MERCURIAL ( paul atreides.. )

012. Litany in Fearful Storms of Trust..

"Can you not see, my friends?" A Naib's voice shook the walls of his sietch's ceremonial chamber, soaked in the heaviness of cinnamon scents. "Can you not feel the Great Dissemination is upon us?" His hand raised towards the low ceiling, blue-within-blue eyes purging his sight in cobalt, while the tears of Epiphany's preaching blurred the frames by which he watched his own hand's tremors. A loud exhale captured the oracle-ticking of his lungs towards defaming devotion, nearing the acclaim of a wail before sharply, he inhaled the thick air in hunger. Words quickened and fell of his lips in waves as obedient to his needs as sand was to Shai-Hulud, "Like the old songs have foretold, the Dissemination has stilled Arrakis into a Coriolis storm that ventured past the Great Flat and even now levels into a grounded waste a dozen surface villages. Sietches are sought for refuge and Fremen numbers will grow in the eve of our reemergence. Oh!" He cried out breathlessly and his other hand finally raised upwards too, reaching for the formless atmosphere which bathed his senses in lightness, in emancipation he wielded by the strength found in his eyes whose pupils no longer distinguished themselves from their irises or cornea. 

"We hear you, Ghamatt," the entirety of his sietch had gathered there, chanting in their ancient tongues. Though surprisingly small, counting little over a three hundred heads bowed into the sand at the edge of the False Wall East, near the Hang Pass, Ghamatt's sietch has been around since before the times anyone could remember. Then again, to the displeasure of the pilgrimed hearts beating into their spice abundance, there was very little their communities still recalled from as far back as the making of the Spacing Guild and the first promises the Emperor had turned against them and their homes. They used to be thousands, right when the Butlerian Jihad ended and the rising of religious revolutions vibrated through the entire Known Universe. That was but a painfully short period after which the Bene Gesserit's first whispers of the Lisan al Gaib's singular power turned their hymns of Euyun Alhayaa fainter. 

"The Guide and the Teacher. The Mother and the Father," Ghamatt's words were breaths and they gave him life as they had given to hundreds of Naibs of this sietch's, where devotees of the prophecy sought refuge, sought strength and guidance, sought the safety that would shield them in their faith through the suffering before paradise. "With a blink into a memory's shadow and the other into a future's light, we are living the times of the Great Dissemination." 

"We see you, Ghamatt."

"There's going to be power in our air and in our veins, for powerful they require us to be, as their soldiers, as their children on the dune," he preached what he's been reciting for as long as he could remember, so proudly that he's been exlied and banned from Arrakeen shortly after the House of Atreides settled in. Scars on his back were still aching, yet his near escape was but a taste of what had happened to louder believers than him before. For ten thousand years their voices had been snuffed out faster than humidity released into the hallucinations of the deep desert. 

His gospel's verses stuck in his throat as he watched a single man stir through the crowd; at all times during their ceremonies, by rotation, two members of the sietch had to become guards. One would remain outside their very doors, while the other guarded the entrance from malicious trespassers which sought to kill these live whispers of the Eyes of Life once and for all. The surface guard was now walking towards Ghamatt, dark in the face and startled, perhaps even weakened by the amount of spice he was suddenly inhaling through a stillsuit's removed mask. 

"There's an ornithopter," he blurted out, "news from Liet Kynes."

Several people snarled at the mention of the planetologist who took in her own hands the heralding of Arrakis' prophesized paradise instead of waiting around, letting village after village be consumed by a ferocious, spreading desert which consumed and endured, while the routes of the sandworm territory covered more ground by the lunar month.