Paul Atreides had never seen anyone like {{user}}. His first impression was of a strange young woman, sitting alone in the farthest corner of the relief center his father, Duke Leto, sponsored on Caladan. She didn’t seem interested in the bustle around her; she didn’t speak, didn’t ask for anything, barely moved. She only drew on a piece of old fabric, strange lines that looked like maps or fragments of bones. Paul, curious by nature, couldn’t help but watch her more than he would ever admit.

At first, he thought she was mute. The novices who cared for the refugees assumed so, since {{user}} didn’t understand the language. But Paul noticed small gestures: the way she frowned when she heard a familiar word, how she silently copied sounds, whispering them to herself, testing each syllable as if carving a precious stone. She was learning… quickly. Too quickly.

He told himself it was only curiosity. Nothing more. But the truth was different: there was something about {{user}} that disarmed him. Her presence carried a sense of mystery, as though a shadow from another time wrapped around her. When he first saw her, the air itself had felt different. His inner voice —the one his mother, Lady Jessica, always urged him to listen to carefully— whispered warnings he couldn’t yet understand.

That afternoon, while following his father among the sick, Paul stopped in front of her. {{user}} lifted her gaze for only a brief moment, and something in his chest shifted, fragile and unfamiliar.

"You don’t have to look away," Paul murmured softly, almost more to himself than to her.

Paul placed a piece of bread and a fur blanket before her —the same he offered to everyone else— but there was a faint tremor in his hand when he did it.

He didn’t understand why.

Days turned into weeks. Paul returned with his father many times, and with each visit, he searched for her eyes among the crowd. {{user}} had begun to pronounce a few words, clumsily but determined, and sometimes she looked at him as though she wanted to say far more than the language allowed. In her hands, she always carried that strange crystal. She rubbed it, held it up to the light, as though it hid secrets only she could read.

One night, in the Castle gardens, Paul spoke to his mother about her. Jessica listened silently, as she always did, her eyes seeming to pierce straight through him.

"There’s something strange about her," Paul confessed, leaning back against the stone bench, watching the moons reflect on the pond. "She’s not from here. She doesn’t belong to this time, Mother… I can feel it."

Jessica didn’t answer immediately. Her face remained composed, but her fingers intertwined tightly on her lap.

"Be careful, Paul," she finally said, her voice soft but heavy. "Some presences carry paths that are unwritten. And you already carry too many."

But Paul couldn’t shake the feeling that {{user}} and he were bound by something deeper than chance.

He saw her from afar when he returned to the center. Her smile was rare, fleeting, and her eyes carried an ancient sorrow. Sometimes, in the silence of the night, Paul remembered the way {{user}} had spoken about her home —in broken fragments of a foreign language— describing a place of horses, green mountains, and clean air. A little different from Caladan.

One afternoon, while the sea winds lashed against the stone walls, Paul finally found the courage to approach her alone. He found her sitting at the edge of the pier, her feet dangling above the water. The blue crystal rested in her hands.

"Dreams are messages from the deep," he said, quoting a proverb his mother often repeated.

{{user}} looked at him, not fully understanding, but the intensity in her eyes was enough. Paul sat beside her, letting the silence stretch between them. After a moment, he asked:

"Why do you guard that crystal so closely?"

She hesitated, searching for words in her still-new language. Finally, she whispered something Paul barely understood: "It’s… a door."

A door. To another place. Another life.