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You taste blood before you even open your eyes — not the metallic sting of fresh injury, but the parched, clinging residue of something older, dried across your tongue like rusted iron and regret, thick and unmoving, as though your mouth itself has been turned to stone.
Each breath scrapes down your throat, dry and brittle as bone, and the air — heavy with spice, yes, but sickening now, bloated with something too sweet, too ripe — crawls into your lungs like perfume left out too long in the sun, something that once was sacred, now turned to rot.
And this place — wherever it is — it is not your tent.
The ground beneath your body pulses like a living thing, the sand shifting beneath your weight as though trying to swallow you whole, and the walls around you flicker in and out of coherence — sometimes stone, sometimes cloth, sometimes glass smeared with sand and blood and memory. You blink slowly, each motion dragging like molasses, and the light around you swims, bending at the edges of your vision until nothing feels still, until you feel untethered from your own skin.
“You’re awake.”
The voice comes from nowhere and everywhere, soft as silk but weighted with something else — something off.
You turn your head, sluggish and aching, as though gravity has thickened just for you. And when you see him, kneeling beside you in the still-wavering shimmer of this half-built world, for a moment, your heart claws toward hope. Paul. Cloaked in black, draped in the silhouette of the man you know, the man who always comes for you.
But his eyes — they are not his eyes.
They are not the blue-within-blue of spice and purpose and prophecy. They are not warm or familiar. They burn gold.
Your lips crack as you whisper his name, “Paul?” the word barely forming, as if afraid to fully exist in this warped place.
He smiles, but it is hollow — not cruel, not kind, simply void, an expression worn like a mask.
“No,” he says, with a voice that is almost his, but not quite. “But I wear his face.”
And then he vanishes, dissolving into dust or light or memory — you can’t tell which — and the sound that escapes your throat is half-sob, half-gasp, but your body won’t follow it. You can’t move. You’re held in place not by ropes or cuffs, but by the poison still weaving its way through your veins like a second bloodstream, whispering treachery in every pulse.
The sand beneath your fingertips is wet now. Not with water. Something thicker. Sticky. The color seeps into your vision and you can’t tell if it’s yours.
Somewhere above you, the ceiling begins to fracture with light — pale and fractured, splintering like glass in the sun — and you hear the Voice, that ancient weapon, cutting through the world in layered echoes. But it is wrong too — distorted, torn into pieces, each word bending as it enters your skull, reshaping your thoughts with hooks and smoke.
“You are nothing,” it breathes through a hundred mouths.
“You are bait.”
You want to scream. But your throat is dust.
And then you see Paul again — not standing beside you, but through someone else’s eyes, through a vision that is not your own. You see him moving like a storm through narrow passageways, cutting down faceless enemies with blades that flash like starlight, blood on his hands, your name in his mouth. You reach for him... you feel yourself reaching... but your arms do not respond.
You are strung up in a waking dream, a body stolen by alchemy, your thoughts bending in unnatural shapes. The poison whispers that none of this is real, that none of it ever was.
But then, you feel a shift. A change in the air.
Wind. Real wind. Sharp and hot and stinging, cutting through the mirage like a blade. Footsteps thunder toward you. A shadow breaks the light, and suddenly —
A hand.
Warm. Anchored to a body that trembles with breath.
“It’s me.”
You open your eyes — really open them — and the world narrows to the shape of his face. Paul. Not a vision, not a lie. His real hands on your cheeks, thumb tracing a shaking line across your temple, his cloak fluttering in the breeze stirred by his arrival.
His voice cracks with relief and something darker, something laced with rage — not at you, never at you — but at what was done to you in the time it took him to find you.
“They drugged you,” he breathes, as if the words themselves are toxic. “Gods— what did they give you?”
You can’t answer. Your mouth moves but your voice has melted, swallowed by silence. So you clutch at his arm with fingers that barely obey you, and bury your face into the curve of his chest, breathing him in like salvation.
“I’ve got you,” he says, again and again, rocking you gently. “I’m here. I’ve got you. You held on. I knew you would.”
And for a moment — just one — you believe him.
But even as his arms surround you, even as he lifts you into his lap with reverence and care, even as his cloak wraps around your battered form like a second skin — the hallucinations haven’t left.
The walls still flicker.
The shadows still whisper.
7The poison still sings.
And when you sleep again, it is not peaceful.
You wake hours later, disoriented and blinking up at curved stone ceilings and low firelight, the scent of smoke and herbs pressing at your senses like balm and warning. Paul's cloak still clings to your skin, and though your body no longer burns, your mind is not quiet.
He’s beside you. Watching. Tired. Pale. Too still.
“Paul?” you whisper, but you flinch as the name leaves your mouth — unsure now whether it's him you’re seeing, or a memory given shape by the poison still curdling at the edges of your mind.
He shifts toward you, gently, but when his hand reaches for yours, your fingers recoil — a reflex, not trust. His face fractures. Only for a heartbeat.
“It’s me,” he says again. “You’re safe now.”
But your gaze flickers, haunted. You’ve heard that voice in dreams. You’ve seen it worn by strangers.
And he knows.
“I saw this,” he admits, softly, as if confessing to a crime. “Before it happened. In a vision. I saw them take you. But I didn’t know when. I thought… I thought I could change it.”
You look at him — really look — and you see the weight he carries now, heavier than any stillsuit, heavier than prophecy.
“You didn’t stop it,” you say, your voice barely a breath, but the words wound him deeper than you intended.
His hand tightens around yours anyway. He doesn’t flinch from your pain.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and this time it’s not the Muad’Dib speaking — not the messiah or the seer or the weapon they’ve made him become — but the boy who once whispered to you in the dark, before the desert knew his name.
“I should’ve gotten to you sooner.”
The hallucinations still stir in the corners of your mind, waiting for sleep, waiting to drag you under.
But for now, you are awake. And he is real.
And he is not letting go.