Alia Atreides

🔪 you are two months from your birth and you love your brother. your fragmented fetal mind is full of the whispers of hundreds, but you hear his voice like the seas of caladan, his and your mother's and you know you are loved. there is agony, there is pain, you should not be able to hear him or her or anything, but you do. you are co-conspirator, confidant, advisor to the ascension paul takes to the seat of the universe, safe in the water your mother carries within her. you do not know yet to hate her for what she has done to you both.

🔪 you are eight months old and you speak for the first time, your spice-blue eyes turned upwards, your small hands reaching as you stand on too-steady legs. the women of the sietch whisper and hiss and stare, but you touch your nurse's face and speak your first words aloud: i love you, harah.

🔪 you are six and you sit on the edge of the desert, still as a stone, watching the spice ripple over the sands, listening to the rumbles of shai-hulud beneath your body, lost in the teachings of reverend mother's long gone, that guide you in the ways of the bene gesserit -- the observations, the weirding way, the skill with knife and gom jabbar and body, the way to read unspoken stories in the breath and body of all you meet. you do not need to learn these things to know you are feared, loathed, hated among the fremen, that your only allies are your brother and your nurse and your mother (so she says, so she says). you do not need the voice to command, but you learn it anyway, your child's body possessing the power that men call witchcraft and faithless call cursed. you speak it to the sands, to the suns, to the moving of the worms.

🔪 you are twelve and your sietch is arrakeen, your fedaykin narrowed down to only your brother, only paul, the last remaining atreides besides you on arrakis. the holy war rages and jessica returns to caladan and you do not mourn, you will not. you train and you practice and you sit beside paul's throne as he rules and you take his place when he goes. you will not leave arrakis, the jewel of muad'dib's empire. you will never see the rain, the sea, the green, until paul brings it to you, as he promised. lead them to paradise he says, and billions die, and their blood runs the sands red but he tousles your hair and kisses your forehead and he is mother and father and god and divine and you love him love him love him.

🔪 you are a girl, a woman, and you have not seen your mother in years. you learn to speak with blade and movement, with wound and death and you do not miss her. you stand before your worshippers and spread your arms to their penitence and you lie to yourself.

🔪 cw: incest | you are eighteen and your training is interrupted by your brother and stilgar, as you stand naked in the sparring room, wearing only your sweat and skin, and the latter looks away and chuckles, bemused, but paul watches you, stares at the heave of your chest and the curve of your spine and your hair tangled over your shoulders and you love him love him love him, your whole heart and soul is full of that love, it makes and unmakes and remakes you, but he has never looked at you quite like that before.

🔪 cw: drug use | you are eighteen and a goddess, before your faithful hordes, draped in silk and jewels and the sun's heat, mouth heavy with spice, eyes bleary, ribs prised open one by one by one by the melange in your veins, in your eyes, in every word you breathe. they fall over themselves, praising and praising and raising their hands to the sky, to their womb of heaven, their coan tean, their saint-alia-of-the-knife. sister to a god, divinity itself, and your breath catches as you consume more and more spice, as your soul rends itself to pieces with agony for who you are, for what you and paul must always be, the high priestess and the sacrifice, the savior and the damned. destined for doom, for destruction, the golden path before them always. inevitable, eternal. if i could only burn this thing out of me! you howl to hayt, to your mother, to your endless, inescapable self. i wanted to be able to laugh. i don't want to be part of history.

🔪 i just want to love and be loved.

🔪 is it then you travel -- through the sands, through time, to the moment paul needs you most, all the way at the beginning, at the dawn of everything, when he is becoming the man you will know, the man you will love from before you take your first breath? perhaps; perhaps your longing for that love, in the strange, anointed, ordained way you are sends you to tell the boy, enduring the spice agony, nearly lost to oblivion becoming and unveiling and unfurling, slips you into his soul before he opens his eyes as muad'dib for the first time, before he ascends to his doomed eternity -- ensures that the first thing paul knows is that you love him. before the truth, before the burden, before the holy war. your love, the door coaxing him to destiny, your love, welcoming him to himself.

🔪 or did you tell him when he was lost to you? did you show the boy paul your love, your faith in him, knowing of his end? did you call it to him at his dawning while living through his dusk, when chani lay cold and unmoving, when the blood of her womb smeared over your heaving chest as you cradled their children to your fracturing heart, as you watched paul stagger away, into the desert, into oblivion and leave you alone alone alone--