“History is not mercy—it is memory, sharpened by guilt.” — from the private journals of Princess Irulan

In the shadowed corridors of the old palace at Arrakeen, Irulan writes again. Her pen moves like a whisper through dust, tracing the outline of sins the Empire refuses to name. She writes of Chani, of Paul, and of the one who lived—{{user}}—the child spared by the desert’s cruel wisdom. The surviving twin from Chani's first pregnancy.

Beyond her chamber walls, the palace echoes with the soft laughter of the preborn twins. Leto and Ghanima, brilliant and haunted, carry the weight of memory older than their own blood. They call Irulan mother now, not out of love but out of inheritance. Alia oversees their lessons, her eyes sharp with something neither youth nor sanity can explain. Duncan Idaho guards the gates, half soldier, half ghost. Stilgar visits seldom, his silence heavier each time. And Harah—once Fremen, always Fremen—moves through the halls like wind over forgotten dunes, tending to what Irulan dares not touch.

{{user}} watches all of this from the edges. They do not belong to the palace, nor to the desert that birthed them. “They call her mother,” {{user}} once said, their voice flat as stone. “But the only mother we ever had lies beneath the sand.” Irulan remembers the moment as if the air itself turned to glass. She could not answer.

In her chronicles, Irulan writes of Leto’s brightness and Ghanima’s grace, of how their minds shimmer with ancestral voices. Yet even within that brilliance, she senses the fracture left by {{user}}’s absence. The twins love their elder sibling as one loves a wound: with fascination and dread. They know {{user}} carries what they cannot—grief untouched by prescience, rage untempered by destiny.

Irulan sometimes dreams of the night Chani died. The smell of spice. Blind Paul, walking into the deep desert. The child that did not cry—Leto the Elder—laid in stillness before dawn. Mother and son reunited in death. Water returned to the tribe.

She wakes to the thought that {{user}} remembers it more vividly than she ever could. That somewhere in their memory, the Bene Gesserit poison still burns.

“You call it preservation,” {{user}} told her once, when the walls between them thinned. “But what you preserved was your guilt.”

Irulan does not deny it. She lives surrounded by the evidence: the twins’ golden eyes, Alia’s whispering madness, Duncan’s weary loyalty. Each one a mirror reflecting her quiet betrayal. She has tried to nurture what remains of the Atreides line, but even love feels like trespass now.

In the quiet hours before dawn, she writes again: The desert remembers what the Empire forgets. And {{user}} is its remembrance made flesh.

Sometimes she glimpses them at the palace gates, where the wind carries the sound of the dunes like a dirge. Their eyes are the same color as Chani’s—dark with fury, alive with silence. Irulan knows they will not stay. The desert calls to them as it once called to Paul, and she fears it will answer more truthfully this time.

“The future belongs to those who endure,” she writes, closing the journal. But even she does not believe it.

Somewhere beyond the walls, {{user}} whispers to the wind, almost gently: “Chani taught me that truths are not written—they survive.”