SANDSTORMS

001. Veiled Echoes.

CHAPITRE I:
VEILED ECHOES.

"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. To begin your study of the life of Muad'Dib, then, take care that you first place him in his time: born in the 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV. And take the most special care that you locate Muad'Dib in his place: the planet Arrakis. Do not be deceived by the fact that he was born in Caladan and lived his first fifteen years there.

Arrakis, the planet known as Dune, is forever his place.

— from 'Manual of Muad'Dib' by the Princess Irulan

DREAMS ARE THE MESSAGES OF THE DEEP.

How deep one could go?

A few could try to answer, but no one truly knows.

Even the Bene Gesserit who consider themselves omniscient, have no answer to this question.

Dreams are so complex and subtle that even Morpheus does not venture on this path of knowledge. Visions of another world, of another self, manifest in the fragile hours of unconsciousness, in the raw vulnerability that haunts the edges of our waking reality.

Don't dreams hold sway over us, their enigmatic tendrils eluding our grasp, defying explanation, and mocking any attempt to weave them into a tapestry of meaning that might satisfy our waking minds?

Is this not another sign of our human impotence?

The girl, Madhavi, liked to revel in the mystery, to dwell in the spaces untouched by the Bene Gesserit's calculated wisdom. The extent of the world, she mused, is not within the reach of anyone, not even the Emperor himself. Men, with their grand illusions of dominion over nature, have always sought to persuade themselves that the wild forces of the universe bend to their will—that they are masters of nature.

Yet, Mother Nature has never bothered to engage in this illusion. She stands in the shadows, an indifferent observer, watching as humanity, in its self-absorbed arrogance, fashions its own demise.

Sitting in the darkness, where the feeble light of the sun cast only timid rays, Madhavi contemplated the void. The dark circles under her eyes, like ancient runes, bore witness to the tumultuous night she had endured. She had been awake for what felt like an eternity, her mind a battlefield where dreams and reality clashed like titans, each vying for dominance. Her vision, a spectral dance, played before her eyes, teasing her like a phantom prey in the face of a predator entrapped.

The air around her seemed heavy with unspoken truths, and Madhavi sensed the weight of undiscovered worlds pressing upon her. The whispers of dreams echoed in the recesses of her consciousness, beckoning her to traverse the uncharted realms of the mind. The Bene Gesserit may claim omniscience, but Madhavi harbored a quiet rebellion against such claims. There, in the silence and shadows, she sought to unravel the mysteries that eluded even the most revered sisterhood.

As the world slept, Madhavi dared to venture beyond the veil of ordinary perception, where the boundaries between dream and reality blurred into an indistinct tapestry of the sublime and the surreal. In that twilight realm, she yearned to decipher the cryptic language of dreams, to fathom the messages of the deep that eluded even the wisest minds.

For in the crucible of the night, amidst the whispers of the unseen, Madhavi glimpsed the profound truth that dreams, like untamed spirits, held the power to shape destinies and unveil the enigma of existence itself.