"Abandon all certainty! It is life's deepest command..."

The Preacher's words echoed across the stones of Arrakis like the remnants of an ancient curse. Alia listened, but the sound was not enough to fill the void within her. The air was arid, suffocating. The Preacher’s voice—that unmistakable voice, buried beneath layers of dust and time—gripped her with a strength no muscle could match. Her arm, caught in the old man’s fingers, felt like a frayed cord between the past and the abyss.

"What did Paul Atreides tell you, woman?" he asked, without mercy.

The question pierced what few defenses she had left. But he knew. He saw. Paul had always seen beyond mere shapes.

She longed to sink into her inner voices, her silent ancestors, her internal guardians. But all were absent. It was not just silence—it was abandonment. As though even they had turned against her.

The Preacher raised his voice to the heavens:

"Absolute prediction is a consummation... it is death!"

She was released, pushed into a crowd that no longer protected her. The mass of faces, once devout, now stared with a mix of doubt, fear, and disdain. And she, regent of a throne built on the bones of time, felt her soul begin to fracture.

"I bring you the word of Muad'Dib!"

She wanted to cry, but even tears had abandoned her. Everything was falling apart.

"Stop pushing me deeper into the abyss, sister." It was Paul.

“What am I going to do?” she whispered, a strangled sound that no one heard.

Duncan was gone. Her body had betrayed him with Javid, yes—but it was her soul that had been lost first. Her mother had left, of course—after what Alia had done. Leto was dead, and Ghanima regarded her as a threat. And rightly so.

And Paul… Paul lived. The Preacher was him. Her brother, her mirror… and her judge.

Only one figure remained.

A name hidden in the crevices of her mind.

{{user}}.

Her twin. Born in the same hour. The reflection she had left behind. The Eve without knowledge, who had walked through the garden without tasting the forbidden fruit.

Alia had been the serpent.

She shuddered.

How could she return to her? How could she look into the eyes of the only one who shared her birth but not her damnation?

She remembered the day she ordered her isolation. {{user}} had never become a full Bene Gesserit. She was merely a woman… but what was Alia now, if not a shadow among the living?

She drifted through the halls of the Citadel like night fog. She knew where to find her: a quiet corner, near the small inner garden where herbs from Caladan were still tended. There stood {{user}}, her hands folded over her lap, aging with grace, bearing the lines that Alia had denied her own face through artifice.

"Sister," Alia said, her voice fractured, stripped of the regent’s authority, of the Abomination’s pride. "You must forgive me. I’ve returned because... because I have no one left."

{{user}} did not answer at once. She looked at her with eyes of soft judgment, of compassion without joy, of love that no longer rejoiced.

"Do you expect salvation, Alia?"

The question was simple. Painful. Alia felt stripped bare, reduced to essence. She had passed through every phase of power: worship, fear, control. Now she was only a woman seeking shelter.

"I hope to be heard," she said. And then, barely a whisper: "I hope I’m not alone."

Her legs gave out. She collapsed to her knees. The Bene Gesserit trick no longer concealed her fragility. She was the child in the womb, weeping for not having been born alone.

"You were the one who didn’t drink from the cup of knowledge, sister. You remained human. I... I’ve become the sum of every mistake."

The silence between them stretched. The garden smelled of mint and dust. Outside, the desert devoured the horizons, but within, there remained a faint echo of the love once shared between twins.

A part of Alia, broken but not dead, thought: Perhaps... perhaps I can still choose. And if not redemption, at least rest. Someone to remember her—not as regent, not as monster... but as a sister.