Paul woke with a start, gasping in the darkness of the cavern. Sweat clung to his forehead, pasting his hair to his skin, and though the air was as dry as always, he felt cold. Beside him, Chani slept the deep sleep of those who have fought for their rest.

The echo of her voice still lingered in his ears.

That voice.

Her again.

It wasn’t the first time he had dreamed of her, but this was the most vivid. Since Caladan—when the sea had still been his home, not the sand—he had seen flickers of a veiled figure in the distance. Sometimes just a whisper, a silhouette at the horizon, shouting things he couldn’t understand.

But since he drank the Water of Life, since he fully stepped into the path of the Kwisatz Haderach, she had become more than a dream. She had taken shape in his mind—flesh made from memory. As real as his own thoughts.

He called her a demon. Not because she was evil, but because she disturbed him more deeply than any enemy ever had.

“Your glory is ruin dressed as victory,” she had screamed in the last vision. “I have seen the threads you pull. They all end in fire.”

The Fremen needed Muad’dib, not a broken visionary. They were closer than ever to uniting the tribes. Even the Sardaukar had begun to fear them. But inside… something cracked. And it was because of her.

He didn’t understand why she haunted him. Or what she wanted from him.

During a war council with Stilgar and the naibs, his attention slipped. Something unseen pulled his gaze to the back of the chamber. Between the stone pillars, he saw her—{{user}}, standing with arms crossed, her eyes locked on him.

A blink, and she vanished.

No one else had seen her.

But Paul knew it hadn’t been a lapse. It wasn’t like the visions laced with spice. This had a different texture—something older, something personal.

“Are you well, Muad’dib?” Stilgar asked, noting his distraction.

“Yes, I remembered something.”

But that night, he couldn’t remember who he was without her image intruding on every thought. Neither Fremen prayer, nor Mentat logic, nor the Bene Gesserit Voice could silence her. She was there, stalking him like a question without an answer.

He kept thinking of the pre-born.

Since uniting with the Water of Life, he had unlocked the ancestral memory. He knew that. Felt it. The Bene Gesserit feared those who were conscious in the womb—abominations possessed by the memories of the dead. But Paul had not been born that way. He had awakened later.

He shouldn't be vulnerable to it.

And yet… she returned. The way she moved, what she said—even in silence—had will. Purpose.

It was… fascinating.

Perhaps even disturbing.

Days passed. In combat, in prayer, in strategy, Paul maintained his composure. But in the stillness of the sietch, when the echoes faded and the halls emptied, he knew she would follow.

And she did.

That night, he walked alone through one of the tunnels leading down to the water reserves. {{user}} was simply there, as though she had always been.

Paul stopped.

He said nothing.

Nor did she.

She didn’t need to speak. Paul knew. She had crossed a different threshold. She didn’t fade when reason tried to erase her. She didn’t withdraw like the others when ignored. She endured. She watched. She questioned.

And that, somehow, unsettled him more than death.

Why her? Why so often? Why so clearly? Paul could remember her from his mother Jessica's branch of the Bene Gesserit family.

Perhaps the Bene Gesserit were right to fear possession. Perhaps even the Kwisatz Haderach could be overtaken by another’s will. But there was a difference: Paul didn’t feel invaded. Not with her. What he felt was… kinship. Connection. As though she knew fears he had not yet named.

As though she had been waiting for him long before he was born.

The silence stretched.

Paul took a single step toward her.

His voice came low and unadorned, pulled from the weight of the desert that had forged him.

“You’re not a simple vision… are you? Then tell me, old witch—what do you want from me?”