MERCURIAL ( paul atreides.. )

017. Decanters Filled With Triumph..

Inhale.

The only time it has been rumored several sandworms could ignore their territorial behavior to rampage into a single couple of hundreds of square kilometers of desert, is when a shield is used into the open, maddening them into an already famed destructive frenzy. Mercury's scream had awakened and called upon four sandworms. They had entangled themselves willingly into a dance of death under the dunes outside Sietch Tabr, spun in the whirl of hypnosis which her mourning had not only envenomed their eon-old systems, but also transposed their flesh of sturdy near-immortality with frailty that chipped and cut into Paul's very own flesh as well. A mirror of her suffering, he had shattered into a thousand shards with what few steps he felt he threaded, and then diminished into mere dust, forced to pull himself together, atom by atom. 

It was now an angry sea of sand that they were prisoners into. Waves taller than mountains rained spice over them and in a moment's lucidity, between pearling tears turning his face tender with emotion uncontrollable and as pernicious as the cataclysm they swirled into reality, Paul ripped from his shirt a patch of material to cover Mercury's nose and mouth with, while he picked her up from the moving sands. 

This dead sea was lamenting in ruination pulses, convincingly alive, only in the wake of their safe escape to extant as a graveyard instead. 

Exhale.

Close and silent, Paul was trapped into concentrated breaths. His back hurt as a background noise, his elbows buzzed numbness absently unimportant and their senses, together, were corrupted by coarse-grained skin, coated by the sand which almost swallowed them whole; Paul had ignored dutifully his body's aches and whatever need to shift from this position he was into existed at some point, naturally he had long buried it under the cemented foundation of his obligation to his future wife, to his soul's binding, to his threatened sunrise. He had carried her into their yali -her, the shivering whimper that woke the entire Sietch into frightened murmurs and stirred Paul's very soul into a sandwom like wrath; he could do close to nothing to take her pain away, to dim her suffering, now that it had already bloomed. There could have been no room for even the polite apologies when he barged in an interrupted Halleck from his stolen hours of sleep since the end of the end of the council meeting, for no matter how embedded into his being etiquette rules have been, he was left numb with muteness at the weight in his arms. 

With wide eyes, he had spoken without sounds to their tensed guard: This is as close as I ever want to get to carrying Mercury's corpse. 

For indeed, she had been gripped by so many shadows at once that her lightness was ghostly in his arms; her chilling, short breaths were unnatural. She was freezing, in the middle of the day, on Arrakis. 

Halleck might have asked about what disaster happened and maybe even about searching for a physician in that Sietch -he had prayed since the decisions drawn out of the meeting that they had one, given the upcoming war- but Paul remembered not if he had managed to articulate a single word to his father's most trusted friend, or if by some miracle, he had simply understood that he ought to light the candles in the yali -light that casts away the darkness- and then leave them, in the favor of making sure there will be no disturbances from the already rather busy sounded halls outside their cavernous walls, not entirely thick, so not even close to soundproof.

Not that silence was what they required. In fact, it was a near opposite of Mercury's needs. 

An attempt was made to lay her down on the area of their bedroom made out of pillows, however, he should have known better than to assume Mercury would have done anything else but cling onto him harder when the option of distance would arise. Her arms were wrapped around his neck before he could do anything more than fall to his knees; both of them lacking an integration into the ranks of beings capable of eloquent speech, instead demoted by suffering beyond human recognition into the cradle of primitive creatures communicating in sighs and grunt, in shifts of motion and in the erratic demands that ensued, Mercury's clinging force compelled Paul into sitting down on the pillows himself, just so she could climb on his lap and embrace him like a famished soul, on the verge of dying of hunger for the feeling of safety that he provided.