Paul’s arm clinging to his neck and shoulder, the perfect soft weight of Paul’s head against his chest. After all this time, such things still had the power to keep him firmly wrapped around Paul’s fingers. And now there was the child of their union – a child who was wanted, a child who was no pawn of destiny or kingmakers – binding him even tighter to his lover’s side.

It was not a life he had ever envisioned for himself. But all things considering, it was not a bad life at all.

“You do know that Ghanima will never be your heir,” Feyd mentioned as he carried Paul to their bedchamber.

“Why is that?”

“Well, it doesn’t matter how beautiful or clever she turns out, if she’s the bastard child sired with a bloodsucker from a House that’s busy losing the spice war to the Arrakians.”

Paul did not seem in the least shaken by the statement. “You’re right,” he sighed, tightening his hold to snuggle closer, his words muffled against Feyd’s chest. “My mother hasn’t given up seeking a match for me.”

“And has she been successful?”

“There are several keen contenders for my hand. Two of which might end up restoring House Atreides to its former stature within the decade.” Never had Feyd heard good news delivered with such misery.

“You should take your pick of them,” he said. “Like it or not, you are an Atreides, and a duke.”

Paul sighed. “And our daughter deserves that much. She deserves not to pay for my mistakes.”

His melancholy softened and gave way to exhaustion as soon as Feyd placed him in bed, and pulled the covers to his chest. “I don’t want to lie with anyone else,” he murmured. “Or to raise our child with someone else. It would be a marriage only to secure a future for her. And for us.”

Feyd slid in next to him. “I could lie and tell you I’m content to be a mere concubine. Coming second to a proper spouse. But the damned truth is, it maddens me to think of somebody else’s hands on you.” He pushed a hand up beneath Paul’s shirt, already compelled to claim him. Paul was his, damn it. All his.

“I’m yours before anyone else’s, Feyd,” Paul said as if echoing his thoughts. “Nothing can change that. We were made for each other.” He stole a kiss from Feyd’s lips. “I would marry you right now. You know I would.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’re too dutiful for that.”

Paul fell silent for a good while, his head tucked into the curve of Feyd’s neck and shoulder. Feyd thought he had fallen asleep until he lifted his hand and removed the ducal ring that had always been a little too big for his slender fingers. He took Feyd’s hand and slid it onto his ring finger, where it sat perfectly as if it had been – much like its owner – made for him.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” was Feyd’s first response. He tried to brush aside the sudden, painful quickening of his heartbeat.

“I plan to get another made. This one has never fit well.”

"Well. Still, you can't just – just give away an heirloom like that..." It was an utterly foolish notion. A child's game. And yet Paul was no longer a child, but a young man certain of what he wanted.

Paul pressed those soft lips to his knuckles. “Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. Will you be mine?”

“That’s a stupid question.” Feyd closed his fingers around a handful of ink-dark curls and planted a row of searing kisses on his neck, marking him as no other lover would ever mark him. “Seeing as I’m already yours.”