All characters from the Dune Universe are property of the Frank Herbert Estate. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.
"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."
Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, testing Paul Atreides with the Gom Jabbar.
Three years have passed.
The holy war between the church of the ancient light and the heretics continue. Arrakis has become both a prison and a war zone. Fish Speakers desperately try to keep order in a crumbling empire. Bene Gesserit and Tleilaxu agents work in the fringes of the conflict to create a universe in their favor.
In the chaos, the Slayers persist.
"Her Graceful Measure" was a naked eye object. Surayya could easily see it from the dune top on which she lay. Leto designed it that way. He wanted people to know that death could be called from above.
Surayya used her night vision goggles to watch a supply caravan move along the horizon. Years of war had reduced Humans to using ancient motorized vehicles. The constant attacks had totally destroyed the infrastructure of Arrakis. The ecological transformation had been set back hundreds of years. Water reservoirs had been smashed, satellites had been blown from orbit supply lines had been cut. The planet was now taking back what Leto had stolen. There was desert sand in the cities.
Surayya brushed her hair from her eyes. She wore it short nowadays, but there was always a strand or two that found it's way into her eyes. The desert had darkened her. Her lithe youthful figure was now mostly muscle. She had calluses on her feet. Her hands were now brown and leathery. Her eyes were the Freman blue in blue. She couldn't remember the last time she smiled.
The changes were the same for Motorria and Lisa. Motorria had lost a few kilograms. Lisa was as stoic as ever.
They watched the caravan for vampires. Since the war, people had started moving around under cover of night. That left them open to another kind of attack. The Arrakis war zone had made the planet a feeding ground for every vampire in the galaxy. The slayer fleet had long left orbit and now had the status of myth.
Surayya's guerilla war, however, was a fact.
She raised her hand, and then clamped it into a fist. Surayya opened two fingers, made a circle then pointed them at the vampires that moved under cover of night.
Motorria and Lisa caught sight of them through their night vision goggles and moved in for the kill.
Three years.
Surayya remembered that day in the cave when they had been given slayer spice. That was the day everything had changed for her. She loved her sisters dearly. She would do anything for them. She would even fight to the death for them. But she was no longer Leto's slayer. She was her own woman now. Both Motorria and Lisa felt the same way.
The spice had opened their minds.
For Surayya, it felt as if she was floating out of her body and into the huge overarching presence of something old and powerful. She was in the presence of the Last Sandworm on Arrakis and it had the answers to all of her questions.
The spice had burned its way into her system with frightening speed. Her Bene Gesserit training was helpless before it. That spice was secreted by the last sandworm on Arrakis, a sandworm that burrowed so deeply into the sand that not even Leto knew it existed.
The only being that could reach this sandworm was Spike in his luminous form. Spike grew the sandworm from a deep patch of sand plankton. The sand plankton were photosensitive and Spike was their Sun. As he grew them he modulated his light patterns encrypting the information he wanted to convey until it was encoded into their DNA. By his light, Spike mutated the sand plankton.
He kept the developing sandtrout trapped on an underground island surrounded by water. When the sandworm emerged it was like nothing else on Arrakis. It produced spice that only affected slayers. This was his last gift to them. Spike produced a spice that allowed them to commune with any Slayer from the past. Not as a memory, but as the real thing.
Spike gave them the power to snatch slayers out of time among other things.
Surayya had talked with many slayers from the past learning about their lives and what it meant to them to be a slayer. She knew now she was not a soldier. She was definitely not a tool of Leto anymore.
Surayya gave the signal. The three slayers launched into the vampires like a pack of hungry wolves.
