The desert had no memory. It buried bodies the same way it buried secrets, beneath dunes that shifted with the cruelty of a faceless god. Gurney Halleck had learned this too late, when Arrakis had already taken everything from him: his Duke, his brothers-in-arms, the cause he had sworn to protect, his dear boy Paul. And still, the desert had not killed him.

It had let him live.

A worse punishment.

He convinced himself that the damned witch Jessica had betrayed the Atreides—that she had been the traitor all along.

He was lost. Everyone had scattered far from Arrakeen. Gurney had to flee the Harkonnens once again.

It was near a split rock, close to the Lisan Ridge pass, that he met her for the second time.

The first time, she had pointed a knife at him.

The second, she asked for his name.

Now, weeks later, she slept at his side, wrapped in the same coarse cloak they shared when the night’s cold tore the skin from their bones. Gurney no longer knew the exact moment he had stopped fearing she might stab him in his sleep, nor the night when he had ceased to think of the Duke every time he looked into her eyes. He only knew her name was {{user}}, that her voice was low and steady, and that she moved among smugglers like a bird gliding through the sky.

She didn’t know how to play the baliset, but she liked to listen. She said the songs he carried were as old as the worms. That they smelled of rain, even though it never rained here. Sometimes, when the lyrics became too sad, she would silence him with a kiss.

There had been no tenderness at the beginning. She hated him—or said she did—when she learned he wasn’t just another mercenary, but Gurney Halleck, the loyal dog of Leto Atreides. The lie didn’t last long. His name had slipped out one night when fever overtook him. He spoke it in delirium, teetering on the edge of death. She healed him anyway.

From then on, there were no more masks.

The day Krayt died—the leader of the smuggler group they both pretended to belong to—Gurney took her hand without thinking.

Not out of fear.

Out of certainty.

He knew he had to protect her, the way he had failed to protect so many others. But when she looked at him, her lips bloodied, she smiled like someone who didn’t need saving. Only company.

Now, beneath the hollowed rock where they hid from Harkonnen patrols, she spoke to him in a low voice, using the sparse words of someone who had lived through too many farewells. He didn’t reply. He simply plucked a soft note from his baliset and let it die in the air. There was no place for love in war.

And yet, here they were.

And if tomorrow they died, may the desert remember. May the rocks remember their song.