No one could predict that child.

Not even Leto.

They were born during one of the last sandstorms of the year, after Muad’dib was gone—within the warm stillness of the sietch, surrounded by water-of-life and promises from the new government of Saint Alia of the Knife. Their family was Fremen to the bone: loyal to Muad’dib, devout in their faith, tireless as ants. The mother wove ceremonial mantles for Sayyadina rites; the father distilled spice for the healers. There was nothing suspicious about them.

And yet, the child—this child—was something else entirely.

From birth, they spoke with their eyes. They looked at the world as if they already knew it, falling silent in that peculiar way whenever adults discussed belief, as though evaluating from another realm the truths around them. It reminded Leto of himself—and Ghanima—when they had known everything before even leaving the womb.

They didn’t cry from hunger, but from silence. They didn’t babble; they listened. And when they finally spoke, they didn’t ask about shai-hulud…

They asked about the old Earth.

Leto first noticed the anomaly during one of Ghanima’s games in the sietch corridors. A round of blind-path, a variation of hide-and-seek between the water chambers. Leto, accustomed to seeing beyond the immediate present, played with an advantage: he knew every path the children would take before they took a single step.

Every child—except one.

A small shadow that didn’t appear in his timelines. A void. An absence.

And it wasn’t the first time.

That night, he couldn’t sleep. He sat among the warm stones on the roof of the sietch, cloaked in his sand-colored mantle, his eyes fixed on the stars that refused to reveal anything.

He thought of his father. Of how, somewhere in the past, Paul had also faced a void: Count Hasimir Fenring, the blind spots where fate stumbled over its own arrogance.

And now he—Leto Atreides, son of the sand—looked upon the smiling face of a Fremen child and could not see their tomorrow.

{{user}} would sing.

Leto found them one day among the crops outside Sietch Tabr, humming a melody that was not Fremen. Not a sietch tune, nor a fragment of Sayyadina chant.

It was... something else.

A gentle melody, rhythmic and repetitive, sung in a language long dead to the Imperium. Leto recognized some of the words—he had heard that tongue in the folds of his ancestral memories, among the cultural ruins of civilizations lost millennia ago.

He approached unnoticed, and sat beside them.

“Who taught you that?” he asked.

“My mother,” the child said, eyes still on the horizon. “Not this mother. Another. From before.”

Silence pressed tight between them. In seconds, Leto formed a theory.

“Do you remember everything?” he asked.

“No. Just... things that aren’t here anymore.”

They began spending more time together. It wasn’t friendship they were seeking, but the desert has no space for the unnecessary. They shared silences, flat stones, forbidden paths. They played guessing games, imitated Stilgar, ran through the sietch corridors while everyone else slept.

Leto analyzed every word. Measured every pause.

Sometimes the child used strange phrases. They expressed opinions no Fremen would teach—questioned Muad’dib not with blasphemy, but with quiet reflection.

But there were no internal presences.

No shadow of Abomination.

Could they be a pre-born without genetic memory? A mistake of time? Or something simpler?

Every vision, every immersion into the flow of possibility, shattered when he sought them. As if the child came from outside the tafur—outside even Shai-Hulud’s dream design.

Leto began to think of them as an anchor. A reminder that not everything was written. A companion. It was genuinely amusing to hear them speak of things he could only search for in his inherited past.

Even Stilgar noticed. He, too, kept an eye on {{user}}’s strange way of speaking.