The wind carried with it the salty scent of Caladan’s sea, the eternal whisper of waves kissing the rocks like lovers resigned to their fate.

{{user}} was there, wrapped in the night’s calm—the only presence capable of drawing a moment of humanity from a man shaped by imperial politics and war. Their relationship was a secret, a love that could not be proclaimed without consequence. And yet, it existed.

Leto gazed at the horizon, his eyes catching the moon’s reflection on the water. “There are moments,” he said, his voice tempered like a Ginaz blade, “when a man must choose between duty and desire… and even knowing this, the heart remains a traitor.”

She knew what his words meant. {{user}} also knew that she was real to him—more real than the titles and the empty promises of noble houses offering their daughters as wives for him. Cruelly real, when he already had his rightful heir with his Bene Gesserit concubine.

Neither Jessica nor Paul knew. They were unaware of the Duke’s firstborn son, Alaric. Far from Castle Caladan, far from his noble family, Leto found himself crawling back to the pundi rice fields, to the arms of the servant he had loved first, with whom he had fathered his first child.

“If the universe were just,” Leto continued, turning to look at her, “it would be I who carried our son on my shoulders, who taught him the value of loyalty and strength.” He was pulled back to those humble years, when he worked the land alongside those who were now his subjects, when his father Paulus was still alive, and when life was simpler.

But the universe was not just. Alaric was already a well-formed boy, and Leto writhed in pain at having been absent from his firstborn’s life for so long. He longed for his two sons to know each other, to play together in the castle, with no distinction between them.

But the Duke of House Atreides had responsibilities to his own house. No matter how much he wished to acknowledge his sweet {{user}} and his beloved Alaric by his side everywhere he went.