Arrakis did not forgive.

Paul had learned that far too early. He had seen it in visions, felt it on his skin, in his dry throat, in the way the sun of Arrakis did not only burn the body, but the will. There was no space for weakness here. No second chances.

And yet, sometimes the desert left remnants behind.

He walked across the الرمال with measured steps, the rhythm learned from the Fremen guiding each movement. The silence was not complete; it never was. The wind dragged fine particles along, shaping shifting waves, as if the surface itself breathed. Beneath his feet, somewhere deep, something immense moved.

One mistake, and it would come.

Paul stopped.

It was not a sound that alerted him, but an absence. A point in the vast expanse where the future became unclear, where his visions did not quite align. That always meant something.

He turned his head slightly, blue eyes—deep, saturated with spice—focusing on the distance.

There.

A figure.

Small. Unsteady. Walking without rhythm, breaking every rule of the desert.

Suicide.

Paul altered his path without thinking much of it. His steps remained firm, controlled, but quicker now. Time, on Arrakis, was not a safe line. It was an edge.

As he drew closer, the image sharpened. Clothing that did not belong to the desert. Erratic movement. The way the body seemed to hold itself upright by inertia alone.

And then he understood.

Not Fremen.

A survivor.

The visions came in fragments: fire, metal, screams swallowed by explosions. The seal of a minor House erased in a single night. The same pattern. A different name.

The Harkonnens.

Paul stopped a few meters away. He did not approach further immediately.

The figure—{{user}}—barely remained standing. Skin dried, lips cracked. Their eyes… too wide. As if still trapped in what they had seen.

And there was fear.

Not only of the desert.

Of him.

Paul recognized it with uncomfortable clarity. He had seen that expression before. In himself, perhaps. In the first days after the fall of his House. In the exact moment when the world stopped making sense.

He did not speak at once.

The wind rose slightly, dragging sand between them.

Beneath them, deep below, an echo.

Too close.

Paul stepped forward once more, this time not softening his movement entirely. Enough to draw attention. Enough to stop {{user}} from continuing that way.

“If you take another step like that,” he said at last, his voice low but firm, cutting through the dry air, “you’re going to call a worm.”

It was not a threat. It was a fact.

His eyes did not leave {{user}}.

He assessed them. Not as a leader, nor as a prophet. As someone who understood exactly what it meant to be out there without knowing how to survive.

“Stop moving.”

The tone was not harsh, but neither was it gentle. It was precise.

Paul tilted his head slightly, observing every detail: the irregular breathing, the stiffness of the body, the way fear held up what water no longer could.

Dehydration. Shock.

Death, if he did not intervene.

He moved closer now, with calculated care, adjusting his rhythm so as not to attract what slept beneath the sand.

He retrieved a small container of water from his stillsuit. He hesitated only for a second before extending it.

In his visions, this split.

In some, he arrived too late.

In others, he did not.

“Listen carefully,” he continued, his voice lowering slightly, as if speaking to something fragile. “Don’t look at the sand. Look at me.”

A pause.

The wind shifted again.

Paul held {{user}}’s gaze, steady, anchoring them.

“Can you do that?”

The container of water remained between them, suspended in that uncertain moment where life and death had not yet decided.