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After their child's life is stolen, Chani watches as her man turns to stone.
Something stirs in Chani’s chest in answer, a creature writhing and snapping its jaws. I will not lose another, it growls.
She bites down, and does not let go.
Her beloved takes the hand of a princess and rule of a planet. Chani accepts this as the sand accepts new shape, with the grace of the endlessly reinvented, moved by the whims of the wind.
When the time comes to negotiate – for a wife, for a kingdom; to become something Chani is unsure she’ll recognize – Paul turns to his mother, then his lover. With a squaring of shoulders, Chani swallows the tears she’s long learned not to shed.
“I know the reasons,” she whispers. “If it must be… Usul.”
For their people. For peace. For green paradise. For the death of what was that brings birth of what will be.
Paul touches her face. For all the calluses of years of battle and leadership, his hands on her skin are as tender as when they first knew her. “My Sihaya need fear nothing, ever,” he murmurs.
Jessica is the practical one, seeks instruction. What end does he wish them to seek? At what price? In Paul’s answers, there’s none of the gentle, the lover. He’s fire and steel; he’s a force that won’t bend.
Her thoughts long to drift; her ruh-self cries out for the comfort of steps without rhythm out on the open bled. Still, she takes careful note of each term of Paul’s bargain. She has killed and humiliated for this man of hers. No king stripped of his crown will outwit her in this.
“And for the royal concubine?” Jessica inquires.
What does Chani care for titles? Her arms ache, empty. Her son’s water was spilled before words from his lips: she’ll never hear him call her Mother. Shai-hulud arrived too late to save the innocent: what business has the bitter faithless serving among the Sayyadina?
“No title for me,” Chani pleads. She sounds hollow, scraped out, worn thin. “Nothing. I beg of you.”
Once more, Paul carefully cups her face. For an instant, they’re transported; the coup fades away and it’s only Chani and Usul in the desert.
“I swear to you now,” Paul says to her quietly, firmly, “that you'll need no title.”
The intensity in his gaze burns her. Chani blinks and breaks eye contact. She chooses to believe him.
In the city of Arrakeen, Paul’s Keep is grand, elaborate and spacious. It’s easy to get lost in winding corridors, or to spend an entire day without seeing the same person twice. Most people she passes by are strangers. It’s odd after a lifetime of pressing close to all, sharing space and lives and tau.
Chani isn’t sure who she’s meant to be here. She’s no longer the warrior or Sayyadina. She left everything she knew – friendships, responsibilities, a way of life – behind in the sietch. She lives in a city of daylight and stone, missing the years she knew shadows and sand. She exists as an echo of herself, of the past that made Muad’Dib who he is in the present.
But when at night Paul returns to the foot of their bed, he lays down his burdens and she sees a glimpse of the boy she taught to walk the sands.
Stripped of stillsuit and ceremony, he frees himself, for a moment, from claws of time. Mine, she thinks. The wild thing in her chest purrs.
This moment of respite won’t last, she’s aware. Soon, he’ll be swept up again in the future. He can rarely disentangle himself from what he knows. “Come, beloved,” Chani beckons. She reaches for him, claims him once more.
The Emperor of the Known Universe, obedient to Chani’s wishes. He buries his nose in her shoulder and breathes. “My Sihaya,” he exhales. With her thumb, Chani smooths out the lines from his brow.
What does it matter that she has no place here? She remembers old words she'd spoken: Only call me ‘my love,’ and I’m anchored.
She longs for children, to give her man sons. Any Naib worth his water would need them, to take up his name and carry forth his legacy. And the Lisan al-Gaib shepherds the peoples of many stars upon stars.
Chani returns to Sietch Tabr and her breaths come easier, sweetened with spice. She kneels at the prayer wall, empty, and keens. She casts her accusations into the depths where dwells Shai-hulud: Was taking my Leto not enough?
Fleetingly, she allows herself to wonder why she prays here at all, when the one she loves is praised as a god.
To love a man made myth becomes a matter, so often, of averting her eyes.
He’s become too bright to look at, the very face she’s loved so long shining with a light, a truth, that sears.
These days more than ever, it feels as though they have such little time. Chani feels her beloved retreating from her, distant whenever she tries to draw closer.
Still, through the longing, there’s a taste of thrill in the chase. When at last she captures him, their coming together is sweet. She uncovers a fragment of the Usul that was.
As they disentangle to prepare to face the day, Chani lets out a sigh: “If the people only knew your love…”
But in a flash, his demeanor has darkened. “You can’t build politics on love. People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can’t have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?”
“You’re not a despot!” Chani protests. “Your laws are just.”
Paul turns to her, regards her carefully. Despite his blindness, she knows with a certainty that he sees her in her entirety. Who she was, who she is, all the visions of who she may be, bared to him without barrier of place or time.
He averts his gaze, pulls back the drapes to ruminate on the view out their window. “Ahh, laws,” he exhales bitterly. “What’s law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity?”
Chani’s mouth tightens. These moods of his blow like the winds.
“Law – our highest ideal and our basest nature,” Paul mutters, fingers twitching on the curtains. “Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.”
Behind chillingly empty eye sockets, there’s a glimpse of the too-knowing stare of a man who’s claimed billions of lives. Under his family’s banner, war was waged across the universe. That Atreides fire, burning endlessly, wiped out worlds, fractured families, remade religions.
Never to forgive, proclaim the Fremen across millenia, never to forget. Paul’s bound that maxim tightly to the burden of blood he carries, and he lashes himself with that whip endlessly.
All at once, Chani understands: all along, it was Muad’Dib’s mercy to never give her his name.
She avoids his sightless eyes. Standing at his side, she joins him in peering out at the vividly painted desert far below. The whisper of the wind stirs ancient sands. Her beloved strokes her knuckles with soft fingertips. Without words, she leans against his arm, relishing the familiar warmth.
The Atreides name lives on. The twins’ first cries, in tandem, mingle with their mother’s final breath.
As Chani’s spirit seeks the sands, it pauses to whisper in Usul’s ear.
“It was mostly sweet,” he murmurs, “and you were the sweetest of all.”