The sietch breathed in silence.

Paul had learned to distinguish its rhythms: the distant murmur of stored water, the echo of softened footsteps against stone, the low voices that never fully broke the calm. Sietch Tabr was not only a refuge. It was living memory.

And also… secrets.

Chani had not told him at first.

Not with words.

But Paul had seen the tension in her posture, in the way her eyes followed certain movements, in how she subtly shifted her path when he approached certain chambers of the sietch. There were boundaries that had not been explained to him, but that existed nonetheless.

And that, inevitably, led him toward them.

It was in one of the innermost corridors that prescience faltered again.

Not completely. It never did. But it became blurred, incomplete, as if something—or someone—did not quite fit within the paths he could see.

There was {{user}}.

Younger than he expected.

Not a child, but not yet an adult. Their presence was… sheltered. Not out of weakness, but by deliberate choice. Paul understood it almost immediately. The way the sietch moved around them gave it away.

Protection.

Despite the fact that they could ride a sandworm. Despite the way their rhythm across the sand was not unskilled.

Stilgar had decided that some things were not to be risked.

And Chani… Chani obeyed in that.

Paul observed them in silence for a few seconds.

There was something about {{user}} that did not align with what he knew of the Fremen. It was not ignorance. It was isolation. As if their world had been deliberately kept small, contained between familiar faces and clear rules.

They had never seen someone like him.

They had never needed to.

The visions did not help. Only fragments: a smaller figure beside Chani, muted laughter in childhood, the shadow of an absent woman. And further back… Liet-Kynes.

The weight of that name crossed Paul’s mind like an underground current. Chani’s father. The man who had believed in a future for Arrakis.

Dead.

And before that, the mother.

The desert did not only take lives. It took structures.

Stilgar had taken his place. Not only as a leader, but as what remained of family.

Paul stepped forward.

Chani was not there. That was the only thing that usually stopped him.

But not this time.

{{user}} noticed him.

The shift in their posture was immediate. Not hostility, exactly. But an instinctive alertness. Like an animal recognizing something unfamiliar—not necessarily dangerous… but not safe either.

Paul stopped at a careful distance.

He did not speak at once.

He knew his presence alone was already too much.

Too many things gathered in him: outsider, messiah, heir to a war that had reached even this place.

His blue eyes fixed on them with an intensity that was more curious than commanding.

“Chani tries to keep you away from me,” he said at last, his voice low, without harshness. More observation than accusation.

A brief pause.

The echo of the sietch settled between them.

“And you don’t know what to do with me.”

It was not a question.

Paul tilted his head slightly, studying the smallest reactions, the subtle details that prescience did not offer him.

That was what intrigued him.

Not the grand mystery, but the small one.

The human one.

Paul lowered his gaze slightly, as if searching for something simpler, something less burdened by destiny.

When he spoke, his voice shifted just enough.

“Do they always hide you like this?”