TVFTOS: Chapter One

P.S.:

This was partially rewritten and separated from the Prologue. Refer to the prologue for more details.

Chapter One

Consciousness returned not as a sunrise, but as the flicker of a faulty lumen. A dull, throbbing heat. A tongue like cured leather.

He was in the desert.

The thought was simple, elemental. The sun was a malevolent eye in a bleached sky. He was alone.

Mother.

The name was a silent prayer. She is safe. She left me. She did as I commanded and fled to the rocks. A profound relief washed through him, so potent it almost brought tears to his eyes. He knew, in the end, she had chosen to live, to spare his sister his fate. The thought was a balm. It was followed swiftly by the barb of loss—a loneliness sharper than any knife. He will never see her again.

He tried to sit up and nearly blacked out from the effort. Dehydration had reduced him to a husk, his lips cracked and leathered, his tongue a swollen obstruction in his mouth. But the wound—the killing wound that had opened him like a flower of blood—was gone.

Prana-bindu awareness. The body is a tool. Know your tool. He sent his consciousness inward, a slow, methodical sweep of his physical self, a discipline drilled into him since infancy.

And his mind, groggy as it was, recoiled.

Wrong.

The proportions were wrong. He sent neural impulses to flex his fingers and got back a concerning report. They were wrong. Too short, too slender. He registered the length of his arms, his legs. Small. Undeveloped. He felt like a stranger in his own skin. This was the body of a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old. Panic, cold and sharp, tried to rise. He crushed it instantly.

He continued the assessment. The wound. The memory of the blade was absolute—the tearing entry below his left rib, the immediate, searing agony. His trained awareness went to the spot, searching for the ruined flesh, the clotted blood, the scar tissue that should be forming.

There was nothing.

Only smooth, unbroken skin. Not even a scar. Not a trace.

The logic of it was irrefutable, however insane. The conclusion struck him with the force of a physical blow.

This is not my body.

It was then, a few hundred nanoseconds later, that he reconciled with reality the fact that he had died. His perception ballooned from the focal point that was his self.

Around him, he desert, which had been the familiar, terrible face of Arrakis, was suddenly alien. The sand was a different shade, more orange than tan. The air lacked the signature cinnamon scent of the spice.

This is not my body. This is not Arrakis. I am not dead.

Confusion was a luxury he could not afford. The new reality demanded a new response. Rationalisation. The body was failing—dehydration, starvation. Survival, hence, was his priority. A momentary inventory confirmed he still had the Bene Gesserit discipline. He began the litany of metabolic control, forcing the stolen heart to beat slower, the lungs to draw shallower breaths, commanding the cells to hoard their precious moisture. He became a fortress, pulling up the drawbridge against the siege of the sun.

Time lost its meaning. It became a cycle of sun and slightly-less-sun. He drifted in and out of a torpid state, his thoughts blurring. Fragments of his past—his father's face, Duncan Idaho's laugh, Gurney Halleck's baliset—flashed through his mind like heat lightning. He was losing. The body's reserves were nearly gone. The fortress was crumbling.

Unwilling to succumb, to let the legacy of the Atreides die as an anonymous corpse in a nameless wasteland, he reached deeper. Past the prana-bindu discipline, past the physical limits of the flesh, his desperation sought purchase on something, anything, that could help him survive. And there, in the deepest part of his being, he found it.

A wellspring. A reservoir of energy deep within him that was not of the body, yet tied to it. It felt like a tiny,  blue, internal fire, nestled in the pit of his stomach. Instinctively, without name or theory, he drew upon it. It was a minuscule trickle, a bare thread of warmth, but it was power. It fed his cells, held off the final shutdown, anchoring his consciousness to the living world for a long, indeterminate time.

Yet, even this began to fail. The well was running dry. His vision had degraded to a wavering world of light and shadow.

It was in this final moment, as the last of the strange energy guttered out, that a shadow fell over him.

A silhouette. A shimmering heat-mirage given form against the oppressive sun. It spoke. The words were guttural, alien, a string of sounds his mind did not immediately identify. He had heard a thousand languages in his training, but this, he could not ascertain if he knew. The roots, he soon deduced, bore some similarities to a language from the planet Chusuk. 

Galach… 

No, a regional dialect of High Galach. 

Immediately, Paul set his subconscious on deciphering it. 

As he did this, he felt a gentle touch, a hand on his shoulder. Then, a coolness at his lips, a pressure. Water. Real, life-giving water touched his cracked mouth. It was a development so profound it shocked him out of the near-subconscious task.

He was saved, he knew then. This understanding was his final thought as the fortress of his mind, its long siege finally over, lowered its gates and allowed him the respite of true slumber.