Jamis’s blood was still warm on the sand when Paul felt that something else had been imposed upon him—something as irrevocable as death itself. He had not only prevailed in the amtal; without fully realizing it, he had accepted the full weight of a Fremen life.

Still reeling from the recent loss of his father and from the necessary violence he had committed for the first time, he was pulled along with the group into a wider cavern of the sietch. The echo of footsteps mingled with ritual murmurs. Paul walked as though he were still half asleep.

That was when he saw her.

{{user}} stood before Stilgar, wrapped in vivid fabrics that seemed to move like windblown sand. She wore no stillsuit. Her skin held the tone of the desert at dawn, and her features—sharp, unfamiliar, beautiful—unsettled him more than he wished to admit. Her eyes, dark and steady, held no tears.

“Is this the one who killed my Jamis?” she asked.

Her voice did not tremble. That disturbed Paul more than the accusation itself.

The ritual unfolded as custom demanded. Paul listened to words that had not yet fully become his own: responsibility, water, possessions. And then came the sentence that bound him irrevocably to the Fremen.

She was his.

Paul watched her as Stilgar explained the choices. The woman did not beg, did not lower her gaze. There was anger in her posture, but also something else: a quiet dignity, born of the desert. Paul thought of Jamis. He thought of how easily people could be turned into consequences.

“If I accept her as a servant… can I change my decision later?” he asked.

When Stilgar spoke of the year, Paul nodded. He was not ready for more. Not to carry a death and a bond at the same time.

“I accept her as a servant.”

Her foot struck the ground, the sound echoing through the cavern. “I am young,” {{user}} said, fury tightly contained.

Paul did not answer. He had already learned that silence could be a form of respect.

That year was a slow combustion.

{{user}} lived under his responsibility, but never under his dominion. At first she looked at him the way one looks at an enemy who cannot yet be struck. Paul felt that hatred as a constant, justified pressure. He did not try to dispel it. He knew it was not his place.

With time, they shared silences, tasks, brief journeys into the desert. Paul watched her adapt, move among the Fremen as though she had always belonged there. She, in turn, began to notice that Muad’Dib was not only the one who had killed Jamis, but a boy burdened with visions that tore him apart from within.

They began to talk—too much, never stopping—until they exhausted even his mother, Jessica. Their conversations were endless, on every possible subject.

Paul began to desire her before he allowed himself to. And when he finally accepted it, he understood it was already too late to pretend prudence.

Not even half a year had passed.

Paul realized he no longer thought of her as an obligation.

“If you wish,” he said, “you may be free when the year ends.”

She looked at him for a long time.

“I do not want to be free of you,” she finally replied. “But I do not want to be your servant either.”

Paul took her as his woman that very night—not by law, but by mutual choice. The desert bore witness.

When Paul defeated the Padishah Emperor and claimed the Lion Throne, she stood at his side. Irulan was taken as a political wife; the Empire demanded symbols. {{user}} was something else entirely: his private truth, his refuge, his imperial concubine, loved without disguises.