Across the Sands

~El Sayal

~*~

All I ask you is for another chance

Another way around you

To live by circumstance once again

-Crestfallen

Smashing Pumpkins

~*~

               Leto returned to the palace at dusk and shut himself into his chamber. Ghani stood outside the heavy crested double doors that led into the emperor rooms, wringing her hands in anguish.

               "Maybe he needs a moment, Ghanima," Irulan suggested, gently laying a hand on Ghani's shoulder. The girl tensed slightly under her foster mother's touch, although, Irulan noted, not as much as she did when she was younger. Sighing, she removed her hand. Ghani turned around to meet Irulan's gaze with her sorrow-filled Eyes of Ibad.

"He's changing, Irulan," Ghani said, her voice weighed down with the sadness she had felt since she was born, which had increased terribly since her father's death and her brother's Path had been found. "My old Leto is disappearing with the desert, and with the sandworms that roam its depths."

"The Golden Path"-

"The Golden Path is a curse upon my brother and my family," snapped Ghanima. Her voice lowered, as her eyes flashed in anger at what had happened to her life. "But he had to take it- it was his fate." Ghani sighed. "Destiny called- and Leto had to answer." She looked at Irulan from under her lashes, her head tilted down. "Leto isn't the type to turn away from destiny," she whispered.

The two women stood in silence before the towering doors for a few moments. Then one of the doors opened a crack. "Ghani," a voice called softly from inside the cavernous chambers. Ghani nodded farewell to Irulan before disappearing into the darkness behind the doors. Leto's crest was carved high into the wood, a forever present reminder of his presence, and of the Path that he represented. Irulan stood before the crest, staring up at it for a moment. Then she turned abruptly away from the terrible symbol and walked quickly out onto the quiet promenade that led a little ways around the side of the great building.

There Irulan stood, cloaked in the heavy scent of mélange. Blue tints had begun to show around the irises of her eyes, through the appearance-altering Tleilaxu contacts that she had been wearing to hide the signs of spice addiction. Something inside made her hide her Fremen eyes. Something was still clinging to the long dead Corrino princess that she had once been.

She pressed her fingertip into a small pile of sand that had collected on the railing of the promenade. Once the sands of Arrakis had been entirely alien to her, but she felt more at home here amidst the dunes then she ever had in the stuffy palace back on Salusa Secundus. The winds rose slightly, pushing the grains of sand around her finger and into the desert's infinity.

A memory slowly filtered itself into her mind- "The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing." Gasping, Irulan hurried to her chambers and scrawled the verse onto a blank paper that was bound to a cover, which bore the words The Wisdom of Muad'dib. Irulan smiled, slightly more satisfied with herself than she had been a moment ago. She happily tapped a polished fingernail against the thick parchment paper, watching the ink glisten in the disappearing sunlight.

Disappearing sunlight? Irulan glanced out the window. Her suspicions had been confirmed- a coriolis was sweeping its destructive wave across the desert and towards Arrakeen. She reached out a hand and drew the glass windows together, clasping them shut with a silver hook. She drew the curtains partway across the window, but left a section of the window open. Irulan enjoyed watching the coriolis storms, and the falling el sayal that made tapping noises like hail against the expensive glass plates of the windows. A noise like a great thunder grew as the storm approached, flattening the dunes and throwing sand thousands of meters into the air.

The tsunami-like wave of sand that sped across the desert leaped over the city's limits and sped in a deafening wall towards the castle. Irulan daringly threw aside the curtains the remainder of the way, and spread her arms out slightly. Let them take me, she thought, a smile crossing her face. The sand swallowed the palace, and the room was thrown into darkness.

~*~

"Stilgar?"

"Yes, Irulan?"

"Where are the Fremen?"  The unlikely pair stood on the streets of Arrakeen, wearing the standard Fremen robes. Stilgar toed a sand-filled puddle as he stared out across the empty, saturated streets.

"I've never seen an el sayal bring so much moisture from the skies," said Stilgar. "In my time, the children would be outside with oiled baskets in order to catch the rain of sand and the water that it would bring to our people."

"Times have changed so drastically, Stil," said Irulan as she surveyed the streets from under the hood of her abba. "Even in my time, there were no puddles on the streets of Arrakeen. Now look," she said, sweeping her hand to indicate the watery landscape that surrounded them. "Puddles, mud! And not a Fremen in sight! Thus, the miracles of Liet."

"Miracles," Stilgar scoffed. "Miracles to kill the desert, and to wipe out our people. The Fremen ways are disappearing, Irulan," he said. "They are going with the old ways to join Shai-Hulud."

"Shai-Hulud and the desert will return to Arrakis, Stil, that's the Golden Path," said Irulan. "It's just that neither you nor I will be around to see Arrakis come back to its own."

"We won't get to see the return of Shai-Hulud," said Stilgar, "only the death of him."

~*~

El sayal- "rain of sand" during a coriolis storm that brings moisture from the sky down to the ground

Abba- the traditional robe of Fremen women