Metamorphosis the First

DUNE WASTES, ARRAKIS: TIME UNKNOWN He was sick of sand. Echoes from an ancient movie ran through his head. Sand got in your clothes. Sand wore against your skin. Sand burned your eyes, and left a gritty taste in your mouth. Sand eroded the outside, ground away the flesh until there was nothing left but the very core of your being. These things combined to make the locals fearful and reverent of the dunes. For Yaijinden, however, these problems were largely academic. He was all too familiar with the habits of the Fremen, the local inhabitants of the desert world Arrakis. For a long time, months blending into years, he'd been rubbing elbows with them as one-of-them-but-not, feigning the traits and the language and the beliefs of the desert primevals but never quite fitting in. It was not their company he wanted, really; if he wanted company, there were a million different worlds he could have gone to in order to sell his stories. No, the Fremen had what everybody else in the universe would soon be wanting: the spice melange. It had taken him many years to gather as much as he had needed. By this time in history, shortly after the Sailor Wars and the middle-end of the Butlerian Jihad, the properties of spice melange were still largely unknown to everyone save the Fremen and a few random traders. Yaijinden knew of these things because Yaijinden knew many things of this ilk. It came with being as old as he was, and knowing the people whom he had known. He was not a regular user of the spice melange-- not anymore, not by a long shot. Before he had chosen his path, he had used the occasional beer and the occasional whiff as a meditational tool to center his thoughts. Now, with his knowledge and personal depravity as advanced as it had come, the insights that the melange gave him were crippling more often than not. He could see the remnant hatred of the Tairon Overfiend, laced in and between every grain of sand. He could see the siren song of the crawling Chaos, crooning the sweet melody of entropy into the soul of every sentient it could get its hooks into. He could see the paths of the universe carved by the Lurker at the Threshold, eons before the Galaxy Cauldron began simmering, and if he listened, he could ever-so-faintly hear a distant cacophony of piping... No, he had eschewed the spice melange for the same reason that a human burned out on LSD would be aversive to anything psychotropic. He had bad trips nowadys, experienced horrifying visions, and he had had these fearsome trips more than once. It was no coincidence that they had become more strenuous the more knowledgeable he became. No, he had vowed, not again: not anymore. If an observed had pointed out the irony in his current situation, he would have vaguely considered laughing along with him. Right now, were someone to call him stoned out of his gourd on spice melange, they would be making something of an understatement. There was more spice in Yaijinden's system than he had ever taken in all the little doses of his life, and he was having trouble walking in a straight line because of it. His flesh, immortal though it was, was not genetically inclined towards this sort of thing. That honor belonged to people far younger than he, hundreds of hundreds of generations removed, to distant nephews and nieces so distantly removed that-- Gods above and below, if one of his get survived to spawn, and their descendents came to Arrakis and became pre-born, then Abomination, and was consumed by the memory of his spirit, what would it do to them?-- No, couldn't think about that. Didn't have the time. He was sweating spice, his body desperately trying to reject the substance, and he was forcing himself to recycle it. His ad-libbed stiltsuit wasn't anything like those of the future; the reclaimation was barely half of the modern things, the rest lost to flaws incurred by damage and negligence. Every step was an agonizing decision, every breath full of infinite promise. Yaijinden could see the motion of the stars in perfect clarity, feeling the pulse of space-time flexing against every breath. He could see everything but himself in this, the place of gods and men fixed in an infinite decision tree that was so obvious as to be blinding, and he mourned the termination of every branch that he stumbled across. But he could not rest. Not yet. Shudde Me'ell, the Burrower Beneath named Shai-Hulud, was watching his footsteps, sensing his ill will and waiting for him to make a mistake, and though he could not truly harm Yaijinden (who could?), the machinations and minions of the Great Old One would bury him for an eon. Yaijinden would have spat derision, but the effort would have been too great and risked too much of the spice within his system. He had to stay bulging with spice, water-fat, and had to keep so much of it inside that he wished he had the option to die. His footsteps fell in the staggered rhythm that would keep the great worms disinterested. The tools for worm-riding had not been perfected, and he had not thought to fetch one beforehand. His stomach lurched with illness; more than once he had needed to sit down and choke back vomit. Roads that weren't, paths that he could never permit himself to travel, and ideas that never were fought for his attention, teasing him with contemplation of the universal decay and ways that he could keep it intact, put himself in their place, become the very stuff of the stars, and he moaned and staggered onwards. Submission to the universe was the way of the Outer Gods, who could not know what they asked because they had already done so. In resisting the call of those powers, Nietzsche's warning held true: in fighting monsters, one needed take care that they not become one, and when you stared into the abyss... The knowledge lay open to him, just as obvious as the Golden Path would some day be to the Atreides line. It was different, though-- subtly different, but infinitely more dangerous. The melange whispers in his ears were warning him, begging him that the paths of the universe would be revitalized if he chose to consume one aspect and renew it within himself. Submission was as easy as that, and assumption was just as valid. He would become part of the universe, subservient to nothing-- --nothing but himself, and the burdens he chose to carry. But that was a sucker's game. It always had been. He had conned more people than he knew out of their choices. Undeserving people who chose mediocrity instead of life, unending servitude in place of freedom: so he cut their hearts out and gave them both, binding their fates to his own, offering them just the little petty treasure they sought. He, though... he was above petty treasure, and that was why he was going to persist in this. Years upon years of existing and examination a degree of self-understanding of mind and soul that few creatures in the world could match. He had unified the voice in his shell and the voice of his heart into a single thing, achieving as much of an enlightenment as someone like he could. Now, it was time for the flesh to catch up. When the stars were right, Yaijinden brought himself to an abrupt halt; the subsequent effort of staying upright proved to be more or less impossible, which resulted in him falling over flat onto his face. Ignoring the fact that the fall had crushed his lower lip beneath his teeth (as he would have regardless of his mental state), the khadi pushed himself over onto his back and watched the night sky above. He had a soft spot for foreign skies and the stars that hung in them; beauty was one of his few vices, and he made sure to indulge it whenever he had the opportunity. There was no beauty in the workings of the Outer Gods and the things that made obseience to them. Perhaps, he mused as he opened the canteen at his belt, that was why he was so averse to their ways. The burbling of flowing water was less soothing than he'd hoped it would be. The water was not meant for soothing, though-- it was meant for summoning. He could hear the sandtrout already, squirming through the sand in search of the water they were genetically programmed to seek. He was treading the path that Duke Leto II would tread many, many years from now, but their paths would take them in very different directions. Leto II was a much different animal than he was. Where Leto had experiences dating even older than Yaijinden's, Yaijinden's mind was unified-- there was one voice, one consciousness, one awareness and sentience. Where Leto sought to guide mankind to a better age, Yaijinden sought to put his people through greater and greater fires, burning the chaff away in favor of the meat... and maybe then eating the meat, as a joke. Yes, he thought, seizing a sandtrout in one hand and watching it squirm in his hands. Maybe, as a joke, he would take a bite and see what happened. Slowly, he put the wormling in both hands and began rolling it up, squeezing it into a thin membrane. The creature had already gone quiescent, lulled to confusion by the spice saturating every cell, every drop of water in the khadi's body... Disclaimer: All characters presented here are the property of their owners, and are used largely without permission. If the owner of a character used in this subdomain has issues with the way I mime their voice, there's a Contact link you can click on in order to get a hold of me and let me know. 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