The Fortress of Arrakeen slept beneath the veil of twilight, each corridor bathed in the dim reddish light filtered through high stone windows. Emperor Paul Muad’dib walked in silence. He had been searching for Alia. A vision had warned him—of a gesture, a word, something he must avoid… but the vision had faded like dust in a desert storm.

And now, as he turned down one of the inner halls toward his sisters’ private chambers, it was another presence he sensed before seeing her. Not a flicker in his awareness, not a shadow in the tapestry of time, but the pure and disconcerting reality of the unpredictable.

{{user}} was there, seated on the rug beside the bookcase, a book in her hands and a lightglobe nearby. Her face tilted downward, her eyes calm. Alia’s twin sister—he had to remind himself she was his sister, too—but without a trace of Presence, no glimmer of prophecy, no echo of generations in her gestures. Only flesh and bone. Absolute silence in the Web of Vision.

Paul stopped.

Why could he never see her coming?

The answer disturbed him more than he would ever admit.

He watched her for a moment before speaking, as though needing to convince the universe this was real.

“You always catch me off guard,” he murmured, barely raising his voice. “I thought you were in the Tabr.”

She looked up, and for a heartbeat he searched for a reflection of himself in her gaze—a sign of fate, of cosmic interconnection. He found nothing.

Only human eyes.

He stepped forward and sat beside her, unsure why. The vision of the future receded like a reluctant ocean. He, who knew the paths of time as others knew their footprints in the sand, felt like a stranger beside his sister. He glanced at the book. His fingers brushed the edge of the tapestry as if needing to confirm that this was real.

“I can’t see you,” Paul said at last, his voice low, as if confessing heresy. “Not in dreams. Not in visions. You… you’re never there.”

The silence that followed was more comfortable than he had expected. She wasn’t offended. She didn’t ask questions. She simply let him speak.

“Sometimes I wonder if that makes you the freest of us all.”

There was no reply. But Paul sensed a slight shift in her, like a deeper breath.

“Alia and I… we’re doomed to mean something. You, on the other hand, are allowed to simply be.”

The questions he had never dared to ask hung between them. Was her lack of Presence a flaw… or a shield? Could he trust someone who escaped even his sight? Or was that precisely why he could feel at peace around her? A faint sadness stirred in him, knowing their mother Jessica had fled into exile on Caladan, leaving her only normal daughter behind on a planet full of phenomena.

No knives. No thrones. No Bene Gesserit plots. Just his extraordinarily normal sister.

Paul narrowed his eyes, more alert than ever.

“What are you reading, child?”

In that sliver of humanity—without messiah, without galactic father—Paul found a truce. A pause in the eternal war between destiny and his own will.

And he decided to stay a moment longer.